Time Shaper transforms high-frame-rate footage into smooth, controllable cinematic motion—all in software, no extra hardware required.

As camera technology advanced, filmmakers began to capture scenes at much higher frame rates than ever before. This opened extraordinary creative doors—but also created serious challenges in managing motion and maintaining cinematic quality.

At Tessive, we had already pioneered The Time Filter, a liquid crystal shutter that enabled in-camera temporal filtering. But as digital cinema matured, another possibility emerged: why not capture at very high frame rates and then apply temporal shaping in post-production, entirely in software?

That idea became Time Shaper.

I prototyped the system in MATLAB, taking advantage of the then-new MATLAB Coder to translate the algorithms directly into C. From there, I compiled high-performance code with Xcode on Mac and GCC on Linux, adding GPU acceleration and direct library hooks for high-speed image I/O. It was both a technical experiment in new scientific-computing workflows and a practical tool that could scale to production demands. And it worked.

The first major use came on Ang Lee’s groundbreaking Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk—the first feature film shot in 4K, 3D, and 120 fps source. The film required a new way to manage motion at unprecedented capture speeds, and Time Shaper helped make that possible.

Following this, RealD acquired the Tessive motion-image processing assets and launched RealD TrueMotion, built directly on the Time Shaper technology source. TrueMotion was used again by Ang Lee for Gemini Man, continuing the push into high-frame-rate 3D cinema source.

Time Shaper was more than a product—it was a glimpse of how modern scientific computing tools (MATLAB, C, GPU pipelines) could leap from research into the heart of cinema production.