By Andrew Liszewski
If you thought you had problems storing all the RAW files from your digital SLR camera, imagine having to deal with the stream of data coming from a digital motion picture camera capturing footage at 24 frames per second or higher. That’s why researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS in Erlangen, Germany have developed the FlashBox which docks to a digital film camera, like the ARRI D21 or the Sony F35, and stores up to 500GB of footage on a couple of swappable SSDs.
At just 5.1 x 3.1 x 2.8 inches in size and 3.3 pounds the FlashBox is remarkably light and compact, but it can capture and store Bayer raw sensor data in resolutions up to 2048×1000 pixels, or compressed using the JPEG2000 codec. A built-in LCD also allows the footage to be played back as soon as it’s captured, and a “multi-level prompting process” ensures recorded scenes don’t get accidentally overwritten which is one of the few times when nagging software is a definite plus.
The FlashBox will be available to select beta testers sometime in the Spring of 2010, but a prototype will be exhibited at the IBC (International Broadcast Convention) show in Amsterdam starting on September 11.
[ Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft – The little giant of storage for the big screen ]
