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.
I agree that the article isn't very clear on this, but I believe you're describing the previous work.
> 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 new innovation here actually records the frames right after each other of one single event:
> 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.
