It is really hard to imagine how I am able to rewatch a moment of the past just because some fancy camera recorded it? If I think about it it feels very unnatural.
What are the key parts of microphones and cameras that make them work the way they work?
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Microphones are basically speakers but wired to function backwards. When you speak into a microphone, you create sound waves that make a membrane inside of the mic vibrate, and the movement of that membrane causes an electrical signal to be sent down a wire into a Digital audio interface. This is a piece of equipment that takes in analog electrical signals and transforms them into digital signals. This digital signals are fed into a program that processes the audio and stores is in some format (mp3 wav etc…)
A camera works by taking a lens (or multiple lenses) to focus the light going into them to a specific spot inside the camera. This spot that the light is focused onto is a silicon chip made out of millions of tiny sensors laid out in a grid.
These sensors are able to detect the brightness and color of the light that is hitting them. And each sensor corresponds to a pixel in your picture.
When you take a picture, the camera opens its shutter allowing light to hit the sensors and then the sensors sends the information that they registered and the picture gets stored as an array of different values of brightness and color. The specifics of how this is done from a software point of view is beyond the scope of an ELI5.
For video, this process is repeated many times per second (usually 24 times per second at least) and then the pictures are shown back to you at that speed.
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