What is it?#

Cinemate is a boilerplate cinema camera system for Raspberry Pi 5 building on CinePi‑RAW recorder by Csaba Nagy for enabling 12 bit (or even 16 bit) Cinema DNG recordings using off-the-shelf components.

Cinemate provides a minimal starting point that you can extend with your own controls and accessories.

The project combines a Python UI with a custom fork of cinepi-raw.

Camera stack exploded

Figure 1: Camera stack exploded view. Apps change settings by updating Redis keys. CinePi-RAW listens for those updates and captures frames accordingly while Cinemate provides the camera user interface.

New features in version 3.2#

  • improved mounting mechanics for NVME and SSD drives with less drop frames

  • storage preroll to "warm up" the recording media, improving writing stability

  • improved audio sync with correction of effective fps (different resolutions/frame rates due to sensor VBLANK), available for fine tuning in src/module/sensor_correction_factors.py

  • option to record a fixed number of frames or seconds for user calibration of fps correction factors (run Cinemate manually for this calibration as feedback is supplied in the terminal)

  • system startup fix to have Cinemate wait for sensor to be loaded properly by the system (contribution from user Yabbo01)

  • simple GUI now supports different resolutions defined by the user in setting.json (contribution from user 0point)

Installation#

See the releases section for preinstalled image file and Quick Start Guide.

For manual install of the camera stack on Raspberry Pi Bookworm, see the here.

Compatible sensors#

  • IMX477 (official Raspberry Pi HQ camera)
  • IMX294 (official Raspberry Pi GS camera)
  • IMX585 (Starlight Eye by Will Whang)
  • IMX283 (OneInchEye by Will Whang)

Preinstalled hardware#

Customization#

Buttons, encoders and oled display are optional and configured via the settings file.

Join the CinePi Discord for discussions and sharing builds.

Supporting the project#

ko-fi