This Raspberry Pi Cinema Camera can shoot high end video for a fraction of the cost of a fancy broadcast camera.

The demo video below was shot with the Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera, plus a 6mm lens, on a 4GB Raspberry Pi 4 Model B. It was captured in 12-bit RAW DNG, 2028×1080 at 24fps, and DaVinci Resolve was used to edit the RAW footage.

A passion for filmmaking and programming

This project’s author has been using Raspberry Pi products for years and finally got round to combining their passions for filmmaking and programming.

We usually come across interesting Raspberry Pi projects on reddit, Twitter or YouTube, so it was nice to find this brilliant creation by schoolpost on our own forums.

In their forum post, the keen filmmaker explains:

For those that know, high end film/video cameras typically shoot high resolution ( 4K+ ) with very good codecs (RAW when possible) and with tons of manual control for high flexibility to manipulate images in the post processing stage.

Out of the box the Raspberry Pi provides a very friendly experience to work with cameras, with convenience features like auto white-balance, auto exposure, efficient h264/jpeg codec. These features cater to a wide variety of general applications, but for high end video work these are often hindrances that restrict you from controlling the quality of your image.

So they sought to combine the best elements of shooting high-end video with the ease of use that Raspberry Pi offers. It seems like it worked: they believe what they’ve built is capable of shooting at the same specs you find on cameras costing $1000 and up.

Contributions welcome

All the software to enable cinema camera capabilities for Raspberry Pi is on GitHub, and schoolpost is inviting contributions to help them clean up the code. They explain that they just wanted to get to where they are now without spending too much time making everything elegant, and say they’ll appreciate a friendly piling-in to help on the software side.