In-situ visualization of the material flow during orthogonal cutting is achieved using new high-speed optical system. Difficulties arise from the submillimetric size of the cutting zone. Therefore, a dedicated optical system was designed allowing for local scale analysis of chip formation. The Digital Image Correlation (DIC) technique is applied on recorded images from the cutting zone to measure the kinematic fields. Then, the effect of the cutting conditions on chip formation is presented with local scale analysis.