I have an alternative idea to capturing component to uncompressed. It may also give some ideas to the Digital Cinema camera people.

As we know, that once you go uncompressed component it costs heaps of money in drives and capture cards. But what if we used HDCAM, HDCAMSR, HDXDCAM, DVCPRO HD codec instead, and existing software optimised to record them? Are there cheaper component options that will record to these formats?

For Digital Cinema cameras, there would have to be a driver that made the USB/capture board stream look like a component port to the software. The only advantage is that the capture software is optimised already across a number of different systems for maximum performance (and the compression) instead of having to be re-written.

I'm curious, is there a external adaptor that converts components to one of these codecs?

The only thing I have been able to come up with is:
Which seems to be DVCPRO HD like:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=61343