The use of IR videothermography for nondestructive evaluation has typically been limited to situations where the thermal event of interest can be captured within a single video field time (16 ms). For many applications a shorter time scale would be required to make whole field IR video imaging a viable NDE technique. We have developed a method to acquire temporally well-resolved images of repetitive thermal events at frequencies as high as 4 kHz. Our system uses an off-the-shelf commercial imager (Inframetrics IR 600), a video processor board, and a microcomputer.