Why didn't the SI team use a 36X24mm chip? It seems to me they could have have undercut the competition (red) and offered an all in one solution, DoF, High Res, Affordable Lenses, etc., With 2/3 chips you have to pay a lot for 16mm or 2/3 lenses and you still don't have much DoF. Twelve five for a system that requires a mack computer, and an operator on the backside doesn't seem all that appealing. Cineform is sweet no maybe but I think I missed something.

There are many design decisions which went into the first Silicon Digital Cinema Camera. Each decision has an effect on time-to-market, cost (of product and content creation) and functionality (feature rich and flexible).

Our first priority was to a design a product which can be manufactured and used today. That is exactly what we did!

The second requirement was to deliver a product which produced very high quality, film-like content, at an affordable price for the independant film community. The 2/3" optical format delivers an increased DOF over common 1/3" cameras currently on the market. Many professionals and rental houses have access to high quality S16mm cineam optics. The cost of these lenses (or rental) are not much different than the equivalent 35mm version. Also, now you can use affordable, off the shelf HDD and Flash Storage Media, Large Flat-Panel LCD displays and Networking peripherals, rather than manufacturer proprietary components. I will leave the metric for our accomplishment in this category to the market.

The third Critical-To-Quality (CTQ) parameter was to deliver the best workflow for high bit-depth digital cinema content creation, connectivity and post production. This required a change in paradigm; Record RAW directly to a notebook hard-drive with instant wired or wireless network connectivity access. The Cineform RAW codec delivers a single file which contains the full resolution content and the 1/4-res proxy representation, at the same time! Grab the file from the network, drop the file on to the timeline and instantly start editing multiple 1080P streams on your notebook computer. Beat that!!

The flexibility of the Silicon Mini, the worlds smallest native 1920x1080 cinema camera, with simple Gigabit connectivity, enable it to be used in environments and configurations which were never before possible. POV and CrashCam will be popular uses. The small size was a requirement for the emerging 3-D market, where 2 cameras must sit side-by-side with a minimum interocular distance.

Based on the available technology, as we developed this camera, many of the requirements could not be met with a 35mm system; not the time to market, not the cost, not the size, not the workflow and not the architecture flexibility.

We didnt want to wait. We wanted to Shoot on Silicon now :-) !

Why didn't the SI team use a 36X24mm chip?
Why would they use a 36x24mm chip? RED is using a 24.4 x 13.7mm chip.

Ari - does your website have information on the silicon mini with photos ? I will be making a buying decision around November 1, looking for a field unit for sports events, with my distant second option being the Panasonic HVX-200.

35mm ...36x24 and 24x18
when 35mm is used still camera's that most non movie film persons refer to as 36x24 = the film is placed in camera sideways and the width runs 6 perfs wide and the height is bewteen the top/bottom perfs

when used in motion picture camera's the film is vertical = the width runs between the perfs and the height is 4 perfs .. 24x18 = 4x3 aspect ( 1.37) - you only see the equal to 3 perfs projected at the theater to equal 1:85 aspect ratio = 1 perf of film is WASTED (25%) .. there are camera's that shoot 3 perf and then they have to do a optical over to 4 perf for theater release (all movie theaters are set for 4 perf projection) ...
so the RED & most 2/3 " chip camera's you might say are like a 3 perf camera

note Vista vision camera's do run 35mm film sideways running 6 perf - these camera's are used mainly for special effects work ( plates) .. before Starwars went digital they used vista visions camera's for Sfx's ...

Ari - does your website have information on the silicon mini with photos ? I will be making a buying decision around November 1, looking for a field unit for sports events, with my distant second option being the Panasonic HVX-200.

Best place to see pictures of the Mini right now is on the Spoon blog at http://indiefilmlive.blogspot.com

35mm ...36x24 and 24x18
when 35mm is used still camera's that most non movie film persons refer to as 36x24 = the film is placed in camera sideways and the width runs 6 perfs wide and the height is bewteen the top/bottom perfs

when used in motion picture camera's the film is vertical = the width runs between the perfs and the height is 4 perfs .. 24x18 = 4x3 aspect ( 1.37) - you only see the equal to 3 perfs projected at the theater to equal 1:85 aspect ratio = 1 perf of film is WASTED (25%) .. there are camera's that shoot 3 perf and then they have to do a optical over to 4 perf for theater release (all movie theaters are set for 4 perf projection) ...
so the RED & most 2/3 " chip camera's you might say are like a 3 perf camera

note Vista vision camera's do run 35mm film sideways running 6 perf - these camera's are used mainly for special effects work ( plates) .. before Starwars went digital they used vista visions camera's for Sfx's ...

For the record, VistaVision is 8 perf, not 6. So is a 35mm still camera frame.