Home made camera designs?

[Laurence Maher]

What do you guys think of this box camera that supposedly "was designed for digital cinema/tv"?

Maybe expensive? Maybe not?

Input, please.

http://www.isgchips.com/Templates/t_quadhdtv.htm

[Régine Weinberg]

very expensive
and well known
and you need
ton\s of disc\s to hold the data

[Steve Nordhauser]

Sure the Spielbergs can buy anything they want to get results. At the other end are the people still messing with analog camcorders trying film making for the first time. We are doing an elegant dance here trying to reach for lofty goals with limited resources - a fiscal ballet.

At least that is the crap I try to believe when my pockets a full of lint and I am coveting a new tool.

[John Nagle]

Steve,

“A Fiscal ballet” that is the best nutshell description I have heard to describe the endeavour.

Also, how is the SI1920HD coming along?

[Steve Nordhauser]

John, the technical school I went to said I would have no use for the high verbal SAT score that I had. Now you know its real value in engineering.
New batch of sensors due early January. We will turn cameras around within 1 week of receiving them. We have cameras scattered with a bunch of software developers, interface integrators.

[Régine Weinberg]

Dear Steve
does it read with Altasens ?
and if which one?
and if what output?
and if which price about

so many if's so sorry
but if

[Steve Nordhauser]

Ronald, take a deep breathe, relax.
Yes, the 3560. camera link and gigabit ethernet. Email me privately for purchase information.

[Wayne Morellini]

Steve, I understand there are older Alatsens sensors allready out, are they cheaper and are they suitable for a cheap camera?

Wayne.

[Steve Nordhauser]

Wayne,
There are two sensors shipping that are interesting to 1080 people. First is an older 30Hz part. We aren't messing with that because it will be stuck in the rolling shutter artifact problems - if you want to save money go to our SI-3300 for less than half the price. Next is the currently shipping 3560. They have gone through a number of mask iterations and the current one is almost there. We have built a number of cameras with them and they are nice. We just don't want to release a bunch of "orphans" - cameras that may not handle firmware upgrades, may not perform the same - so we are not shipping the current sensor in volume.

The next version of the 3560 is due "soon".
Steve

[Wayne Morellini]

So they don't have a 720p part, and they aren't going to keep the older part as a very cheap cousin for the low end of the market. Thats all I needed to hear. Thanks Steve.

Wayne.

[Matt Champagne]

Does anyone have a link to some basic technical info on building a camera from scratch? Just the general info on how to get the picture onto the ccd properly (what types of condensor lenses are needed before the ccd element) as well as how the information from ccd is sent? All of the "how digital camera's work" tutorials have been slightly informative but far from detailed enough. I have some experience programming microprocessors so other than those two aspects, I have a good idea of how to do the rest.

More or less what I want to do is dump raw images individually onto a hard disk, and then put them together in post. So info on how to build a still camera would be just as useful.

Thanks,
Matt

[Wayne Morellini]

Hi Matt

I don't know of one, but it is good to check sensor and camera manufacturers sites for information on sensor terms. I've listed the best information I have seen in some of the threads (try the Technical thread first and http://www.siliconimaging.com ).

Everybody has moved onto variouse camera projects, and some want to do the same as you want. Go to here for a list of threads:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...threadid=28781

The only other new thread is for the Drake camera:
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...threadid=34339

What you want to do is very difficult, so we have decided to use pre-made camera heads (the bits with the sensor and interface) existing mini computers boards, and our own capture programs.

Now there are three mobs: Drake, the Rob's (one our moderator), and the Obin. Both Drake and Obin are close, Rob's are busy for the moment. We are looking at using cameras based on the Rockwell Altasens sensor, close enough to an A grade HD CMOS sensor. I think the only cmos sensors, that I know of, that offer anything extra are those that do hispeed video for slow motion effects (and there was somebody on here with one of those too). There is SHD sensors, and maybe better cmos HD (though I don't know of any) out there, but they may cost far more.


Camera makers: Sumix was the first to announce support for us, but they are going to be like March or April, Silicon Imaging are supplying now and soon with the Altasens.

The micron 1.3MP camera has problems and is not recommended for professional video without sensor affects, the fillfactory IBIS5 does not have these problems but is still debated about it's usefullness (though Drake uses a refined version), the Micron sensor for 1080 is much better, the Altasens alledgedly much better again.

Wayne.

[Matt Champagne]

Thanks for the info,

Actually what I want to do is quite different I think. More or less I want to split an image among several still SLR ccd's either using prisms, or by a timed synchronization of a moving mirror (or even by physically moving the ccd's into postion). Those sorts of ccd's would create super high defintion images...but unfortunatly can't take them at fast frame rates. To compensate for this I want to use many of them and have them shoot sequentially, then have software order the individual pictures from each. I'd hope to be able to use full frame ccd's for the dof as well. Unfortunatly, I really don't know where to start as far as aquiring and setting up the ccd's is concerned.

Thanks,
Matt

[Matt Champagne]

On the topic of video cameras as opposed to my crazy still idea...could cameras such as this be put to good cinema use?

http://www.rmassa.com/manu/pulnix.htm

Particularly, the TMC-1400...or the TMC 4000 if my alternating frame grab idea is possible. (It might be even easier using something like the TMC 4000...simply use a beam-splitting prism and cause the second camera to begin frame caputure 33ms (1/30 of a second) later.

[Wayne Morellini]

Matt

Looked at those cameras and they appear to be quiet expensive compared to some of the prices we have been looking at around here. Best to check out the links to cameras on the web. I think Ronald has posted links to lists of hundreds of cameras on the technical thread, and I have posted links to the products database of the cameralink standards organisation, and supported cameras of the pixellink capture card company.

I also think Ronald might be interested in something like what your talking about, so it is probably best to post over at the technical thread.

Now on your idea, looks interesting, probably expensive. Every time you split you divide the amount of light, and I don't know what image faults that sort of prism introduces, as well as path length. Note, a lot of chip have rolling shutter, that causes moving object/images to tilt at normal shutters. If you speed up the shutter, to make it more like global shutter, mking the tilt almost unoticable, you loose the extra light gathering ability of a slow shutter. Other things to watch out for are that some cameras readout times are so slow they interfere too much with the next frame round and shorten integration time etc. Now you have all these different feeds coming in simultanously from different sensors, and you have to manage and buiffer them to record them in the right sequence. So you have a lag of a full frame readout before the disk can start recording. Instead, if each drive has enough bandwidth, you can use one file per sensor on each disk, as recording accross multiple files per disk will kill disk perforamance like a dodo because of seeking. The only other option is to interleave them in one file accross the raid, and I don't think you want to go there because of the timing accross multiple sensors. So the slow readout will cost more than normal. But having not thought about it maybe somebody else has a better idea to contribute.

I have recently suggested, on the main thread, that pixel shift on a 1080 3 chip camera would deliver between pseudo 4 and 9 times the resolution. But objectively we shouldn't expect much difference from a 6MP sensor (but a lot more light).

Wayne.