4:4:4 10bit single CMOS HD project

[Betsy Moore]

Do you think some small company will be selling 1080 24p systems in the next 3 or 4 months? Ballpark, how much are we looking at for the whole kit and kaboodle, including the hard drives, assembled camera, etc.?

[Ben Syverson]

I know this is a long thread, but to prevent mass repetition, please look over at least the last couple pages before posting.

Sumix, Silicon Imaging and possibly others will be releasing Altasens-based 1080p cameras whenever they get the chips in. Steve has said there may be an 8 week wait for them to get chips, so you can probably tack on a month or two to that date.

You should contact Steve or Sumix directly for a quote, but I believe the ballpark for these cameras will be US$4k -- 5k. That doesn't include a computer to capture with. Depending on your needs, you could get by on as little as an upgraded laptop, for about $2k.

[Betsy Moore]

thanks for the info, Ben, I did read the last twenty five pages but even reading that many it wasn't clear.

[Rob LaPoint]

Can I ask you guys who have used streampix why it is such a bad workflow? I know everyone agrees that it sucks, I am just wondering what features don't really work well. Also as far as the Gige interface is concerned, would it be possible to use a switch to send the signal to 2 computer one that handles recording and one that handles a realtime full res preview? Would that be something that was worth doing or does the preview not really take much of a toll on the system?

[Jason Rodriguez]

Preview should be fine. I've seen it done before, such as the Altasens booth at NAB. They were previewing 1920x1080 on a monitor, and it was working fine. So I don't see why there'd be any problem, especially with fast processor.

BTW, Obin, did you ever figure out what was hampering the performance of your capture app?

[Régine Weinberg]

Good day. Vance did this (he is on this board too):

Why not use a mechanical shutter? We could use the best Chip
regardles what shutter is implemented

still my dream to convert an S16 or 35 mm

ronald

[Rob Lohman]

I've split off most of the posts on this thread on the new "Drake"
camera system by Rai & Markus to a NEW THREAD. This
for the following reasons:

1. this thread is already pretty long
2. with a working camera out much attention will go to this new camera system and thus a lot of posts
3. since the camera is working it is no longer in primary development (it is being futher developed) and thus is not really at place in this thread

You can find the new thread at the following link:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...threadid=34339

Please continue conversations on this camera there. We understand
that sometimes technology and discussions go from one subject
to another, but please try to keep them in their respective threads.

For the same reason it was a pretty hard job to split the threads
correctly but I believe a pretty good balance has been found, but
some pieces in both threads might read a bit strange with some
pieces of a conversation missing (I've tried to avoid this as much
as possible)

Thank you for consideration!

[Wayne Morellini]

Rob, common, can't we go for a world record on the web ;)

<<<-- Originally posted by Rob LaPoint : Also as far as the Gige interface is concerned, would it be possible to use a switch to send the signal to 2 computer one that handles recording and one that handles a realtime full res preview? -->>>

That is an excellent idea, you don't even need a second computer, all you need is a simple FPGA based circuit to pick up the second stream and convert it to monitor output. Steve, that could even cheaply be included in the camera with monitor port (like Phillips does with it's industrial cameras). Or you can get a faster computer (once the software si fully developed slow down from preview will be a small fraction).

[Wayne Morellini]

<<<-- Originally posted by Flax Johnson : Hi,
My main question is about which sensors/implementations to use (I'm a little bit lost) ? -->>>

Flax, the truth is that the Drake is probably the closet to a working commercially available cinema system, with all the IBIS-5 drawbacks. The cameras for Obin and Rob's systems are available, but the software maybe soon, but the real performance prize of Altasens is, as said, months off.

Alltogether I am pretty dissapionted with present CMOS sensors, with Alatsens being one of the turn around products. Recently I posted a link to a long electronic engineering article in the technical thread that questioned the reality of the inferiorities of CCD's, maybe we should have had a look at that too (what is the imperex like ??).

Jason:

No argument, I'm just listing all the possibilities new people should check out when looking at a camera.

About the preview thing. I think I was talking about the advantages and disadvantages of a lossless compressed pixel stream from the camera compared to an uncomrpessed one, that is where the decompression word came in as one of the possible disadvantages of using a compressed camera head.

Rob: actually I'm reconsidering it, maybe we will eventually need a "Home made & Lossless Digital Cameras & Mods" area, where Cinema, Documentary and Video people can talk it out. After we get 100 regular people all consistantly talking about this I think we will have enough traffic.

[Rob Lohman]

Wayne: I thought we crossed that mark already a while ago ;-)

yes, in the end it may be best to open a sub forum to talk about
the special homemade (HD) camera's. The time isn't there at this
point though.

As you know there are currently 3 major things going on in this forum:

1. making our own 35mm lens adaptors

2. Juan's project to adapt the DVX to RAW uncompressed output

3. and our HD camera project

At the moment this is a nice amount of traffic for this forum. No
need to split it up at this point in time. Ofcourse we will keep an
eye on how things develop. It is certainly a very interesting time!

For whom it may concern: I had a small talk with Rob S. and he
has been very busy (as we gathered) with other activities that
he had to do. He was confident he would return to the project
shortly. I myself am ready to start working at optimizing some
stuff again as well. Unfortunately we all need to juggle this project
with a lot of other things.

[Steve Nordhauser]

Two approaches here. We do support something called multicasting where one camera data can be broadcast to multiple computers - possibly one for preview one for record. Second, using the custom GigE drivers on an Intel Pro1000 interface card, there is almost no CPU overhead to move the data to system memory since it is all DMA driven. I would assume that a fast write to a RAID buffer would be the same. Other than bus bandwidth issues, preview should be easy. Now that I think about it, even the bus isn't a problem since the CPU will read data out of memory and send to the AGP - no bus traffic added on the PCI bus.

Hmm, some of the southbridge chips (ICH5-R) have built in two drive SATA RAID capability. This reduces the bus traffic to one pass. 32 bit machines could be enough even for 1920x1080 @ 30fps 12 bit.

[Rob LaPoint]

Thanks for the relpies. I know most people are trying to get away from being to tethered to just one computer but for some reason I am intrigued with what could be done in realtime with two computers (if one was dedicated to only capturing.)

We all agree that 12 bits is the way to go for the latitude that it gives you in post. But when you are actually exposing for maximum color information the look of the raw image is bad before correction. I know some people were trying to figure out which 8 bits of the 12 to use for a preview when recording in 12 bit mode. Could a second computer do a rough realtime color correct and downcovert to 8 bits for preview? If the second computer could then store that color correction data it would be very similar to the tools panasonic has for the varicam (although they have to do it that way because they are trapped with 8 bits.)

This would obviously only be a nice accessory and not influencial to the working of these systems. Any DP worth his weight in salt can tell you what your latitude will be with some light readings and a knowledge of the camera. But on the same token for a director it would be nice to look at an apple cinema display on set with a beautiful image and toy with the color settings right there. Then if the settings were saved it would speed up correcting in post as only minor 'tweaking' would be needed.

[Jason Rodriguez]

Yo guys,

A second computer???

Are you kidding me??

Like one isn't complicated enough!! ;-)

Actually I do find it sort of interesting that you can "multicast" the data, one thing this could lead to is a computer for 1080/60p super high-res slow motion, and then the portable computer for 720/60p and 1080/30p (since hard-drives aren't easy to come by.

hmmm . . . .

How small is the smallest switch you can get (would it fit inside a portable app)?

[Wayne Morellini]

Rob LaPoint:

My thoughts exactly, no second guessing, do it right on set and store what the director (or whoever) wants straightup along with the frames to speed up correction after. A good suggestion for a future version of the capture app.

Jason, that DNG format, as everything have to be batched processed, would it be possible to have a file with extra cinema data inbetween each frame (including multichannel sound), and have Photoshop pickout the frames, and maybe use the colour settings?

[Jason Rodriguez]

No audio in the DNG format.

But I for one don't think you need it. After all, Hollywood is basing their digital-cinema workflow off of DPX and OpenEXR files, and those don't carry audio either.

In order to carry audio you can't have a frame sequence.

One thing you can embed in the DNG format is timecode if you want.