It sounds like they are taking different phases of the light spreading, and it just looks like the light is traveling.
While cool, it's not a true 1 trillion fps camera.
Here's true 1 million fps footage:
While cool, it's not a true 1 trillion fps camera.
Here's true 1 million fps footage:
Sounds a lot like a CRT. Or some of the oldest video capturing techniques (scanning line by line into a photo diode, and then using that signal to vary light on the output following the same scanning pattern).
The only thing that this camera is missing from other high-speed cameras is 1000 more lines in parallel, and a faster cool-down between frames. And many high-speed cameras in the past got around the cool-down by using multiple cameras, each taking a different slice of the action, and stitching them back together afterwards, but they're still considered high-speed cameras.
This could be 100% identical if they built a million of them and took a video in one shot, but it isn't currently feasible or cost-effective. And, since their 'bullet' is non-destructive, there's no reason to not simply repeat it with a cheaper technique.
So, you could assume that the scene is static, but that's just not true in any scene.
Look up Debevec's Light-stage work on Digital Emily. One of the unanticipated benefits of fast, high-detail face capture is that we get to see how skin really deforms. This after decades of papers on how skin is supposed to deform.
This new camera has limitations of course, but it has a time resolution literally 1,000,000 times the one in your video.