Lets forget all those video compression compromises for a moment. All this artificial seperation between still and movie mode. What I really want is full frame RAW recording at 24 or 30 fps. And with full frame I mean 6 Megapixels or so. Put all concerns about storage space and computer power aside and imagine a camera that stores the same quality regardless if its supposed to be a still or a movie. QuickTime Pro or Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended would be all you need to turn the individual shots into a movie. You can scale the recorded stills to any frame size and aspect ratio and compress it to any video format of your choice. If Cinema DNG comes to live you will have a movie in the first place and can then choose stills from it. Or even better Cinema DNG compatible editing software would allow nondestructive editing using lower resolution proxy images. That's what I really want.
Do I? Lets now speak of the amount of data such a camera would produce:
6,000,000 pixel x 2 bytes/pixel x 24 fps would be 288 MB/s or 17 GB/min or 1 TB/hour. This is calculated for a 16 bit resolution per pixel monochrome Bayer pattern. RGB values are later calculated from this.
If this seems to be too huge to store and archive at the moment hows about a camera that records 12 to 20 Mpixels RAW stills and 3 Mpixels RAW movies? Kind of a RED Scarlet but with SLR sized sensor. 500GB/hour RAW video doesn't sound that bad.
Read some interesting thoughts at Luminous Landscape.
