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Camera freezes time at 10 trillion frames per second

inrs.ca

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Re: Camera freezes time at 10 trillion frames per second

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long can they maintain that frame rate for?

From what I understand, it is a camera, so as long as you can record data fast enough. I didn't read any limitation of the current setup across time (there is one across space though). So far, it is only 25 frames captured, it is fundamental research, not yet a product people can get value of. Note that what we want to observe with those cams are very short, transient phenomenons. When I was doing my internship at a…

That's incredible. How long did it take to write 0.5s of data to disk? I'm guessing there's no way to sustain this as you'd be so far behind after only a single second. I'm pretty sure we can still only store a few gigs per second. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Very interesting though!

Re: Camera freezes time at 10 trillion frames per second

#32
post #12

It doesn't really capture 10 trillion frames per second. The laser pulses at a regular interval, and the combination of the regular pulsing + multiple pictures taken at different points along those pulses makes for 10 trillion distinct frames captured within the timeframe of 1 second. There is no actual video captured. I get that being a tech journalist is difficult, you have to juggle between the tech and the layman…

Note that a rate such as "x frames per second" doesn't mean it needs to be able to operate for the full second. That would be like saying you can sprint at "12 miles per hour" means you can run all of 12 miles in an hour.

Watching a 1 second video shot at 10 trillion fps would make for a very boring lifetime or 15. A 240Hz display would take ~1300 years to display all 10,000,000,000,000 frames.

Re: Camera freezes time at 10 trillion frames per second

#33
This phys.org "article" is simply a copy of the INRS press release you can find here: http://www.inrs.ca/english/actualites/worlds-fastest-camera-...

Actual paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41377-018-0044-7

Website for the INRS lab's project on this: http://coilab.caltech.edu/research_6.html (includes PDF of the above paper and others)

As almost always, the phys.org "article" adds nothing of value to the press release it reproduces.

Re: Camera freezes time at 10 trillion frames per second

#35
post #33

This phys.org "article" is simply a copy of the INRS press release you can find here: http://www.inrs.ca/english/actualites/worlds-fastest-camera-... Actual paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41377-018-0044-7 Website for the INRS lab's project on this: http://coilab.caltech.edu/research_6.html (includes PDF of the above paper and others) As almost always, the phys.org "article" adds nothing of value to the press…

Thanks for the links! I see your point, but lots of people wouldn’t know about this if it was just a press release. I know I don’t have enough time to check for them.

Re: Camera freezes time at 10 trillion frames per second

#37
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I understand, it is a camera, so as long as you can record data fast enough. I didn't read any limitation of the current setup across time (there is one across space though). So far, it is only 25 frames captured, it is fundamental research, not yet a product people can get value of. Note that what we want to observe with those cams are very short, transient phenomenons. When I was doing my internship at a…

That's incredible. How long did it take to write 0.5s of data to disk? I'm guessing there's no way to sustain this as you'd be so far behind after only a single second. I'm pretty sure we can still only store a few gigs per second. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Very interesting though!

The best way to think of this is it might take 100 seconds to 'record' those 10 trillion frames that occur in 1 second.

That doesn't seem to make sense, but imagine this. You want to shoot 100 frames of the first millisecond of an airsoft pellet leaving a gun, but you have a camera that only shoots around 2 frames per second.

Your airsoft gun shoots 1 ball exactly (1ns accuracy) every second, exactly the same velocity and direction.

You have your camera, that only captures 2 frames every second, but this camera has an insane shutter speed, 1 microsecond, and has a shutter with that you can time to the gun exactly.

You can also delay the release of the shutter by 1 microsecond increments.

So, you start by taking 1 picture, 10 microseconds after you shoot your pellet. Then in the next second, 20 microseconds, you do this 100 times. You stitch this all together, and you have a video in super slow motion of an airsoft pellet leaving a gun. It just happens to be 100 different airsoft pellets.

Re: Camera freezes time at 10 trillion frames per second

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long can they maintain that frame rate for?

I'm more curious about how they can store it. even if each frame could somehow be encoded as a single byte, you're looking at ~10TB/s, which afaik exceeds even the bandwidth between L1 cache and the execution core of a modern cpu.

It may take 100s of seconds to capture the data.

Re: Camera freezes time at 10 trillion frames per second

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't quite understand how your original point refutes the headline. They are saying that it captures frames at a rate that, measured in seconds, would be ten trillion frames per second. The headline seems entirely accurate.

It does not capture events as they occur. You can't do a 10Tfps recording of a lightning strike with it for example because every lightning is different. It only allows you to synthesize an averaged video of repeatable events.

Did you read TFA? It seems that you are describing prior techniques for ultrafast image capture, whereas this technique is for capturing single, non-repeatable events.

> Using current imaging techniques, measurements taken with ultrashort laser pulses must be repeated many times, which is appropriate for some types of inert samples, but impossible for other more fragile ones. [...] The first time it was used, the ultrafast camera broke new ground by capturing the temporal focusing of a single femtosecond laser pulse in real time (Fig. 2). This process was recorded in 25 frames taken at an interval of 400 femtoseconds and detailed the light pulse's shape, intensity, and angle of inclination.

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