Horse Gait Motion Analysis

In the period from 1872-1880, Eadweard Muybridge 'recorded' arguably the first ever high-speed 'video'. Records show that it all started with a bet initiated by a gentleman named Leland Stanford who hired Muybridge to prove that all four hooves of a horse are off the ground at the same instant during a trot and gallop. At that time, they captured pictures by exposing a viscous silver nitrate solution (wet collodion) that was supported on a glass plate. To give you an idea, this is roughly 300-times less sensitive than modern-day film. Early efforts by Muybridge failed due to a slow shutter and insensitive photographic emulsion. Once these issues were addressed by some engineering effort, Muybridge was able to record a series of photographs at Stanford's track at Palo Alto Stock Farm, which is part of the Stanford University campus today. The photographs were later immortalized as published cabinet cards entitled, "The Horse in Motion", which you see all over the world.
In this particular video, a horse's gait is analyzed using high-speed video captured at 500 frames-per-second. With one camera, it is also possible to capture and analyze the 2D biomechanics of the horse, and easily see that all the hooves are off the ground even during a trot. A simple template matching algorithm was used to track individual (unique) points on the horse's body.
Flynn (the horse) is a thoroughbred that lives amongst a herd in Warwick New York, USA and clearly was eager to partake in this shoot. Like many other analyzed animals, Flynn's gait was characterized using high-speed imaging, and analyzed using a post-processing software. This technique serves as a nice method to quantitatively elucidate motion, kinematics, efficiencies, etc. I did this shot with Phil Taylor, Toni, Lucatorto, and Christina Batista. Enjoy.
A Phantom Flex4k was used at 500 FPS / 1 ms / Global / 4096 x 2160 / template matching (single-pixel)

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Interesting how running is less moving your legs (like walking), and more jumping rapidly