Digital Camera Control

Shooting movies under extreme conditions like in deserts is a big challenge for recording equipment; this rugged camera control unit based on COTS 3U CompactPCI® and CompactPCI® Serial computers is perfectly suited for such harsh environments and also offers further advantages over regular cameras.

Prior to the availability of high-performance Intel® mobile architecture, digital cinema camera systems were limited to dedicated hardware and did not have the flexibility of software upgradability or the connectivity options that are available when using a general purpose embedded processing platform.

Using standard-based embedded hardware with sufficient ruggedization, processing and graphics performance and IP connectivity enables film producers to shoot film footage directly to disk at Full HD (1920x1080) or greater cinema resolutions (2048x1152) with an IT centric digital camera, changing the way movies are made.

The 3U CompactPCI® single-board computer F17 with Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor T7600 running at 2.33GHz and an Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) 950 Graphics Core could already provide the raw performance needed to support 2.3 megapixel, 24 frame per second wavelet video compression processing, real-time defective pixel correction and colorization at full resolution as well as a touchscreen Graphical User Interface. The low power consumption (less than 50W) made for a longer camera battery life and reduced heat.

As performance demands increased, the F17 was replaced by an F18 with the next generation of Intel® CPUs, and more recently by a G20, which is the first CompactPCI® Serial card featuring an Intel® Core™ i7 processor.