RAW full HD video processes at roughly 120mb a second. So can you think of a camera / CF card combo that could cope with that? 1GB = 9 seconds of footage. The write rate for it would have to be... INCONCEIVABLE.
Hmm...I notice that Lexar just announced new UDMA7 CF cards. Can't find the sustained write speeds, but sustained read is 150MB/s, so if write is near that it might possibly support the 120MB/s needed for the RAW 1080p30.
Too bad it doesn't have USB 3.0, that would support enough bandwidth to send raw 1080p50/60 streams to an external system to write. Assuming the external system could support the write speeds of course.
If it's 1GB = 9 second, then a $800 128GB card can store 19 mins of footage. Not very practical I would think.
19 minutes is more than a 1000 foot spool of 35mm film. That's really not so bad. But it doesn't shoot full resolution in raw, because why would it shoot 6fps at 3:2 and then 30fps cropped to 16:9. Makes no sense.
If there were any hope for raw video it would be something similar to sraw. A quarter the resolution so maybe four times the frame rate? That would be a HUGE deal, although the video would still suffer from aliasing.
Also, remember that bayer sensors don't record as much detail as their stated resolution--red's 4k isn't as sharp as a IMAX scanned and downressed to 4k... "720p raw" would look like SD and alias worse than the current generation's output.
But it's not going to happen. These specs are based on what's posted on one website--one website that erroneously claims the 5DII and 7D record in "avi and raw." When, really, they record in .mov, raw, and jpeg.
The video samples from the 1DX aren't substantially better than those from the 5DII. I wish the 5DIII were a killer video camera, but it seems like Canon is waiting on a lower end cinema dSLR until some time in the future. Fingers crossed, of course--I'd love to order one of these.
