Long exposure video - is it possible?

TheAvenogFilm

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Hey guys! This is my first post and I just wanted to discuss a quick idea I had the other day:

After taking some time-lapse photos the other night, I had an idea about taking long exposure video, where the "taking" of a single frame was actually recorded in "subframes" and could be played as a video. For instance, if you shot a ball rolling across the ground in a single time-lapse photo, you would see a streak across the ground representing the path of the ball over that period of time. If you could view this recording process in real time however, it would look like a ball rolling across the frame, leaving a streak as it traveled. Not only would this be an extremely interesting style of shooting, but it opens the door for high speed video as well. If you think of a long exposure shot as like an infinite number of iterations (frames) that have been composed together to form the shot, then you could theoretically shoot video at an infinite frame rate (speaking strictly theoretically here). If all you had to do was specify the number of subframes, or rate at which the camera recorded subframes, you could dial in the frame rate of a "streaky" looking video to be whatever your heart desires. What do you guys think? Do you know if this would be possible with a digital camera?
 
Essentially what you're describing exists and has been implemented for some time now using basically souped up CCD sensors that can just transfer photon data on the fly. These are up to 25 million+ frame per second cameras currently. NASA for example uses them to study particle effects on the edges of airfoils at extremely high speeds.

Note that if you want normally exposed and fully informative frames at 25 million FPS, you will need a light source a million times brighter than at 25 FPS

If you are okay with using lasers in a specialized and highly constrained laboratory setup, you can even get to 1 trillion frames per second via other means, enough to watch light pulses propagate through objects:
MIT researchers develop one trillion frame per second camera
 

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