In reply to Lucia's last post....

My implementation will only include the necessary hardware to interface the digital video stream to firewire 800(and a driver to capture it). There is no need to design additional hardware to do any compression, because that just complicates the project, and besides, any re-formatting or compression can be easily done in software once the raw data is captured on the computer.

Juan

Hi Obin. No, unfortunately that's long been dismantled. I still have the parts (somewhere - lol). I've gotten more into rigging cost effective alternatives to various studio equipment since then. ie - batteries, dollies, grip carts etc.

I trust Juan is on the right trail on this one. High quality film transfers is what I'm looking for and this sounds like the way to go.

Juan, export to firewire 800 is a great boon to this being a viable device modification. You state that the reconversion of exported data to a usable media will be done in some sort of software recompiler, what if you are shooting and need to see playback on set? Any idea on when your testing will be completed? As I would like to try this mod on a project in the early summer.

Thanx for your amazing research. A proud DVX owner.

I believe that Juan had said that there's a posibility the camera would function normal with the mod in place. Could playback occur from the normal DV tape? Or perhaps a secondary recorder fed from the video out of the camera?

That's right John...the camera would work just as normal, and you can record to tape normally while this is all going on. You can also have a monitor coming out of the camera or use the on-board LCD/viewfinder as normal.

If you want to preview the high-quality output, that's going to be difficult with my initial device, because it's going to be in a very fat raw format which would need a custom monitor for it. However, once i get this working it is possible to implement standard outputs in hardware like some have suggested.

Will the RAW files from the DVX100 have any more dynamic range than the normal DVX100 in use? Just wondering since I've played around with RAW Thompson Viper files, and those have a tremendous amount of dynamic range, roughly equal to color negative film stocks like Fuji F400 or Vision stocks-and those are both coming off 12-bit A/D converters.

BTW, to view files, I would just assume that you would simply hook up a laptop to the camera and view the frame grabs that get recorded on the hard-drive. Once you have a couple "shots" that give you an idea of what the scene will look like, then you can easily use the DV tape to preview the movement, etc., and then have the uncompressed files later for onlining purposes.

That's a good question, but i was under the impression that the extra dynamic range of the thomson was because of the CCD's characteristics, i might be wrong.

In the meantime while the chip clip gets here, i've been doing some more experiments. Since i don't have enough surface mount probes, my experiments today consisted of probing the BLUE A/D converter, and at that only had enough probes of 7 bits(of 12).

The images seem to be 771pixels wide...i am definitely getting more pixels than that, but they seemed to be masked off. It's kinda hard to tell from the blue CCD only, unless i have a special test scene which I didn't. All i did was shoot a spray can that was in the lab, which happened to be blue/white. :)

I am going to try this week and setup a blue grid and do some more tests....

Juan

good tips Jason,

Juan is it just a simple piggyback ont the chip? What is it tapping into?

Would you please post a pic of you probing the chip? I just want to where to put the test leds, I can host it for you if you need

Right now i am just using 'grabber' probes. The final application will be a piggy-back clip, so there is technically no modification made to the DVX itself, since there is no soldering done.

I'll take some pictures of my test setup whenever i work on it again...

Juan

I want a DIRECT output that NEEDS color correcting in POST..I don't want the camera to do ANYTHING to the picture...this will assure me of the BEST chroma key you can get and that is about all I would use this "mod" for anyway..unless you make a portable storage unit for it ;)

if anyone cares, heres how the DV953 will get 768x934, its the lower left pic of the gal, it shows the real resolution of the camera before processing to DV format.

it could be the same for a DVX100?

With an Anamorphic Adapter we could be reaching into HD territory (HDTV 720 x 1080)

http://www.fortvir.net/modules.php?f...view_photo.php
Thanks to Guy Bruner for the cool site

4:4:4 12-bit Uncompressed DVX100
 

Hello Juan, thank you for all you're doing.
Just one thing :
PAL VERSION ???
Please say yes.

Yes, the hardware would be exactly the same, the only difference will be programming the driver so it correctly detects the PAL version.

however, it might even be easier than this...since the CCD's are so large, i would think that they would cut costs and use the same CCD's for both the PAL and NTSC versions of the DVX...if this is true, even the same software will work because the only differences between the cameras would be the programming of the chips and how the DV is formatted.

Great !!!
Put me on that list of your future clients
and again Thank You

On the List
 

Hello Juan, I've monitored this thread and like what I see. Please put me down on the list of interested parties to purchase your discovery.