On August 20th 2003 at the London club Sketch, Canon launched a new 35mm Digital camera called the EOS 300D. Three weeks earlier, the Glassworks Special Projects team were commissioned to design and build the worlds first Digital Timeslice Rig, to be run exclusively for that launch party.

Glassworks Special Projects designed and built the rig in two weeks including commissioning special electronics to trigger the cameras - the surface mounted transistors needed were flown in from Japan by Canon - our electronics engineer designed all the boards and soldered them in by hand in four days flat! The difference between this and all other Timeslice Rigs was that the results were captured, stabilized and output in 18 seconds! Normally the results take a day or two while the film is processed, scanned, imported and stabilized.

In order to achieve guaranteed results in the time available, it was necessary to run one computer per camera (plus a couple of servers). This meant building a temporary machine room (for the night) which contained 48 computers, 3 industrial air conditioning units, a 3 phase supply at 64 amps per phase, a 50 machine network, and a 48 way KVM switching system. Each camera had 30 meters of USB cable back to it's own computer, this meant over 1 mile of USBs alone!

Each camera (the new Canon EOS 300Ds of course) had to be triggered from our specially designed and commissioned interface box, driven (in turn) from TTL level I/O card on the main server. Glassworks R&D developed software to remotely control the aperture, shutter and ASA speed of the cameras and to trigger them with variable delays and speed ramps.

Special Projects are currently looking at further development of the rig for other events along with exploring its further applications in filmmaking.