Black Betty, A Camera With a Mac Mini Inside ⇒

Joe Marine over at nofilmschool reveals the Black Betty camera:

Black Betty is much more than a camera. It’s a complete cinema solution utilizing an Apple Mac Mini computer with a Silicon Imaging SI-2K Mini for the imager. It also happens to be the first single unit camera in existence capable of shooting, editing, and posting footage online, without the need for any other hardware.

I think Joe and the Black Betty team are over-playing this “shoot and edit” capability. Basically the video is recorded to the Mac Mini, so technically you could plug a monitor into it and cut away, but that sounds inconvenient.

However, Joe’s interview with the camera’s creators Adam Van Voorhis and Mike Szegedithey hints at some of the things one could do with the Black Betty, which is where things get interesting.

Adam: […] There’s nothing stopping you from taking Bluetooth keyboards and Bluetooth mice, and using them to do things like trigger the camera remotely. I’ve triggered the camera from hundreds of feet away with a Bluetooth mouse and it works, and that’s damn cool.

Mike: Since it’s an Apple device, you could probably use Apple devices to trigger it.

Adam: Sure. Anything that you can do with a Mac Mini, you can do with the camera.

Wi-Fi. Bluetooth. This is starting to sound like a camera that could make my old Google Wave for Filmmakers1 concept possible.

Mac Minis turn up in so many creative places; it may be one of Apple’s best devices simply in terms of the scope of the projects it has made possible.

(via Engadget.)


  1. Google Wave may be dead, but my original proposal was for a collaborative online hub where a project’s XML file could be cut by multiple editors. Proxy videos could be shot straight to shared storage so an editor could start cutting instantly miles away. ↩︎