4:4:4 10bit single CMOS HD project

[Obin Olson]

Ok Les I am doing htat now for you

You need to give me your email address
I have 3 tiff files 16bit ready to send you

[Matthew Miller]

Obin,
First of all, the footage looks quite impressive from a color and detail standpoint, but I'm also quite curious about this frame blending. When the video is playing, certain movement seems to have an odd strobe like effect. When I paused it, I realized there was a double image in several of the frames.
What did you use to encode the WMV file? There are alot of options in Windows Media Encoder and Adobe Premiere Pro when it comes to encoding WMV (not sure about Vegas).
I take it you encoded to 24fps, Non-interlaced. Perhaps you had inverse telecine turned on or some other feature that WM9 uses for encoding different kinds of 24fps materials.

Other than that, the artifacts associated with Bayer imaging are only noticeable when I pause the video and get up close to my projection screen (I mean less than two feet away.) Specifically, the edge of your earlobe in the last shot of the wmv, since it's against a black background, shows a kind of dithered anti-aliasing.

And then lastly, I keep thinking that I see a set of thick bars running horizontally across certain shots. It's noticeable in the darker parts of your face when you hold up the watch. It is almost exactly like what was in the low-res quicktime file of the girl waving that shiny fabric around.... but drastically less obvious. Do you notice that as well? It's always in the same place in the image, so it could obviously be corrected with a filter in post if it couldn't be worked out before hand.

Keep up the pioneering.

[Juan M. M. Fiebelkorn]

I'm feeling sad at this moment cause I see the technical part of this thread seems to go nowhere most of the time....
Anyway here I go again.

I'm trying to develop an opensource project for a codec for this project.The main idea is to use a mini-itx motherboard with a P4 or athlon (may be a mobile athlon).Now the codec is performing more or less good, giving around 20 fps for a 1280x720 RGB.
The final idea is to have at least 30 fps for 1920x1080 Bayer.
It is based on a hybrid of DCT and DWT.
When the moment arrives, I will need some expert coders to optimize it.
Anyone here is able for this task?
Thank you very much.

P.S. Everybody seems to ask for complete off-the-shelf FPGA projects.The Russian Net-Camera is a working FPGA project.I know it gives 15 fps, but in the worst case we could duplicate its compression system to get 30 fps(I mean a duplicated FPGA board.)
There are also some huffman compression working FPGA projects, which I posted before but nobody seems to notice them.

[Les Dit]

Ok, send it to my gmail account, it has that nice free 1 gig of storage that they want to snoop into for sending me junk popups :)

it's lesdit at gmail
com

-Thanks
-Les


<<<-- Originally posted by Obin Olson : Ok Les I am doing htat now for you

You need to give me your email address
I have 3 tiff files 16bit ready to send you -->>>

[Obin Olson]

matt how does it compare to the HDTV signals you have seen from broadcast? does it look clear? if you sit back would you say ya this could be a movie...or nope this is pure cheap looking video even though it's HDTV resolution??

[Steve Nordhauser]

OK, I was hinting that I might have something interesting brewing. Micron has a 3.2Mpix sensor that is part of the same family as the 1.3Mpix that Obin and Scott are using. The down side is that it is the same size sensor so the pixels are smaller (3.2 micron). The interesting thing is that we have tested it so far at 1920x1080, 10 bit, 24fps and 1280 x 720, 10 bit, 48fps. We will see if they make it to 30fps/60fps. The other thing is that this sensor is the one suggested by Micron when I discussed the oversaturated smearing of the SI-1300. Next nice thing - single piece pricing is $2195 alone or $2695 bundled with the Epix 32 bit FG. We will be doing a 64 bit bundle when the Epix 64 bit FG is available.

This is not a replacement for an Altasens camera. It is a cost effective solution for some applications. I'll try to get some test images posted when I get a camera - they are out getting integrated with Epix and the gigabit ethernet interface right now. I don't have a manual but the sensor data is available from Micron.

[Valeriu Campan]

Obin, the numbers reffer to aperture opening, not lens coverage. Try to find Cmount lenses that cover 2/3, 16mm or ask some questions before you buy.
Apart from vignetting, how does it look?

<<<--
I understand the 12.5mm and the 4mm, what about the 1:1.3 and 1:2.2??
-->>>

[Les Dit]

Steve, this sounds good. Make sure that if you get to do some test images, they include some like what I just described to Obin. I know they are very ugly to look at visually, but they say a TON about how good the camera is for movie camera use. True DP's ignore the artistic content of test footage, DOF, and lighting, they look behind the 'scenes' to see image quality.

Maybe the smaller pixels will be OK ? Let's see!

-Les


<<<-- Originally posted by Steve Nordhauser : OK, I was hinting that I might have something interesting brewing. Micron has a 3.2Mpix sensor that is part of the same family as the 1.3Mpix that Obin and Scott are using. The down side is that it is the same size sensor so the pixels are smaller (3.2 micron). The interesting thing is that we have tested it so far at 1920x1080, 10 bit, 24fps and 1280 x 720, 10 bit, 48fps. We will see if they make it to 30fps/60fps. The other thing is that this sensor is the one suggested by Micron when I discussed the oversaturated smearing of the SI-1300. Next nice thing - single piece pricing is $2195 alone or $2695 bundled with the Epix 32 bit FG. We will be doing a 64 bit bundle when the Epix 64 bit FG is available.

This is not a replacement for an Altasens camera. It is a cost effective solution for some applications. I'll try to get some test images posted when I get a camera - they are out getting integrated with Epix and the gigabit ethernet interface right now. I don't have a manual but the sensor data is available from Micron. -->>>

[Obin Olson]

like a really wide lens ;) it's a cheapo lens but it would have worked if it was full coverage....oh well ...the ebay guy is nice enough to take it back - the shipping ;)


Steve keep me in the loop on the 3.2megapixel...the smear upgrade is worth it alone from everytying else...what will the cost be on the Altasens camera anyway?

when do you think you will have a Micron 3.2 for testing and image shooting?

[Juan M. M. Fiebelkorn]

A Xilinx Spartan3 FPGA 1 million gates costs $15
And here is a developmente board

http://www.nuhorizons.com/products/x...ent-board.html

Free IPs

SDRAM Controller:

http://www.cmosexod.com/sdram.html

Open Core compression system

http://www.opencores.org/projects.cg...stems/overview

Diagrams of the Elphel camera:

http://www.elphel.com/3fhlo/index.html

[Matthew Miller]

Steve,
Pretty exciting stuff in regards to the Micron sensor. The price sounds right. What would be the problem with smaller pixels? Is there no sub-sampling from this sensor? 1280x720 would have to be a smaller window on the sensor? That doesn't bother me too much. The price sounds all-right. What is the ballpark price for an altasens chip design going to be?

Obin,
I actually made my friends watch three or four clips of stuff from www.wmvhd.com before showing them your clip. This included the dawn of the dead trailor, the trailer for step into liquid, the punisher trailor, and the rules of attraction trailor.

From the back of the room, the images from your camera and the images from all the other clips matched up just fine. From seven feet away, the grain in the stuff shot on actual 35mm film is very apparent, where as your clip is free of any grain. The final shot of your face in the wmv file was the point where everyone commented on the fine detail of the image.
Grain is added digitally all the time, espescially for composited CG work in movies. Still, the slight doubled motion artifact, that you say isn't actually in the image when captured, detracted from the overall smoothness of moving images.If you could send me just 2 or 3 seconds of framegrabs of something with a person or two, maybe even converted to jpg or something smaller than TIFF (not that I wouldn't take the TIFF files), I'd love to try and add grain to it and do a few other experiments with color-correction and such.
I know your getting alot of requests here, so it's cool if you can't.

[Wayne Morellini]

This sounds like the same artifact that people were complaining was in the HD10. I think JVC argued it was a trick of peoples mind to do with the shutter, others argued that it was some frame rate conversion, or one other thing I can't remember.

Oblin

I got the hd test.wmv, and most of it seems to be stuffed up with only bits playing, but I do see the double image. It seems to be in every scene (especially the carpark ones), but oddly, I don't see anything at all wrong with the clip of your sister, or the outside flowers clip (only a few frames of moment actually got downloaded for each). To test out the theory I change my refresh from 60Hz to a multiple of 24, 72Hz, it is still there. Did you shoot or process the file of your sister differently? Was that the one you did 24fps shutter. Maybe it is a problem with the 48fps reset thing not reseting properly and leaving a ghost image, but you did say that it is not there in the origional frames, soi that only leavces one of the software packages. Media Player and the codec, does it support 24fps playback, maybe it only does regular 25/30/50/60, I've seen simular things playing a 50i Pal DVD movie on a 60FPS monitor.

[Les Dit]

Yes, with the HD10 people were actually 'seeing things', as it turned out. It's simple to still frame it and look for the double frame artifact. None was found.

At this time I think the HD10 has a slight sharpness advantage over this 1300 camera. That's about the only advantage of the consumer camera, but it's solvable since the 1300 *does* have more pixels to work with.

Here is the frame grab compare I posted before, if you want to see how they look:
300KB comparison frame JVC vs 1300 :

==========================================
========== SAMPLE FRAME LINK BELOW ============

http://home.earthlink.net/~lesd/hd/JVC-1300-comparo.jpg

===========================================
===========================================

Obin: does the current softrare let you load a LUT for the 10 to 8 conversion? Also, a quick look at the noise frames you sent look good, but oddly there is more noise in some midtone areas than the darkest areas!

-Les




<<<-- Originally posted by Wayne Morellini : This sounds like the same artifact that people were complaining was int eh HD10. I think JVC argued it was a trick of peoples mind to do with the shutter, others argued that it was some frame rate conversion, or one other thing I can't remember.

Oblin
. -->>>

[Steve Nordhauser]

SI-3300:
You can't subsample with this other than is even multiples so you can't get to 1280x720 since the basic sensor is 2048x1536. This means you have to use ROI (region of interest - windowing). The small pixels mean less sensitivity, potentially more noise (but it still looks really good), narrower FOV with the same lens and more DOF problems. The manual is complete so it is going to the FG company this week for integration.
Altasens:
It has an unusual 2/3 subsample mode that lets you get to 1280x720 even though this is not an even multiple. I don't know if that will introduce artifacts. It has pixels about the size of the SI-1300 - 5 microns. The price is $3995 alone or $4995 bundled with a 64 bit FG, cables and PS.
Lenses:
The SI-1300 and SI-3300 are 1/2" c mount. The Altasens is 2/3". This is just the image circle at the focal point. Here is a good set of tables:

http://www.siliconimaging.com/Lens%2...%20formats.htm

[Steve Nordhauser]

Wayne:
Remember, Obin is using some used CCTV lenses that I sent him. If you are looking at the two images and the lower resolution camera looks sharper, it is probably an optics issue.
Here are some potential ebay lenses - this is not an endorsement - they just look better than the CCTV stuff:
3825739231
3826011676
3826545481
Buyer beware, it is up to you to verify the optical size. Or you can hit a used place like BFphotovideo.com More pricey but a real inventory and reliable ratings.