Blackmagic Forum

Hi all,
I am recording a long journey, in attempting to create a fully fledged imaging system from already existing parts. I've been disassembling cameras, researching, and tinkering for several months now, and i'm running into a heck of a problem.

I know that a CMOS sensor records all the rows of pixels simultaneously, as opposed to a CCD which takes the data a row at a time. How would you go about getting and organizing the raw data from a CMOS image sensor?

Any ideas?

It's the majority of CMOS sensors that output line by line which gives rise to rolling shutter artifacts on fast movement. The Sony A9 lll has a global shutter CMOS sensor, but does not record RAW.
May I ask why you don't choose a camera that already records in RAW like the Canon EOS R5 or the
Panasonic Lumix S1H, or a camera that records in Blackmagic's BRAW format? As you are going on a long journey have you considered the amount of data RAW files generate?

That sounds like a really cool project! When I was working with a CMOS sensor, I found that connecting it to a Raspberry Pi was super helpful for pulling in the raw data. Just make sure you have the right libraries set up for the sensor— that saved me a lot of headaches. Once you have the data, I used OpenCV to organize and process the images, which made it way easier to work with everything.