Shooting movies under extreme conditions like in deserts is a big challenge for recording equipment; this rugged camera control unit based on the F17 single-board computer is perfectly suited for such harsh environments and also offers further advantages over regular cameras.

Prior to the availability of the Intel® Core™ 2 Duo architecture, digital cinema camera systems were limited to dedicated hardware and did not have the flexibility of software upgradability or the connectivity options that are available when using a general purpose embedded processing platform.

Using standard-based embedded hardware with sufficient ruggedization, processing and graphics performance and IP connectivity enables film producers to shoot film footage directly to disk at Full HD (1920x1080) or greater cinema resolutions (2048x1152) with an IT centric digital camera, changing the way movies are made.

An Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor T7600 running at 2.33GHz and an Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) 950 Graphics Core provide the raw performance needed to support 2.3 megapixel, 24 frame per second wavelet video compression processing, real time defective pixel correction and colorization at full resolution as well as a touchscreen Graphical User Interface. The low power consumption (less than 50W) makes for a longer camera battery life and reduced heat.

The segmented system bus architecture of the Intel® chipset provides higher overall bandwidth for data transfer intensive applications. Jumbo frames enable transferring of 100MB/s of video data over standard Gigabit Ethernet.

The same camera control software that runs on the rugged, digital cinema camera can also be run on a laptop computer, providing new options for video capturing.