Capturing the sampling rate from a basketball being dribbled I'm taking an online image and signals class and the structure is absolutely horrible.  

I'm wondering if you can provide me hints, or tips to solving the below question.  I'm not looking for an answer, because I'd actually like to learn something!  The structure of the class is just not conducive to learning as they just point us to online resources without any real "teaching."


  Consider a basketball being dribbled. If the height of the basketball can be described by a sine wave of maximum height 2h, average height h and minimum height 0, and the ball hits the ground once per second, how fast would a video camera have to sample the dribbling to extract its frequency? What happens to the frequency estimate if the sampling rate is too low?


So just thinking out loud... the ball is bouncing at a rate of $1\frac{bounce}{sec}$, which from my reading tells me the frequency is just the inverse of this, so $1\frac{sec}{bounce}$.  

I don't understand, though, how to extract how fast a video camera would need to sample this to extract its frequency as it seems like I already have the frequency.
The information you are given is $f_\textrm{bounce} = 1\,\textrm{Hz}$ - all the technical details about the sine wave and its amplitude is irrelevant. Please note that frequency is always measured in something happening per second, i.e. the unit is always $\frac{1}{\textrm{s}}$.

Since you do not want to have an answer, I try to give you a hint:


Imagine you had a camera that would capture an image once a second. Assume that the moment the image is taken is always when the basketball exactly in the middle between the floor and the player's hand. What can you say about the motion of the basketball after having watched this video?
Imagine your camera would capture the scene every $0.5\,\textrm{s}$, i.e. the frame rate would be $2f_\textrm{bounce} = 2\,\textrm{Hz}$, again exactly when the basketball is between the player's hand and the floor. What would be the difference between this video and the first video? What would you learn about the motion of the basketball by watching this video?


If you want to get more information, you could search for the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem.