A HD DIY configuration, please comment

[Martin Landsburg]

finally my ID has been approved...
anyway i just wanted to say that a friend of mine and I are researching how to DIY HD...
after several weeks, we came up with the following:

a laptop such as this one:
http://www.eurocom.ca/ (the EUROCOM D900T PHANTOM has dual Raid 0)
list price: 2999 USD

a camera such as this one:
www.goavt.com (the Pike 210 is HDTV uncompressed 1920x1080, 1" Kodak CCD, global shutter)
Around 5000 USD

Capture software such as this (in case the firepackage software with the Pike doesnt work with a lossless, fast, on the fly codec)
http://www.norpix.com
price: 995 USD

A codec to encode on the fly (should be 40Mbytes/sec, what the laptop should be able to handle according to norpix)
we thought of this one: http://www.bitjazz.com/sheervideo/#save%20space
price: 149 USD
but norpix says they are not directx compatible...so perhaps just huffyuv or another lossles codec

Ok that's our digging around and calling up and bothering a dozen companies in 3 weeks time or so...well, 3 weeks of spare time lol

Please let me know what your comments are, we are going to test with a trial camera from Basler, since AVT is nowhere near us (closest would be Singapore), download the trial software and use our own laptops first..
This total package above would be more than 10K already, so too pricey. Afraid that a cheaper notebook solution might not be there, but maybe a cheaper cam solution. There are SATA Express cards now that can do RAID 0, which are only 99 USD but then we still need a 1394b bus...which laptops besides Apples come with a FW 800 bus??

Martin Landsburg

[Forrest Schultz]

are you able to afford it? cuz it sounds awesome, you should test it if you can afford to.

with that 1" ccd, DOF should be very good also!

[Wayne Kinney]

Originally Posted by Forrest Schultz

with that 1" ccd, DOF should be very good also!

Please dont put me out of business... ;) heheh

[Keith Wakeham]

I really liked that sensor right from the start, although its been around for a long long time. But Wayne I don't think you have to much worries. The quality of of your DOF adapter speaks for itself while the KAI-2093 is larger than 16mm, its still much smaller than 35mm. (24 x 14mm vs 14 x 9mm) So with using 35mm lenses their would be a fair crop factor.

I think Silicon imaging sells their SI-1920HD camera head with software for something around what your pricing out, so it might be worth looking into since they designed it for movie making and have been trying to solve the software problem very hard.

[Toenis Liivamaegi]

With sensor this size and with c-mout to 35mm slr adapter one should be able to get quite fantastic out of focus areas.
This was done with sub $100 lens and with sensor of similar size 22.7x15.1mm aps-c sized CMOS that has crop factor of 1,6x over full format 35mm still photography frame to be exact.

Future is quite bright,
T

[Jason Rodriguez]

I think Silicon imaging sells their SI-1920HD camera head with software for something around what your pricing out, so it might be worth looking into since they designed it for movie making and have been trying to solve the software problem very hard.

Hi,

No hard sells or anything of that nature, but if you're spending over $10K for a laptop-based solution, Keith is right, you may want to take a hard-look at our solution over at Silicon Imaging.

For $12.5K you get the camera head (very high-quality, and better dynamic range than the Kodak sensor) with recording software that will easily run on a very fast modern laptop (we are suggesting a top-of-the-line Dell XPS M1710, although we high suggest you wait for Merom-based laptops).

In addition you can record to the Cineform RAW codec ($12.5K includes a Cineform Prospect HD license) which takes care of the software codec side of things for RAW compression. And you connect to the camera head over gigabit ethernet, so it's great for long-distance use.

Check out what the Spoon guys are doing with it over at indiefilmlive.blogspot.com.

If you're more interested you should contact Steve Norderhauser over at (518) 279-9098, or privately email us at HD@siliconimaging.com

[Martin Landsburg]

Hi,

What if I were to just buy the sensor alone, and construct from there? What would be necessary? I just got a quote for the Kodak KAI 2093 sensor for 300 USD. Yes, no misprint. So if the sensor is that cheap, where are the costs coming from? Labor? What would the other parts cost?

[Keith Wakeham]

Unless they have changed pricing a lot the sensor was 1100 for a production grade and 250 for an engineering grade, and you had to buy at least one production grade to get an engineering grade.

I'd suggest not buying the CCD unless you happen to have at least a bachelors of Electrical engineering or are in the process of getting one or something equivalent. I was on this path and had spent several hundreds of dollars on supporting electronics to build the reference circuits just for the drivers for the horizontal and vertical driver system. Suffice to say I still needed two CCD front ends, a device to control it (FPGA which I programmed) and then i had to deal with the two channels of data that was 12bit but half the data was backwards for each frame so the design went back to the FPGA to deal with that. This litterally took 9 months of my life while in the engineering faculty and it never got completed because of lack of money. It will cost you way more to try and build a camera from scratch and a lot of know how. Besides that I spent the resst of the time getting an FPGA to control a hard drive just to save the data. That tech is still useful, but all my work for the sensor is not and IMO its not worth it.

I would still suggest the SI route, but don't think that its a simple task to wire up that CCD and get it to spit images, its not like its cmos where you apply a clock and program it over serial port and it just spews forth image data - which again is problematic because you have no interface to capture with so you'd still need to deal with conforming the image some how.

[Jason Rodriguez]

I would still suggest the SI route, but don't think that its a simple task to wire up that CCD and get it to spit images, its not like its cmos where you apply a clock and program it over serial port and it just spews forth image data

I sure wish it was that easy!

I'm not an EE, but I've seen what it takes first-hand, and I can tell you, there's a lot more happening with CMOS than you think . . . many times the complexity can be just like your CCD example or more (especially when you get into the area of multi-tap architectures and having to mux that data, etc. without getting offsets, and other image abnormalities).

Plus unless you spend big-bucks for a CMOS, it will probably look like crap (lots of FPN or PRNU), or not be fast enough to get around the rolling shutter issues.

[Keith Wakeham]

Jason, I'm sorry, I never meant to down play the complexity of CMOS... I mean that it requires less support electronics like caps and resistors and transitors which is the only way to make the drivers for high end CCD's. I have all the data sheets on the Altasens and its no walk in the park to make it spew forth the images in the desired manner.... just don't need to have a ccd front end chip with lots of external timings and the like.

Neither way is fun, and like you said... most CMOS out their are build on the old process's which suck, unlike what altasens and other people are using, common cmos are really noisy

[Wayne Morellini]

Hi

If you want to spend the money the guys are right. But there are much cheaper options, look at my Technical thread in this forum (also consider Obin's 4:4:4 thread for links) and you will see much stuff, the last so page of posts contains a useful summary. there are no really simple solutions, unless you can buy compatible components and put them together.

Elphel will be releasing a 353 chip, that might have promising quality (though I don't see eye to eye with it's creator on that with the 8mpixel quality) there is a thread on the forum about a project based on their 333 camera. Prices are likely around $800 or less, plus computer. Because it is a compressed stream, you might be able to use a Ultra Mobile PC, which is the size of an 8 inch or so LCD tablet. 333, is only similar to DVCPROHD quality, or less at the moment.

You could consider cheaper chips, for less than 5K you might be able to rig a mini computer version with Micron (I think they may have Kodak as well) using buffered cards and higher end versions of the software that comes with cards. Epix is a good company to look at.

Then there are USB2.0 cameras based on the Micron/Kodak/Ibis5a (only with good quality external dacs and circuits, otherwise, you WILL, regret the experience). But because USB is a CPU stealing Hog, very poor computer performance is usually the case, and only 720p can fit sufficiently through USB if you have packing and preferably buffering as well). these cameras start around $800 plus computer and better software most likely.

Another option, is that present cameras have uncompressed component out, and future ones HDMI uncompressed out. Recording for that starts around $1K plus computer uncompressed.

[Martin Landsburg]

Hi Wayne,

yes this was the kind of info I was waiting for...How to do it for less. I'm waiting for the elphel 353 to come out, the specs look promising. However, when I went to the http://www.micron.co.jp/main/product...00LongSpec.pdf site it says the max frame rate is only 30fps at VGA resolution?

Where can I find more info on the other 800$ cameras plus PC setups? I found your threads on your findings, but like you already stated there, the amount of information is overwhelming. I realize that you and others on this site have been researching all the options for several years, whereas I've only just begun.

Which Epix cam were you mentioning? I see they all use framegrabbers, so a laptop configuration would be out?

If there are no simple solutions, what kind of dificulties would you expect if the elphel 353 delivers good quality? if I want to keep a low budget, and record to a laptop that is...

[Wayne Morellini]

I'll have to rush this:

Elphel is not really the best site for information, it si spread across several sites., the main Elphel stage has information hidden, but it was to change to a new site that has more information. Their is a wiki site, a project site confusing.

Look in the Elphel 333 camera project thread for the sites and some links. 353 has little information that I know of, but bound to be information there somewhere (as I do not look). the improvements will be modest, but hopefully worth it. People over at the Elphel thread think it's fantastic (even though they are using Mpeg like compression and filtering footage to hide macro block borders etc). But the future is better image quality, more than DVCPROHD equivalent, it is needing the Openware codec based on V3, Ogg Vorbis, I can't remember the name anymore, and a workflow for it. This is the reality, that the present camera has low throughput of data rate, and not full alternative codec. The new version is to have better motion compensation and higher through put, but I don't know/remember the details. You need something like 200Mb/s+ in Mpeg, or 50Mb/s+ in full Ogg codec, and 10bit+, to get the silky smooth cinema quality you want.

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=63677

So go over it with a fine tooth comb to make sure it comes upto scratch, such as data rate of, and fullness of implementation of, Vorbis compression, in desired resolution, format, time code and work flow, and ask them, they will avoid answering, but eventually will answer something, a bit. The camera has a good future for video, with minor modification.

Epix, yes I was suggesting a bit wider than laptop, more like a mini box PC. there a re a number of small providers, www.win-ent.com comes to mind for PC stuff in general. There are laptop PCCARD or MINI-PCI machine vision capture solutions, but without buffering/packing 720p is probably it. So, ask, there maybe a PCI-Express version (there is a PCI Express version of PC-Card standard). Then there is extra for software that can support direct to disk recording.

Update: It's Ogg Theora. On it's page, Cinelerra Linux NLE supports it, so you are in luck.

http://www.theora.org/

Another word of warning, take a look at the quality and price of h264 cameras, in comparison to your own. Panasonic has announced to formats so far (the broadcast h264 storage, nle, and lossless formats have a wide range). The highest is 50mb/s 4:2:2 10bit intra frame (no intermediate frames). This maybe headed to a $6K camera next year. They also announced 19mb/s 4:2:0 H264 inter AVCHD for this year, cameras should start at less than 2K, but what a descent one with the best video modes and data rate will cost I don't know. Pana seems to be indicating that 50MB will be upto twice as good as DVCPROHD. I expect that given the best data rate to pixel ratio that AVCHD will look as good as 4:2:0 50mb/s intra when things are not moving and the picture is not noisy.