4:4:4 10bit single CMOS HD project

[Obin Olson]

Jason do you think we would get any realtime stuff even a fadeout in FCP with our footage in SheerCodec? or will everything we do take hours to render?

problem is that Cineform could do it for PC NOW and we have all PC systems in the office running premier pro and a pc videoserver ..I don't really want to switch to mac ...I wish cineform had a product forsale now for this system.....

Jason do you think premiere can't edit because it's a quicktime sheer file?

[Wayne Morellini]

Good cameras normally take in 10-12bits process it and store in 8 bits, because the image manipulation leads to accumulated chromma error in the reds and such forth in 8bits. It is stored in 8 bits because that is the resolution of human site (actually lower but it is not scalled linearily). But for post production effects and editing I think it would also be benefical (as Obin has allready demonstrated).

Which leads me to a question fro Steve, the response curve for camera and human sight is not the same, are there any on camera adjustments for this or do we rely on post processing and higher bit rate?

<<<-- Originally posted by Jim Lafferty :
Personally, I think the idea of lugging a PC around is laughable -- if the project's not portable then it's of little use to anyone looking to shoot: outdoors, on the run, rougher conditions, etc. What everyone's proposing so far is a good studio cam, and for those of us without studios...

That said, anyone know of realtime hardware encoders that we might use? Looking for something small, fast and cheap :D

I think we need to invite Dan Vance in on these talks. He built his system from scratch -- not around a pre-built camera core -- and did it all for under $3,000.

- jim -->>>


HA, ha ;), reminds me of a picture I saw over at Tomshardware (I think) of a guy with his portable system, a tower PC strapped to his back like a backpack and all the rest of it, including the monitor strapped to his front. Now those pro camera men are fairly butch (lots of spinach and weight lifting etc) they should be able to handle something easy like that ;). Seriously by the time we finish portable is defintely going to be possible. But when we are finsihed we should put together a system like that and all gather at a NAB/CES and show off it off, then after we have stunned them in disbelief, bring out all the sleek sexy models (I mean camera cases) ;).

Hardware encoders (the good ones at least) are very expensive, I have suggested the clearspeed parrallel array processor that is progammable in C mysdelf as a good alternative, and in the home made thread there is threads to a Russian guy that designed his own in open source FPGA.

Vance's been around on the Home made camera thread before. Has anybody invited Scott Billups, he might be interested, he's done this sort of stuff before.

Good having you here Jim.

Thanks

Wayne.

[David Newman]

<<<-- Originally posted by Obin Olson :
problem is that Cineform could do it for PC NOW and we have all PC systems in the office running premier pro and a pc videoserver ..I don't really want to switch to mac ...I wish cineform had a product forsale now for this system.....
-->>>

Yes we can do it. We are experimenting with real-time compression of CameraLink data, but our editing products are fairly mature. The problem is we have a mid-range real-time 8bit product (Aspect HD) and a high-end real-time 10bit product (Prospect HD). What this (indie) market needs is a mid-range 10bit product with a price to match. We need to work out how to make a suitable product without creating price pressures on our high-end solution. That means we need to be convinced of the market and the feature set that works for you.

There might not be a market here, as the constant pressure from user adopting free tools to kludge together a solution seems to drive a lot of the discussions. But I would love to be convinced otherwise as this seems like a lot of fun.

[Obin Olson]

i would pay $$ for that system now

[Jason Rodriguez]

Just so you know Obin, that Boxx system starts at $22,995. Not cheap, and again, we've bought systems from Boxx for our 3d-guys, and they're nice, but often the base config is never enough, and addtions cost $$$. In othewords, you could easily be north of $30,000 very quickly.

[Jason Rodriguez]

Hey guys,

Just so you know, you're all griping about co$t of systems, we'll, when we're talking thousands of dollars here, just to give you a head's up, you get too expensive, and you might as well rent Cinealta's. I'm about to shoot a short film next weekend on the Cinealta, and it's only costing me $2,200 for the rental, that's a complete kit with waveform monitor, sticks, Zeiss digiprimes (the best lenes available) and insurance. On top of that, HDCAM is a proven workflow (albiet compressed), but still, it works nice with a lot of systems.

So, if you end up spending $20,000 minimum in the end for your system, then that's a five-week shoot on the Cinealta (you can get nice package deals for $4K a week)!!! You could possibly shoot 2 features with that money-if you don't pay anybody else ;-)

I just want to keep cost in perspective here-go too high and you might as well shoot with the real-deal instead of kludging something together.

[David Newman]

Comments like Waynes are exactly thoughts that say there is no market. When HD shooting editing becomes everyday prosumer you will see $100 products, or in other words send me a list of a 100,000 customers for this $100 product. Today when get between $500 and $1200 for an 8bit HD products, and up to $23,000 for a 10bit product. Which will do much more than you need, yet is $100,000 cheaper than a similarly performing AVID. This is this market today. Do you all agree with Wayne that you do not value software? Software only real-time 10bit doesn't exist today, and so how could be valued at only $100. I'm I wrong to be frustrated by this?

[Les Dit]

Obin, just two or three raw bayer (B&W) frames from a capture sequence , at the higher bit depth would be enough. Any file format. The lens can be soft, it actually helps if it's defocus-ed a tiny bit. The shot should be without motion.
Thanks for all your hard work, Obin!

A very usable edit solution would be Adobe Premiere Pro, with the front end render engine replaced with a 16 bit one. This is what Cineform did. Too bad Vegas is stuck at 8bits!
I've been looking for a >8bit codec, and while a couple of companies do have them, they only seem to allow >8bit imports from the capture card that they sell. Like Bluefish cards.

A first step workable solution would be like the Prospect/Prem Pro system with a front end tiff or Cineon image sequence import.
These prototype cam systems can all be made to produce these >8bit images after the Bayer is removed. Non real time is fine.

Combustion can do primitive NLE stuff, but it's very clunky at it, and costs a lot.
Did someone say that Speedrazor does full 16 bit NLE ? Gotta look into that!

Cineform could also make a command line tool that reads image sequences and makes a high bit depth AVI for import into PremPro. That would work for me as well.

[David Newman]

Wayne, your ecomonics do not work. That is what drives price, not greed, simple ecomonics. If my company (or any NLE company) could be profitable selling a $100 10bit HD product today, we would. That is at least years away. Your other suggested prices you were suggesting for an even smaller market, economics are still bad. I've been in this business (designing and marketing NLEs) for my whole engineering career, it is very competitive on pricing and features. I'm just hoping to inject some realism.

Les, It would be certaining fairly straight forward to convert tiff or Cineon image sequences into CineForm CFHD AVI format for real-time editing. However we don't have that yet.

[Jim Lafferty]

A thought occured to me last night that is completely undercooked, but I figured I'd pass it along in the hopes that the programmers here might be able to use it --

One of the greatest challenges of this project is keeping the data flowing from the CCD/CMOS small enough to be compressed quickly and/or passed onto disks quickly and error free. So, aside from minimizing the data by going 10 to 8 bits, why can't we:

1) Split the frames in half, writing each half out to separate disks, or...

2) Write even and odd frames to separate disks

In the case of 1) I'm not speaking of interlacing, I'm speaking of somehow cutting each frame's data in half -- sending the parsed streams to separate drives, and writing a stitcher that re-assembles them back at the workstation.

And in the case of 2), I'm just looking to address the same solution differently. It seems to me that, given our (my) desires for variable framerates and not wanting to comprimise the quality of the stream -- and also given the substantial cost of a realtime compressor and our needs of portability -- these solutions may be viable.

Of course, I'm neither a programmer nor an engineer, so I might be talking out my ass completely :D

What say the pros on the thread?

- jim

[Steve Nordhauser]

Obin: I'll get back to you privately on gain progamming and copy the Robs. No need to be public on camera specific stuff.

Wayne on buffering: Memory in the chain only reduces the data bus rate from the peak to average - like going from 44MB/sec to 40MB/sec. It could at some serious $$ to the camera cost.

Jim on disks: Essentially, you get the same speedup you describe by using a RAID. 2 disks give you appox. twice the disk bandwidth.

[Rob Lohman]

Jim: that's one of the things I have been thinking about. This would
greatly reduce the need for any actual RAID system. You can
just hookup two harddisk. Although you would probably need
an extra IDE controller or one with more than 2 channels (if
you also have an OS drive).

To everyone with other OS thoughts: that might be a direction
where we or perhaps others might go. For now the attention
is on getting a custom software solution to work. Then we can
start thinking about porting and whatnot. Without the basic
platform there is nothing to port.

Les: didn't you want obin to do some tests regarding noise
as well? I personally would definitely like to see some shots
(from the same scene) at 8 and 10 bit exported as bayer (any
file format).

Then after this some motion blur tests would be nice, but perhaps
Rob can try that when he gets his camera in.

[Wayne Morellini]

Hello, back again before the end of the week.

I have deleted the previouse post as I do not want to distract from the companies I was planning to approach in an effort to develope this market, to grow volume. Companies interested in mass market profits of Coal and Sugar.

Just looked at the posts:
Summarising: $100K example, poor.
Good business: With HD moving to large volume mass market (how many millions of cameras to be in the market is unkown). Loss leader to eventual low volume, maybe 1-10K (possibly 100k). Multiple product level marketing stratergy. Existing package coding, business and marketing, is paid for by eventual large volume from all HD, and the high end product. The new small features/code modifications (bit depth, bayer) for "Custom Cam" eventually will be needed for newer mass, and upper, market HD formats (except for cameralink controll) anyway. Just $10 dollers pure profit x10K is $100K profit that the company would not have gotten otherwise, for code modification that would take a $20K a year programmer a few months to implement, and that largerly will eventually need to be shared with newer formats. $100 pure profit then becomes $1 million dollers. But I agree it is too early to decide.

It is simple economics, some choose Microsoft economics, some choose Intelliegent Systems economics (makers of the "Compucolor I & II" the greatest colour computers of the mid 1970's). I have seen many fail.

Again, I don't wish to talk about it anymore, just a matter of two opinions.

[Wayne Morellini]

<<<-- Originally posted by Steve Nordhauser :
Wayne on buffering: Memory in the chain only reduces the data bus rate from the peak to average - like going from 44MB/sec to 40MB/sec. It could at some serious $$ to the camera cost. -->>>

I mention this only as a way to reduce shutter times, and to reduce rolling shutter effect, over slower interfaces (USB and Erthernet) something that will become more important as mainstream camera resolutions increase. I've been around a long time with people in the industry (also used to spend most Friday mornings going through electronic engineering journals at Uni) and there are cheap ways (and a very limited number of suitable components) to do it rather than the expensive ways. I can discuss it further via email if you wish.

Les, Obin recently posted some footage (I assume that it is straight unfiltered bayer). It is not stationary, but then again the filter pattern will be.

About the issue of saving alternative frames between disks, this is something I suggested long ago (but not as sexy as RAID, or software Raid) not sure if it was here though. It is also the reason I suggested large main memory (aswell as stop the system from going to disk) to buffer the frames. Also notice the problem with HDD head over heating and going into cool down mode, by using a stratergy of maximising write speed and pulling back before this, while overlaping with other drives. I think that by doing this it might be possible to break the 50MB/s per drive barrier, but will need a lot of research (a drive manufacturer engineer might be able to advise on the stratergy).

Rob, the reason for your Windows slowing down FPS (mentioned in the wiky), is why I did my beginners to advanced perofromance programming overveiw post. You should be able to stop windows from doing that in an unscheduled manner.

[Obin Olson]

I am not sure who thinks that $100 is the right price to pay for a CineForm plugin to edit 10bit. I would pay $1000 for a plugin and compression codec for editing in Native HD under premiere pro..the only other option for me is FCP on a MAC and I will spend about 5 grand for that system soon if we don't have a way to edit PC