Toshiba Advances Bullet-Time to Next Level In Ad Filmed By 200 Camcorders

Toshiba’s new “timesculpture” advert takes The Matrix’s Bullet Time film technique one bizarrely cool step forward by animating within the freeze-frame. It was filmed with 200 Gigashot camcorders arranged on a special rig, recording a mahoosive 20 terabytes of data from which the ad was composed. Check it out—it’s like a weird moving Bullet-Time ballet, and then check out the making of clip to learn how it was made.

The ad was created for Toshiba’s new low-definition to high-definition upscaling tech built into its LCD TVs, DVD machines and laptops. But it’s amazing all by itself: whereas the Wachowski-brothers’ technique used static images in Bullet-Time, this new style uses looped video clips, digitally compiled together for the final result. Apparently the 200-cam 14-meter diameter filming rig used “the highest number of moving image cameras ever used in a film sequence” and took three days to just focus up and align. All 200 cameras were triggered by a single remote, and it took four weeks to process the image data. Four weeks! The $US4.7million ad’s showing in Europe currently. [Toshiba]