I was surprised how much some of those shots resemble the effects you see in video games physics simulations and online "toy" physics sandboxes. I figured the real world would be more noisy but these results are quite uniform and beautiful. I'll have to give our physics modeling more credit from now on!

Real time physics simulations of deformable objects these days tend to be based on fairly accurate physics models. The major issue facing such simulations today is that it's difficult to simulate extremely rigid objects at high frame rates, due to the non-linear aspects of the underlying forces. The challenge is to take shortcuts and find optimizations that gets you decent looking results while not being overly slow or unstable.

Here's a good paper on some of the technical details of a fairly sophisticated system used in a video game, if you are interested: http://graphics.berkeley.edu/papers/Parker-RTD-2009-08/index...

Based on the last shot, could potentially be useful for diagnosing potential failures due to metal fatigue - the kind of vibrations that you may be able to hear, but can't see. Not sure if that's the intent, but that's what jumped out at me...

That's the intent; the video was shot by a vibration tester manufacturer (an awkward phrase). If you go to the URL at the end, it says that it's a promotion for a predictive maintenance tool that uses vibrations.

I love ultra high speed video. Just about any motion is more interesting at that speed, even simple walking. But my favorite is watching water balloons explode: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sLxuSN2UnQ

Discovery has a series called "Time Warp" which explores many scenarios shot at very high fps.

http://dsc.discovery.com/tv/time-warp/episode/episode.html

E.g.: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0-TbUUXDtM

Curiously, most of the vibrations shown are such that you can hear in a very concrete terms.

In banging a barrel or a cymbal you can certainly hear the fluctuations on the metal surface. But you don't get a proper visual of how the sound actually forms until you see it on the video; when you do, it will just fit.

Slightly OT (or is it), but it's an ad for Fluke - probably the best test gear you can get IMHO yet under-advertised. It's good to see a good company getting with the times.

It's a beautiful ad as well. The music is perfect, the editing is perfect in relation to the music, the climactic moment with the cymbal was perfectly timed in relation to the video as a whole, bravo.

They definitely hired the right people.

EDIT: would've been nice if the video itself had been submitted rather than this noxious blogspam.

Fluke is just one of those brands that doesn't need advertising, their reputation permeates the relevant industries on its own merit.

This is true at the moment but outfits such as Agilent and BK have been making inroads with cheaper, feature-packed kit and agressive marketing. I'd rather have a Fluke TBH. A Fluke won't kill you.