What a tracer should look like (before spazzing just look).

[Heliocon]

Originally Posted by bw_wolverine

With regards to the 'shaking' effect. I discovered a simple little experiment that might help explain what people are talking about with regard to the human eye 'smoothing' it out.

If you're in a car, look at the car in front of you. Is it bouncing around? Certainly the car you're in is vibrating and shifting with road condition, etc. Maybe the car in front is going over bumps and such, but it's not 'shakey' in how it appears to you.

Now look at the car behind you in the rear view mirror. Notice anything different? The car viewed through the mirror, no matter how hard you try to focus or whatever will look more 'shakey', like it's vibrating. Both the car in front and the car behind are being subjected to the identical conditions of the road, so why do they appear different? I believe this is because the view that you're getting of that car is 'fixed' (the mirror) instead of the view of the car ahead of you (your eyes) as mentioned by a few people about guncameras being fixed positions. Someone said in this thread that the human eye has great anti-shake software. It's quite true.

I'm not entirely sure, but I think this is similar to the effect produced by filming the bullets rather than viewing them live.

This is a very easy experiment. I encourage everyone to try it if you are in any way invested in this argument. It's interesting to think about anyway.

Well I dont know if this is what you mean but when you look at a car infront of you, your brain automatically has your eyes track the object and compensate for relative movement (eyes following the car). Also vibrations are reduced by your body. However when you look at the car in the mirror behind you, you are looking at the car's image in the mirror. Therefore when your car vibrates the mirror does too, while your eyes are focused on the car behind, which makes the image of the car in the mirror move relative to the mirrors position and therefore since your eyes are compensating for the car's reflection movement and not the mirror, the mirror obviously vibrates. You would get the opposite effect in extreme situations if you looked at a part of the mirror that had black tape on it, so you would be following the mirror but see the car in your perepheral vision behind you can be seen to move more since you are not focused on it.

Basically the eye picks out an object for you to see, while a camera sees everything "equally" and does not track objects like an eye does.