Using CinePi-RAW from the terminal#

Here is how you can operate CinePi-raw from the command line.

Checking available options#

Before running the program you can view all command‑line flags with:

cinepi-raw -h

This prints a long list of options supported by the application. It includes the standard parameters from rpicam-apps (such as resolution and exposure settings) plus additional flags specific to the Cinemate.

Camera modes#

CinePi-raw uses Libcamera to talk to your Raspberry Pi camera module. Each sensor supports one or more modes, which define the resolution and bit depth of the RAW images that the sensor can produce. A mode is written as:

--mode 2028:1080:12:U

width and height select the active pixel area of the sensor.
bit-depth is usually 12 or 16 bits per pixel.
packing can be P for packed or U for unpacked data.

The mode must match the sensor you are using. For example, an IMX477 camera can run at 4056:3040:12 (full sensor) or at smaller cropped resolutions. When specifying a mode you typically also set the output --width and --height which control the size of the image written to disk. These can be equal to the mode values or smaller when scaling is applied.

Low‑resolution (lores) stream#

--lores-width 1280 --lores-height 720

CinePi-raw can produce a secondary low‑resolution stream alongside the full‑resolution RAW frames.

Preview window#

By default the program opens an HDMI preview so you can see what the camera captures. The size and position of this window are controlled with:

-p 0,30,1920,1020

This positions the preview 30 pixels from the top of the screen with a 1920×1020 window.

Tuning file#

--tuning-file /home/pi/libcamera/src/ipa/rpi/pisp/data/{model_key}.json

Describes the camera’s colour and lens characteristics. Point to a file supplied with Libcamera (for example /home/pi/libcamera/src/ipa/rpi/pisp/data/imx477.json for the HQ camera)

Post processing#

--post-process-file /home/pi/post-processing.json

For cinepi-raw, this file defines the port used by cpp-mjpeg-streamer (default cinepi.local:8000)

If you have more than one camera connected to the Pi, and activated in boot/firmware/config.txt, the camera commected to physical cam0 will use /home/pi/post-processing0.json and the camera connected to cam1 will use /home/pi/post-processing1.json.

Cinemate‑specific flags#

The CineMate fork introduces several extra options:

Flag	Argument	Description
`--cam-port`	`cam0` \| `cam1`	Select which CSI camera port to use.
`--hdmi-port`	`0` \| `1` \| `-1`	Choose the HDMI connector for the preview (`0` = HDMI-0, `1` = HDMI-1, `-1` = auto-detect).
`--same-hdmi`	(none)	Force both capture and controller GUI to share the same HDMI output.
`--keep16`	`true` \| `false`	Save full 16-bit DNGs instead of 12-bit packed files.

At this moment though, Cinemate is 12bit only. The flag is for future updates of the IMX585 16bit clear HDR modes.

Example commands#

Below are sample commands for different sensors and modes.

IMX477 (12‑bit, full width)#

cinepi-raw --mode 4056:2160:12 --width 4056 --height 2160 \
           --lores-width 1280 --lores-height 720 \
           -p 0,30,1920,1020 \
           --post-process-file /home/pi/post-processing.json \
           --tuning-file /home/pi/libcamera/src/ipa/rpi/pisp/data/imx477.json \

IMX585 (12‑bit unpacked)#

cinepi-raw --mode 1928:1090:12:U --width 1928 --height 1090 \
           --lores-width 1280 --lores-height 720 \
           -p 0,30,1920,1020 \
           --post-process-file /home/pi/post-processing.json \
           --tuning-file /home/pi/libcamera/src/ipa/rpi/pisp/data/imx585.json \

Now, with an SSH shell running redis-cli you should be able to capture RAW footage from the command line!

redis-cli
> set is_recording 1
> publish cp_controls is_recording