Ah. I believe the “correct” solution is you record at high speed and down sample for the big screen in order to avoid the motion blur. There are a couple scenes before he gets to the real high speed where he’s showing the clock slowed to 1/10 speed at which point the 100ths place is only a little slow to update. I’m still seeing some alpha nerd room for making the LEDs tick over faster. Maybe the Mark V.
Interesting, that makes sense as a way to depict individual numerals. But even at film/screen framerates, isn’t the basic motion picture idea that you’d get an illusion of continuity? The digits would flicker but the overall effect would still be something of a blur?
I have to imagine that, as his 20,000fps-or-whatever example demonstrates, you’d run into exposure challenges at speeds fast enough to capture individual digits on this particular clock