SCIENTISTS have captured unique footage of water suspended in air and bullets fired from guns using a prize-winning video camera.

The team at KeyMed in Southend have developed the i-SPEED 2 camera which can film 33,000 frames per second, compared to the normal 25 frames per second of a home video camera.

The camera has won the company the Queen's Award for Enterprise, for the second time.

Chris Robinson, team leader for the project said: "Our marketing department identified a need for a high speed camera and we started developing them in 2000.

"Since then around 16 people have been involved in their development and we have faced a constant battle to make the camera go faster."

He added: "This camera is all about showing people what they cannot see."

The team has filmed a water-filled balloon bursting at 2,000 frames per second, the first ten frames show the rubber peeling back, then the water hangs in the air before collapsing.

This allowed the team to calculate the burst rubber skin of the balloon reaches 200mph as it unwraps itself from the water.

Another use for the camera has been at a Schweppes Tonic Water bottling plant.

Mr Robinson said: "They put labels on at a speed of about 11 bottles a second and with the line of bottles travelling at about 25 to 30mph it's not long before a problem produces a large pile of tonic-soaked broken glass.

"They thought they had a problem with a certain machine but couldn't see what was happening - our camera showed the bottles were spinning and toppling over and they soon fixed the problem."

Mr Robinson says the market for the camera is anybody who wants to do motion analysis and the companies knocking on KeyMed's door include the FBI and Nasa.

The camera can film smoke preceeding a bullet from a gun, the bullet, the following shockwave, the smoke and the discharge from a shot.

Mr Robinson added: "Some ballistics people are not interested in the bullet but what happens to everything else."

The camera is also used for recording test car crashes and even the movement of joints.

TV viewers will have seen film shot by the Keymed technology on TV programmes such as Weird Creatures and Brainiac.

Each camera costs just over £20,000 each but the team is already pushing the boundaries.

This week the video development team is heading for Houston in Texas where they will launch the i-SPEED 3 camera which can film up to 150,000 frames per second.