3 channel 36 bit 1280 X 720 low $ camera - Viper?

Wayne Morellini · May 31st, 2004, 05:04 AM

I just rememberd this:
(openware direct to disk RAW HD software) Though, unfortunately, the software is not free, but it gives a nice system like some want, but at a huge price. It's taken me hours to track this down, but I don't know if it was the one I am after. Last year I remembered going to a website that had this software on it, and the Starship Troopers 2 production ref (that uses standard PC components for HD capture and edit, and I remember some cheap direct to disk raw HD recorder. I was looking for a cheap HD raw capture to disk recorder unit. If anybody knows of any let me know.

Thanks

Wayne.

http://www.spectsoft.com/products/ravehd/

http://www.spectsoft.com/projects/

http://www.spectsoft.com/products/sfb/

http://www.creativecow.net/articles/...iew/index.html

http://kino.schirmacher.de/article/view/85/1/7/

http://www.pluginz.com/news/1628

http://www.digitalproducer.com/artic...e.jsp?id=24825

Rob Scott · May 31st, 2004, 11:51 AM

Wayne, you mentioned an $800 chip vs. $200 or so. I haven't seen too many prices yet -- do you know the price ranges of the various chips we've been discussing?

I've been working on the wiki a bit -- check out what I have so far at

http://www.obscuracam.com/wiki/wiki/

Thanks!

Obin Olson · May 31st, 2004, 11:54 AM

from what Steve tells me you don't want that 4mp chip..quality is not high enough...they will have the 1080P chip ready in a few weeks in a camera it will do 1080P at 60fps..that will be a winner....it's the Rockwell chip that JVC may also use

Valeriu Campan · May 31st, 2004, 06:06 PM

Obin,
I hope you are progressing well with your camera. Beware of the CMOS chips as they are dust hungry. Find a way of protecting the chip with a filter or possible with the prism. From my experience with DSLR stills cameras using CMOS chips, they are a nightmare to keep clean especially when changing lenses.
Remember the "hair in the gate"!!!

Obin Olson · May 31st, 2004, 06:46 PM

hah - thanks for the point! I have a canon 10D and I guess your right about the dirty cmos...I have never checked the 10D - I guess I should!

Wayne Morellini · June 1st, 2004, 03:58 AM

<<<-- Originally posted by Rob Scott : Wayne, you mentioned an $800 chip vs. $200 or so. I haven't seen too many prices yet -- do you know the price ranges of the various chips we've been discussing?

I've been working on the wiki a bit -- check out what I have so far at

http://www.obscuracam.com/wiki/wiki/

Thanks! -->>>

Yes a number of prices have been mentioned, Steve mentioned a $1000 bulk for the MOS chip, the Russian camera had a $200 cmos on the site, a silicon imaging pricing was mentioned, and somebody mentioned the price of the Panavision chip on another thread, But basically I am guessing as I said.

Wayne Morellini · June 1st, 2004, 04:39 AM

<<<-- Originally posted by Obin Olson : from what Steve tells me you don't want that 4mp chip..quality is not high enough...they will have the 1080P chip ready in a few weeks in a camera it will do 1080P at 60fps..that will be a winner....it's the Rockwell chip that JVC may also use -->>>

If your refering to me, I don't know but we have to be carefull, we don't want to buy the thing and then decide the sensor is not up to scratch, but we nee a professional analysis of all the options (there was somebody in one of these threads that knew how to do this) basically we have been leaving it upto Sumix to do this. Maybe we should get the datasheets of th best camera we are interested in and compare figures and curves (Cinaltar, Arriflex??). All we really need is the best quality sensor for the price range w are interested in.

I think with single chip you are not going to get the best sampling quality until you go 4* res, so the Micron chip might be good for 720p, and acceptable for 1080, but I don't know whether it can be really great at 1080 and be resoluion upscalable to post 1080 rsolutions. Any opinions?

In a single chip I would be happy with anything that gave accurate 720p or 1080 pictures (a 8mp senors ;).

We still have to address how we are going to get uncompressed (no compression available) 1080 raw 4:4:4 image out of this camera to a cheap capture computer (assuming you don't want to lug a full desktop around on moving shoots). I mean free 3*USB2/3.0, or a couple of hundred doller capture board is great but 1000's of dollers is overkill for somethng that is only a handfull of $! (sepculative figure) USB2.0 ports. We still wait for the gurus at Sumix to trell us what they can do in these areas.

The options I can see:

Some multiple stannard interface link:
1-6 Gigabit Ethernet links (a 10 Gigabit Ethernet might be good). 1=720-1080 4:2:2, 6=8mp 4:4:4 (Sorry couldn't resist ;)

3*USB2.0 (if the seperate port gives another 480Mb's, in either Firewaire or USB2.0 I've been told that doesn't work).

Camera Link to cheap interface board $$ unknown). PCI is like one Gigabit ethernet, PCI-Express is as much as you want (but no cheap portable PC boards with PCI-express, but maybe with AGP).

Camera Link capture board direct to disk, even better if it is based on VIA mini/nano itx reference baord so it can be reconfigured and used as an editor. But nobody has made this tes??

Would not mind an wireless multi gigabit per second interface aswell.

Are there anymore chioces? Dual HD-SDI (for 1080) is nice but don't the interface boards cost thousands each?

Well let's have fun, any more suggestions?

Obin Olson · June 1st, 2004, 09:52 AM

Wayne, from the pictures I have seen the camera I am getting is good but could be better...it's a bayer filter thing...you get CHEAP one chip and low datarate but you loose overall quality a bit...BUT it's soo much better then DV or dvcam or dvcpro that to me it's worth it... after all it's 4:4:4 AND can shoot slomotion...this is enough for me! also you may want to think about this: 1280x720 scaled down to SD 720x480 looks pretty dang good even from a 1ccd Bayer cam

Obin Olson · June 1st, 2004, 09:53 AM

I am going to try and get a demo pic from Steve showing the quality of the 3mp chip...also he says that the capture card needed to capture 30fps at 3mp is VERY high-dollar and you need all sorts of RAID etc and a DUAL Xeon to capture that high datarate

Steve Nordhauser · June 1st, 2004, 10:23 AM

Obin, two different cameras are being discussed. Our 3.2Mpix camera (SI-3170) that runs at 30fps puts out approximately 100Mpix per second. Even in 8 bit mode, that is the full bus bandwidth for PCI-32. The numbers I have for real-time recording from Norpix (our favorite recording software vendor) is about 50MB/sec on a serial-ATA drive, something like 80MB/sec for a 2 drive RAID. These are tested numbers using their software. They can stack up lots of drives in 64 bit systems for fast recording.

This camera has substantially higher noise and lower sensitivity compared to the SI-1300. It is only useful if you can provide lots of light. You will need gain and offset correction to use this for cinematography. There are a couple of people doing that and it is a pretty low cost method to getting 1920x1080x30fps.

http://www.siliconimaging.com/Sample...th%20Linda.jpg
http://www.siliconimaging.com/Sample...%208%20bit.tif

These are corrected images.
This camera does not compare at all to the Altasens (Rockwell) based cameras for image quality, senitivity or speed.

Wayne Morellini · June 2nd, 2004, 06:10 AM

<<<-- Originally posted by Obin Olson : Wayne, from the pictures I have seen the camera I am getting is good but could be better...it's a bayer filter thing...you get CHEAP one chip and low datarate but you loose overall quality a bit...BUT it's soo much better then DV or dvcam or dvcpro that to me it's worth it... after all it's 4:4:4 AND can shoot slomotion...this is enough for me! also you may want to think about this: 1280x720 scaled down to SD 720x480 looks pretty dang good even from a 1ccd Bayer cam -->>>

This is sort of the opposite of what Laurence wants, and as for me it has to have real 4:4:4 720p pixel information. Bayer produces estimates of 4:4:4, so that is why I would like the 720p to be down converted from higher res on chip. What we really have to compare is that we are getting better images then the HD10, or the new Sony/Canon HD (better than the JVC ENG would be better too), then combined with the RAW 4:4:4 we are really cranking. Until then I imagine that your camera will be really cranking compared to the HD10 or Sharp cameras, and I look forward to seeing the results. But going back to what I said before, a more flexible capture interface could allow each of us to use whatever camera head suits our desires. I could admire your slow motion technique (Matrix style, which I like), you could admire Laurences artistic quality, and I could be roaming the country side with something inbetween.

So I think 3chip 720 to 3chip 1080, or 1080 to 2*1080 (in a 1080 16:9 frame) single chip (so we can extract a true 4*720p image from it).

I would really like to see what www.sumix.com has planned for us, by the look of it we might have to accept excellent 720p, or maybe even 1080 (people were aiming for 3chip) or just acceptable 1080 single chip. The capture problems, if the cheaper interface options are taken with upto 4 drives, we should be fine. I suspect Canon might have direct to disk for their camera too at 50Mbs/+. Let the HD format wars begin.

Wayne Morellini · June 2nd, 2004, 06:26 AM

Yes Steve, I can see what you mean. I think movie cameras get away with bayer because they are using such high resolutions it doesn't matter and doesn't need to be upscaled. If you look at a movie there is so much grain (producing chroma error, while the grainless footage I've seen looks better) that any problems from a bayer will still be an improvement.

Rob Scott · June 2nd, 2004, 07:28 AM

<<<-- ... as for me it has to have real 4:4:4 720p pixel information. Bayer produces estimates of 4:4:4, so that is why I would like the 720p to be down converted from higher res on chip. -->>>

If we're building an affordable camera (i.e., 1-chip :-) from scratch, then, we'll want a high-quality sensor such as the Rockwell/AltaSens 1920x1080 chip which will yield an effective horizontal 1440 pixels after Bayer filtering. This should produce an awesome picture after downsampling to 1280x720.

Laurence Maher · June 2nd, 2004, 07:47 AM

Ya,

Like I said, I won't sneeze at 720, but it sure would be nice to make it 1080p for all of the trouble and hope we're gonna put into it. I'm always a "starting big you can get little, but starting little you can't get big" type of guy.

Laurence Maher · June 2nd, 2004, 07:49 AM

By the way wayne, thanks for answering the questions I had there. Also, do you know whether FCP sees the input of "DVCPro HD" as a particular codec, or can it take in a 720p signal from a box camera from summix or the like as well? Maybe 1080 via pci?

Just an idea:

I know we don't want to lug around big computers, but maybe somehow with a laptop or something with firewire:

FCP HD offers this at 4:2:2 with 90-160 mbs in 720p

Offers 1080 "uncompressed" via PCI interface, so if we're going that way . . . well.

Does this stink for you guys? Not bad? Good? Probably expensive, but also an edit machine?

web address:

http://www.apple.com/finalcutpro/

Check out the specs, give me advice please. I was thinking on getting a mac editor for stability anyway.

May 31st, 2004, 11:51 AM	#122
Rob Scott Major Player Join Date: May 2004 Location: Knoxville, TN (USA) Posts: 358	Prices of sensor chips Wayne, you mentioned an $800 chip vs. $200 or so. I haven't seen too many prices yet -- do you know the price ranges of the various chips we've been discussing? I've been working on the wiki a bit -- check out what I have so far at http://www.obscuracam.com/wiki/wiki/ Thanks!

June 1st, 2004, 03:58 AM	#126
Wayne Morellini Inner Circle Join Date: May 2003 Location: Australia Posts: 2,762	Re: Prices of sensor chips <<<-- Originally posted by Rob Scott : Wayne, you mentioned an $800 chip vs. $200 or so. I haven't seen too many prices yet -- do you know the price ranges of the various chips we've been discussing? I've been working on the wiki a bit -- check out what I have so far at http://www.obscuracam.com/wiki/wiki/ Thanks! -->>> Yes a number of prices have been mentioned, Steve mentioned a $1000 bulk for the MOS chip, the Russian camera had a $200 cmos on the site, a silicon imaging pricing was mentioned, and somebody mentioned the price of the Panavision chip on another thread, But basically I am guessing as I said.

June 1st, 2004, 10:23 AM	#130
Steve Nordhauser Silicon Imaging, Inc. Join Date: May 2004 Location: Troy, NY USA Posts: 325	Obin, two different cameras are being discussed. Our 3.2Mpix camera (SI-3170) that runs at 30fps puts out approximately 100Mpix per second. Even in 8 bit mode, that is the full bus bandwidth for PCI-32. The numbers I have for real-time recording from Norpix (our favorite recording software vendor) is about 50MB/sec on a serial-ATA drive, something like 80MB/sec for a 2 drive RAID. These are tested numbers using their software. They can stack up lots of drives in 64 bit systems for fast recording. This camera has substantially higher noise and lower sensitivity compared to the SI-1300. It is only useful if you can provide lots of light. You will need gain and offset correction to use this for cinematography. There are a couple of people doing that and it is a pretty low cost method to getting 1920x1080x30fps. http://www.siliconimaging.com/Sample...th%20Linda.jpg http://www.siliconimaging.com/Sample...%208%20bit.tif These are corrected images. This camera does not compare at all to the Altasens (Rockwell) based cameras for image quality, senitivity or speed. __________________ Silicon Imaging, Inc. We see the Light! http://www.siliconimaging.com

May 31st, 2004, 05:04 AM	#121
Wayne Morellini Inner Circle Join Date: May 2003 Location: Australia Posts: 2,762	I just rememberd this: (openware direct to disk RAW HD software) Though, unfortunately, the software is not free, but it gives a nice system like some want, but at a huge price. It's taken me hours to track this down, but I don't know if it was the one I am after. Last year I remembered going to a website that had this software on it, and the Starship Troopers 2 production ref (that uses standard PC components for HD capture and edit, and I remember some cheap direct to disk raw HD recorder. I was looking for a cheap HD raw capture to disk recorder unit. If anybody knows of any let me know. Thanks Wayne. http://www.spectsoft.com/products/ravehd/ http://www.spectsoft.com/projects/ http://www.spectsoft.com/products/sfb/ http://www.creativecow.net/articles/...iew/index.html http://kino.schirmacher.de/article/view/85/1/7/ http://www.pluginz.com/news/1628 http://www.digitalproducer.com/artic...e.jsp?id=24825

May 31st, 2004, 11:54 AM	#123
Obin Olson Trustee Join Date: Jan 2003 Location: Wilmington NC Posts: 1,414	from what Steve tells me you don't want that 4mp chip..quality is not high enough...they will have the 1080P chip ready in a few weeks in a camera it will do 1080P at 60fps..that will be a winner....it's the Rockwell chip that JVC may also use

May 31st, 2004, 06:06 PM	#124
Valeriu Campan Major Player Join Date: Mar 2004 Location: Melbourne, Australia Posts: 223	Obin, I hope you are progressing well with your camera. Beware of the CMOS chips as they are dust hungry. Find a way of protecting the chip with a filter or possible with the prism. From my experience with DSLR stills cameras using CMOS chips, they are a nightmare to keep clean especially when changing lenses. Remember the "hair in the gate"!!!

May 31st, 2004, 06:46 PM	#125
Obin Olson Trustee Join Date: Jan 2003 Location: Wilmington NC Posts: 1,414	hah - thanks for the point! I have a canon 10D and I guess your right about the dirty cmos...I have never checked the 10D - I guess I should!

June 1st, 2004, 04:39 AM	#127
Wayne Morellini Inner Circle Join Date: May 2003 Location: Australia Posts: 2,762	<<<-- Originally posted by Obin Olson : from what Steve tells me you don't want that 4mp chip..quality is not high enough...they will have the 1080P chip ready in a few weeks in a camera it will do 1080P at 60fps..that will be a winner....it's the Rockwell chip that JVC may also use -->>> If your refering to me, I don't know but we have to be carefull, we don't want to buy the thing and then decide the sensor is not up to scratch, but we nee a professional analysis of all the options (there was somebody in one of these threads that knew how to do this) basically we have been leaving it upto Sumix to do this. Maybe we should get the datasheets of th best camera we are interested in and compare figures and curves (Cinaltar, Arriflex??). All we really need is the best quality sensor for the price range w are interested in. I think with single chip you are not going to get the best sampling quality until you go 4* res, so the Micron chip might be good for 720p, and acceptable for 1080, but I don't know whether it can be really great at 1080 and be resoluion upscalable to post 1080 rsolutions. Any opinions? In a single chip I would be happy with anything that gave accurate 720p or 1080 pictures (a 8mp senors ;). We still have to address how we are going to get uncompressed (no compression available) 1080 raw 4:4:4 image out of this camera to a cheap capture computer (assuming you don't want to lug a full desktop around on moving shoots). I mean free 3USB2/3.0, or a couple of hundred doller capture board is great but 1000's of dollers is overkill for somethng that is only a handfull of $! (sepculative figure) USB2.0 ports. We still wait for the gurus at Sumix to trell us what they can do in these areas. The options I can see: Some multiple stannard interface link: 1-6 Gigabit Ethernet links (a 10 Gigabit Ethernet might be good). 1=720-1080 4:2:2, 6=8mp 4:4:4 (Sorry couldn't resist ;) 3USB2.0 (if the seperate port gives another 480Mb's, in either Firewaire or USB2.0 I've been told that doesn't work). Camera Link to cheap interface board $$ unknown). PCI is like one Gigabit ethernet, PCI-Express is as much as you want (but no cheap portable PC boards with PCI-express, but maybe with AGP). Camera Link capture board direct to disk, even better if it is based on VIA mini/nano itx reference baord so it can be reconfigured and used as an editor. But nobody has made this tes?? Would not mind an wireless multi gigabit per second interface aswell. Are there anymore chioces? Dual HD-SDI (for 1080) is nice but don't the interface boards cost thousands each? Well let's have fun, any more suggestions?

June 1st, 2004, 09:52 AM	#128
Obin Olson Trustee Join Date: Jan 2003 Location: Wilmington NC Posts: 1,414	Wayne, from the pictures I have seen the camera I am getting is good but could be better...it's a bayer filter thing...you get CHEAP one chip and low datarate but you loose overall quality a bit...BUT it's soo much better then DV or dvcam or dvcpro that to me it's worth it... after all it's 4:4:4 AND can shoot slomotion...this is enough for me! also you may want to think about this: 1280x720 scaled down to SD 720x480 looks pretty dang good even from a 1ccd Bayer cam

June 1st, 2004, 09:53 AM	#129
Obin Olson Trustee Join Date: Jan 2003 Location: Wilmington NC Posts: 1,414	I am going to try and get a demo pic from Steve showing the quality of the 3mp chip...also he says that the capture card needed to capture 30fps at 3mp is VERY high-dollar and you need all sorts of RAID etc and a DUAL Xeon to capture that high datarate

June 2nd, 2004, 06:10 AM	#131
Wayne Morellini Inner Circle Join Date: May 2003 Location: Australia Posts: 2,762	<<<-- Originally posted by Obin Olson : Wayne, from the pictures I have seen the camera I am getting is good but could be better...it's a bayer filter thing...you get CHEAP one chip and low datarate but you loose overall quality a bit...BUT it's soo much better then DV or dvcam or dvcpro that to me it's worth it... after all it's 4:4:4 AND can shoot slomotion...this is enough for me! also you may want to think about this: 1280x720 scaled down to SD 720x480 looks pretty dang good even from a 1ccd Bayer cam -->>> This is sort of the opposite of what Laurence wants, and as for me it has to have real 4:4:4 720p pixel information. Bayer produces estimates of 4:4:4, so that is why I would like the 720p to be down converted from higher res on chip. What we really have to compare is that we are getting better images then the HD10, or the new Sony/Canon HD (better than the JVC ENG would be better too), then combined with the RAW 4:4:4 we are really cranking. Until then I imagine that your camera will be really cranking compared to the HD10 or Sharp cameras, and I look forward to seeing the results. But going back to what I said before, a more flexible capture interface could allow each of us to use whatever camera head suits our desires. I could admire your slow motion technique (Matrix style, which I like), you could admire Laurences artistic quality, and I could be roaming the country side with something inbetween. So I think 3chip 720 to 3chip 1080, or 1080 to 21080 (in a 1080 16:9 frame) single chip (so we can extract a true 4720p image from it). I would really like to see what www.sumix.com has planned for us, by the look of it we might have to accept excellent 720p, or maybe even 1080 (people were aiming for 3chip) or just acceptable 1080 single chip. The capture problems, if the cheaper interface options are taken with upto 4 drives, we should be fine. I suspect Canon might have direct to disk for their camera too at 50Mbs/+. Let the HD format wars begin.

June 2nd, 2004, 06:26 AM	#132
Wayne Morellini Inner Circle Join Date: May 2003 Location: Australia Posts: 2,762	Yes Steve, I can see what you mean. I think movie cameras get away with bayer because they are using such high resolutions it doesn't matter and doesn't need to be upscaled. If you look at a movie there is so much grain (producing chroma error, while the grainless footage I've seen looks better) that any problems from a bayer will still be an improvement.

June 2nd, 2004, 07:28 AM	#133
Rob Scott Major Player Join Date: May 2004 Location: Knoxville, TN (USA) Posts: 358	<<<-- ... as for me it has to have real 4:4:4 720p pixel information. Bayer produces estimates of 4:4:4, so that is why I would like the 720p to be down converted from higher res on chip. -->>> If we're building an affordable camera (i.e., 1-chip :-) from scratch, then, we'll want a high-quality sensor such as the Rockwell/AltaSens 1920x1080 chip which will yield an effective horizontal 1440 pixels after Bayer filtering. This should produce an awesome picture after downsampling to 1280x720.

June 2nd, 2004, 07:47 AM	#134
Laurence Maher Join Date: May 2004 Location: denton, texas, usa Posts: 416	Ya, Like I said, I won't sneeze at 720, but it sure would be nice to make it 1080p for all of the trouble and hope we're gonna put into it. I'm always a "starting big you can get little, but starting little you can't get big" type of guy.

June 2nd, 2004, 07:49 AM	#135
Laurence Maher Join Date: May 2004 Location: denton, texas, usa Posts: 416	By the way wayne, thanks for answering the questions I had there. Also, do you know whether FCP sees the input of "DVCPro HD" as a particular codec, or can it take in a 720p signal from a box camera from summix or the like as well? Maybe 1080 via pci? Just an idea: I know we don't want to lug around big computers, but maybe somehow with a laptop or something with firewire: FCP HD offers this at 4:2:2 with 90-160 mbs in 720p Offers 1080 "uncompressed" via PCI interface, so if we're going that way . . . well. Does this stink for you guys? Not bad? Good? Probably expensive, but also an edit machine? web address: http://www.apple.com/finalcutpro/ Check out the specs, give me advice please. I was thinking on getting a mac editor for stability anyway.