When Nikon announced that the new D90 would be capable of shooting
videos, we were stoked. A DSLR with video shooting capabilitie was, up
till then, unheard of. Understandably so, DSLR purists were busy crying
blasphemy, while the rest of the general public (us included) were
foaming with excitement.
As if that wasn't heart stopping enough, camp Canon
decided that Nikon had garnered enough attention and decided to drop a
bomb of their own - by launching the Canon5D Mark II,
Stateside earlier today. In true competitive spirit, the 5D Mk II
one-ups the D90's 24fps video capabilities with full frame 1090i (i.e.
HD) 30fps video capabilities.
Now, we're (or at least I) no experts when it comes
to the topic of how DSLRs work, but we couldn't help but constantly
wonder, why now? Why did it take so long for DSLRs to adopt the video
capturing function, when smaller, cheaper compact cameras have already
been doing it for ages? Well, it looks like we're not the only one's
asking this, because the guys over at the Giz have actually posted up a quick and simple explanation in response to this very same question.
"The biggest challenge to overcome is also the most vague and
nebulous, and is the one part of digital cameras most of us never think
about. Processing is each manufacturer's secret sauce (that's why we
never hear a MHz number or any other specs). It's where a huge portion
of the engineering dollars go to—and where most of the patents come
from.
The data dumped out by a DSLR's large sensor is a lot to
swallow—orders of magnitude more than what even the baddest compact
digicam can process into video. So for instance, the 5D Mk II's Digic
IV processor must take the 21MP, full-frame sensor data and downsample
it by 10x to 1920 x 1080 and compress it into MPEG4 encoding—and it has
to do that 30 times each second. That's a lot of CPU power, and Canon
and Nikon both only just got there, with Digic IV and Expeed,
respectively."
The full article is available here,
and since we posted this before actually posting anything about the new
5D Mk II, the full press release will be available after the jump.
[Source: Gizmodo]
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