The Video Marketer

Remember when we posted about a camera that would record video at one million frames per second? That’s so 4 months ago!

Now researchers at the MIT Media Lab “have created a new imaging system that can acquire visual data at a rate of one trillion frames per second. That’s fast enough to produce a slow-motion video of light traveling through objects.”

How amazing is that? We are already in awe of footage shot at 1000fps, let alone 1 trillion!! Granted, it is for research purposes only at this point, and they hint at consumer cameras application (along with other important real world uses), but will this kind of speed ever get to a camera one might afford? And if so, what would you need it for, what would you film?

Take a look:

And here’s another even more impressive video:

Video of a fruit illuminated by a femtosecond laser pulse and captured at an effective trillion frames per second. Light moves less than 1 mm per frame.

We have built an imaging solution that allows us to visualize propagation of light at an effective rate of one trillion frames per second. Direct recording of light at such a frame rate with sufficient brightness is nearly impossible. We use an indirect ‘stroboscopic’ method that combines millions of repeated measurements by careful scanning in time and viewpoints.

The device has been developed by the MIT Media Lab’s Camera Culture group in collaboration with Bawendi Lab in the Department of Chemistry at MIT. A laser pulse that lasts less than one trillionth of a second is used as a flash and the light returning from the scene is collected by a camera at a rate equivalent to roughly 1 trillion frames per second. However, due to very short exposure times (roughly one trillionth of a second) and a narrow field of view of the camera, the video is captured over several minutes by repeated and periodic sampling.

You can read more about it here.