Having nearly no background in film (I'm a poor engineering student) I'm never sure if my ideas sound sorta rediculous, but I've been reading through some of the archives of this forum and have found alot of people talking about using still digital SLR's to record near hi-def images. Some noted the canon eos1 could go almost 10fps for up to 40frames. I have two interesting ideas.

First is it possible to increase the buffer size dramatically? If the buffer could be replaced by a large memory...of course it would have to be very lage (holding 1440 images for a minute of footage). Then perhaps the buffer could be dumped directly to a disk harddrive instead of a card.

Second, as a method to reach the goal of 24fps, would it be possible to have some sort of prism/image splitter that would send the same image to two SLR's which could be designed to shoot at intermittent rates? I mainly question the optics part (I know absolutely nothing about optics) I'm fairly sure making something to shoot this way would be relatively easy. Of course this assumes that the lag time between shots wouldn't cause the camera to try and dump its buffer and create a delay.

Matt

Matt,
The shutter/mirror mechanism of the cameras has a limited life of actuations. I don't know exactly how many, but it is in low 100k. Maybe with some other capture software, an open shutter with external trigger might do it.

Well how about we do this. Instead of using an entire SLR camera, we just split the image to hit two CCD's. Those CCD's then take pictures intermittently. Then all you need is a way to arrange the frames properly. Correct me if I'm wrong, but what you are refering to is only in SLR cameras in order to keep the image on the viewfinder. In this case the beam-splitting prism takes care of that and we are ignoring the view finders of the original ccd (or SLR).

On a related note: Does anyone know how to go about buying a few ccd sensors? I'm really interested in these:

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0302/03021303atmel8mpccd.asp

Have you checked out the big threads in this forum? The idea of
getting better camera's have been around here for a while with
some succes, but it is not an easy thing to do.

We have threads on:

- building our own camera with CMOS technology (Rai & Steffen are finished, Obin is close)
- getting uncompressed out of a normal DV camera (Juan already did this)