Silicon Imaging the camera used on "Slumdog Millionaire"

Slumdog Millionaire,. swept the academy awards in 2009, bagging a huge 8 out of ten nominations, including BestPicture, BestDirector and BestAdapted Screenplay. It also won seven BAFTA awards. In the crowd pleasing fantasy, Danny Boyle tells a love story about a teenager who rises from the slums of Mumbai to win the Indian version of the television game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Many of the fast-paced chase scenes and game show set were shot with the SI-2K Digital Cinema Camera, developed by Silicon Imaging of Niskayuna, New York, like the one seen below.

Alot of the scenes were shot in the slums in India, and the director, Danny Boyle, was adement he did not want to take large, cumbersome, 35mm cameras into the slums, he wanted to use smaller, more flexible, digital cameras to enable them to shoot quickly with minimal disturbance to the natural flow and communities.Unlike modern HD cameras, which develop and compress colorized imagery inside the camera, the Silicon Imaging SI-2K streams 2K (2048x1152) data as uncompressed raw “digital negatives” over a standard gigabit Ethernet connection. An Intel Core 2 Duo processor-based computer embedded in the camera or tethered to a laptop up to 100 feet away, processes the digital negatives, where they are non-destructively developed and colorized for preview using the cinematographer's desired "look" for the scene.The digital negatives and "look" metadata are simultaneously recorded to hard drive or solid state disk where up to 4-hours of continuous footage are captured on a single 160GB notebook drive; this is the equivalent of 14-reels of 35mm film which has an associated cost exceeding $25,000 for materials and processing. The recorded files, can be immediately played with the target color look at full resolution, without the need for film scanning, tape ingest, format conversions or off-line proxies.