red for autonomous robot vehicle data collection

[RobotJim]

We are trying to use a HD digital camera to drive around the country to gather difficult traffic situations. Your camera seems ideal. We'd like to connect several to a PC that allows us to have the camera run continuously with a cyclic buffer and when someone hits a key, for example, on the PC we'd like to capture the +/n seconds of captured imagery to disk (typically +/-15 seconds). Do you know if an interface your camera can use on a PC that will allow us to write an application to do this I would be appreciative. Also, possible??? a 15 second delay buffer (like the kind for live TV) that could write to a disk on a trigger would work too.

Is there any open interface/software that you are aware of that we could use to plug your camera directly into?

Does your camera have a fiber link to allow us to get your frame data and what is a PC interface we could use to get this data?

[jbeale]

First: I have no connection to Red, other than I have been reading this user forum for a while and have learned about the camera that way.

The output of Red is approximately 27.5 MB/s in 4k resolution (4096 x 2048 pixels, wavelet compressed). The exact bitrate depends on scene complexity. Right now the only 4k data output mode is to individual compact flash cards, in single pass mode (no circular buffer as you describe). There are also digital video outputs at lower resolution (HD-SDI and HDMI) which might be useful with suitable computer interface cards. See also: http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=1119

The Red camera has only just now started shipping to the first customers and there is currently a manufacturing backlog of unknown size, but which may be 6 months - 1 year. In the future, applications such as yours may be supported with some kind of documented software interface, but nothing of that type exists at the moment as far as I know.