High speed motion example http://testufo.com/#test=framerates&count=3&background=none&pps=1440
The USAF, in testing their pilots for visual response time, used a simple test to see if the pilots could distinguish small changes in light. In their experiment a picture of an aircraft was flashed on a screen in a dark room at 1/220th of a second. Pilots were consistently able to "see" the afterimage as well as identify the aircraft. This simple and specific situation not only proves the ability to percieve 1 image within 1/220 of a second, but the ability to interpret higher FPS.
Sample of GoPro camera shooting 120 FPS
Why is NTSC analog video set to 29.97 FPS?
In the U.S., analog video originally had a frame rate of 30 and a line rate of 15,750 (525 horizontal lines) Also early in the specification of television it was decided that the picture would be amplitude modulated on one carrier and the sound would be frequency modulated on a second higher frequency carrier separated enough to prevent the two signals from interfering with each other. What this means is that a television essentially needed two radio receivers comprised of two mixers, two local oscillators, two IF amplifiers, and two detectors. One set of circuits for picture, and one set for sound.
The difficulty in this scheme is getting the two local oscillators to change frequency exactly the right amount every time the user changed channels. This is further exacerbated by the inherent lack of stability of oscillators at these high frequencies. There were no inexpensive phased lock loops and digital synthesizers in the 1950s.
To eliminate the difficulty and expense of building two oscillators that would track each other and not drift apart it was decided that the tolerance of frequency separation could be held more precisely at a single location, the TV transmitter. It was further decided to separate the visual and audio signals by exactly 4.5 MHz. This allowed set manufacturers to design TV sets with inter-carrier sound detection, or a carrier within a carrier.
Glydeck goes into more detail at http://glydeck.blogspot.com/2011/07/why-do-we-have-2997-frame-rates-and-not.html
