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The Camera That's Also a Mac Mini, Or Vice Versa
Joe Marine of No Film School has a short interview with two of the creators of the Black Betty, a deceptively old-school looking digital cinema camera. The Black Betty gets around one issue with the massive data processing and storage needs inherent to high-capacity, high-resolution video cameras by attacking it head-on. Rather than use the camera "merely" as a collection device, the creators have jammed into the machined aluminum case the guts of a Mac Mini, which means the camera not only has a powerful processing brain, but a built-in SSD drive, and can (in a pinch, or even by preference in the field) be used to edit and transmit the footage collected with the actual imaging system, which is based around the SI-2K Mini sensor, which shoots 1080p video at up to 30fps.
Maybe he had some help from Ram Jam? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R044sleOW6I
Silence is a state of mime.
I just struggle to see a situation that wouldn't be better served by a laptop in the field or a workstation back at the studio.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
Components in general become more interchangeable in the future. Need your computer to be a camera? Attach a camera module to a CPU module - the handshaking happens and you have created a new device. How about a phone then? Add the phone module. The next wave of miniaturization is at hand.
If you read the original source, they did start with a different platform.
"I started building a small Mini ITX PC and put it inside a metal frame. Using some parts from a low mode cage from an elderly Glidecam V20, I mounted the camera with odds and ends into a basic camera shape. It was magnificently sucky; The computer heat failed within a week!"
The Mac mini can also run on "unregulated 12V power when the power supply was removed; this was a huge discovery! It removed the need to add any voltage regulation into the camera design." - Jasen.
True.
However, there aren't many complete systems readily available, and that's key. You can build a small computer using a mini-ITX board, but you still have to add processor, cooling solution (this one is fairly big) and all the other stuff (WiFi, Bluetooth, ...), and THEN build the camera. Plus being completely self contained means if it fails, all one really does is take it out, go to an Apple store, buy a new Mac Mini and shove it in. It's a lot tougher to go and buy a mini-ITX system to shove in (or run around town finding a computer store with the requisite parts).
In this case, the mini comes self contained and working out of the box - so they can concentrate on building a camera, and not on building a PC.
For its size, a mini makes a nice self-contained fully functional PC you can carry around.
Plus, as a bonus, it can run OS X, because there's still plenty who do use stuff like Final Cut Pro. And a lot of filmmakers are keen on Apple stuff - if you look, a lot of the film crew are lugging around MacBook Pros or increasingly these days, iPads.