The Slow Mo Guys actually managed to film light at 10 trillion frames per second
Apr 1, 2019
John Aldred
John Aldred is a photographer with over 25 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter – and occasional beta tester – of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
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Every new Slow Mo Guys video just makes me go “wow!”. Seething every day things shot at tens or hundreds of thousand frames per second and then massively slowed down just reveals such amazing things. It might be something incredibly beautiful, or funny, or just plain fascinating to watch.
One thing they get asked about regularly, though, is to film light itself. A seemingly impossible task, but now they’ve done it, using a camera that shoots at an extremely crazy 10,000,000,000,000 frames per second.
The maximum that the slow mo guys have recorded at before is up to about half a million frames per second. But here sees Gav and Dan head to the California Institute of Technology to see a camera that can shoot at 10 trillion (12 zeroes!) frames per second.
For a comparison of just how slow a half a million frames per second is, a one-second sequence shot at 500,000 frames per second and then played back at 24fps would take almost 6 hours to watch back. That same one-second clip shot at 10 trillion frames per second would take 1,321 years to watch back.
If you fired a bullet through this frame it would take years to go from one side to the other.
– Gav
Light moves so quickly that the video sequences is measured in picoseconds (1/1,000,000,000,000th of a second). And even that number has a decimal point because it’s not just fine enough to measure just how fast this is.
It’s insane to think technology has gotten to the point where we can even consider seeing this stuff, let alone actually being able to do it. The boys have put up a second video now, talking with those behind the technology to see exactly how it works.
While almost none of us will ever have the chance to use cameras like this, it’s incredibly fascinating to watch.
What do you want to see recorded in slow motion that Gav & Dan haven’t covered yet?
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John Aldred
John Aldred is a photographer with over 25 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter – and occasional beta tester – of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
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5 responses to “The Slow Mo Guys actually managed to film light at 10 trillion frames per second”
Yeah right ;)
10 trillion FPS?
Is there any camera that can do even 100 000 FPS (100 million times less than that)?
Derrick Taras Smischuk the Phantom camera series is designed for that. The guys who made this video made their channel off the back of those and doing fun stuff with them.
Snowy Duffield The Phantom v2512, the company’s fastest camera as of August 2018, can record video at over 25,000 frames per second.
I can’t wait for the next Sony a7siii if it doesn’t have 8k @960fps and full HD @10trill fps then Sony are bad and Panasonic are good