Adam Koppe

David and Jason thankyou very much for your reply. I just included 30p as it seemed the the most taxing (data rate wise) so all bases were convered by harddisk and camera. Here is Oz we are PAL anyway. Film is what I am most interested in so yes 24p. What are the camera coming out with the Altasens chips you know about? I suppose I said cheap, but what I meant is "what is the cheapest way of doing this"

Ok I have been doing lots of reading on these threads and others and it seems a few people are trying to get an answer to this question What is the cheapest way to get uncompressed, unaltered, 4:4:4 10 or 12bit 1920x1080 30fps onto a hard drive for manipulation by FCP HD on a Mac or whatever windows program for PC. I am interested in getting a Mac solution From what I have gathered 1. Storage Seems from my rudimentary calculations 1920pixles x 1080pixles x 36bit(colour res) x 30fps = 279Mbytes/sec An 8 drive SATA raid with 250MB Maxtor MaXLine III?s will yield 38.2MBx8 = 305.6MB/s (at it?s slowest inner tracks) which is 1.8hrs of this uncompressed video. X-Raid does this with an external enclosure and via Fibre Channel (400MB/s) to a card in the PCI-X in the Mac. There seems to be other similar cheaper non-apple options as well. SATA-II seems to do this cheaper again when it comes. So IMHO storage is do-able. Larger faster HD arrays can be built also 2.Camera This is the biggy, what camera will output uncompressed, unaltered 4:4:4 10 or 12bit 1920x1080 30fps data (with usable lenses for shooting, to preserve resolution, cheap is good) to a computer or straight to the hard drive array. Cameras that I have seen discussions of Summix Imperx Silicon Imaging Redlake Kinetta (but this seems to far away) Sony X300 (seems more expensive than the rest) Dalsa Issues Connection to comp or HDD: HD-SDI...............too slow Dual HD-SDI...............Fast enough Firewire 800...............Too Slow Cameralink...............Fast enough Gigabit Ethernet...............too slow Drivers for the Mac??? Interface card for the Mac to camera???? Aja's KONA 2 Dual HD-SDI Decklink HD Can you connect straight to HDD Array??? Format A Format than can retain the info and be read or converted to a readable form (without info loss) for FCP HD CCD?s Larger CCD better??? 3 better than 1???? Is there a camera that can do this, if there are multiple which one gives a better picture, f-stops, lenses etc. Suggestions for a setup is what I am looking for Thanks