4:4:4 10bit single CMOS HD project

[Juan M. M. Fiebelkorn]

Don't know what are people using here to Demosaick their RAW footage so here I go again:

This is DCRAW ,an open source program to demosaick Bayer images with the best quality I've ever seen.
I post it in case Rai needs it.May be Rob can modify it to process the camera captured stream.

http://www.insflug.org/raw/software/tools/dcraw.php3

[Rob Scott]

Juan M. M. Fiebelkorn wrote:
This is DCRAW ,an open source program to demosaick Bayer images with the best quality I've ever seen.

Thanks Juan! I'll definitely be looking at that.

[Obin Olson]

ok guys I am coming out of the closet now - and I do apologize to Rob C.
I have hired a software programmer and we are writing a capture program that WILL work for production of commercial projects/feature films - at first we will capture RAW images in 8bit and 10bit @ the max framerate the computer can write-to-disk later on we will look at compression BEFORE DISK WRITE

Our software will have ALL camera controls inside the UI in a very easy to use setup - It will save to QuickTime tiff jpeg and avi and use the LeadTools codec for editing - this system will WORK and can be used in production. when better sensors come out they will be supported and as time passes we will have it as an embedded system like a Kinetta but at much less $$

We will also be addressing the issues of Bayer filters for post-processing so we can get the most out of the chip
As of now we are displaying the live image and working on implementing the camera commands and doing multi-threading for a ROCK STABLE capture, I think we may have beta up and working end of this week..we will see I will post screenshots of our mockup UI if anyone wants to see!

[Wayne Morellini]

Great, but this must be costing you a fortune. For Rai, will the exisitng solution do in the meantime? I know we all like everything to be perfect, but is the existing system ussuable?

Thanks

Wayne.

[Rob Scott]

Good luck with that, Obin. I hope you got a decent developer who will do a good job for you.

[Obin Olson]

StreamPix is not somthing you want to use - Xcap is the worst!

so no nothing that could be used at the moment

[Wayne Morellini]

Steve, from the PB-MV40 4 Megapixel document, it is nearly 3 years old, but not listed in their products. What gives?

Thanks

Wayne.

[Pekka Riikonen]

<<<-- Originally posted by Juan M. M. Fiebelkorn : Don't know what are people using here to Demosaick their RAW footage so here I go again:

This is DCRAW ,an open source program to demosaick Bayer images with the best quality I've ever seen.
I post it in case Rai needs it.May be Rob can modify it to process the camera captured stream.

http://www.insflug.org/raw/software/tools/dcraw.php3 -->>>

dcraw's code was used in the first version of the Adobe Camera Raw plugin (now part of the Photoshop CS). Their current code is also likely based on that. It is a very good convertor and free for any kind of use, including commercial.

[Steve Nordhauser]

Wayne:
That was as a photobit design - probably Micron is just supporting existing customers, not fishing for new designs.

Obin:
Quite an interesting bombshell you just lobbed.

Norpix is getting a facelift fairly soon to make the GUI more intuitive. We shall see - I suspect this group will be way beyond there by the time it is ready.

[Joshua Starnes]

we are writing a capture program that WILL work for production of commercial projects/feature films

I've been following this project for a while and I'm very interested in its outcome. Obin, if you are going to pay to develop some software yourself, what are you planning on doing with it. I'm prepared to invest the money into a working camera system, but since there already is a prototype and no working software, there's no reason to do it yet. At the same time, there's no reason to build my own system if there is no software to support it. Obin, are you going to be licensing your software, giving it for free as was originally discussed, or keep it for your own services?

[Rai Orz]

Rob, Obin, Joshua and all others,

It was my idea to shoot a movie with those silicon images Cam. I know the work time for the movieprojekt that just now beginns. And so, it also was my idea to shoot now, at the beginning, with the unsuitable silicon images software and a pc in a car. I know/hope a better software will come soon and also small hardware. I spoke with producer and director, and they say okay, it can be good for movie marketing (and i think also for CAM marketing), but it must work. And now, they want see pictures.

So my questions: Is it possible? First shoots with the software bundled with the camera and later with new software ? I mean, is there a difference in the pictures? What is the different format? What different Hardware it need?

[Obin Olson]

Steve, I held it back untill my last breath of air!! no, I just did not want to talk untill we had somthing in the works forsure..;)

pictures are the same the workflow is really hard. you will want to wait for the good capture software or els waste lots of time on-set. The Streampix cost $1500 and Xcap is $1500 SO you will buy software that will be trashed in a mater of weeks or less..NOT worth it!

what is your reason for shooting with this camera? how not get a Panasonic Varicam? or 16mm film? what is your budget for the movie?

"software bundled with the camera" this software does NOT capture video only 1 still frame at a time

[Rai Orz]

> "software bundled with the camera" this software does NOT capture video only 1 still frame at a time

Sorry, it is a misunderstanding. I meant the Streampix Software, because silicon images sell it too. And, if you buy it "bundled" with a cam, it cost only around $1000.

>what is your reason for shooting with this camera?

I would like sell it with our 35mm solutions and with other nice parts. The movie is Advertisement for the camera. But the camera is also Advertisement for the movie.

This is the reason.

[Ben Syverson]

Hey all,

I think I'm going to bite the bullet and get the Sumix SMX-150C camera. 1280x1024 @ 27.5 fps over USB2. After seeing the sample images, I am convinced.

However, clearly the bundled software does a very crude job of de-mosaicing the bayer filter on the image. It produces images that look like this:
(tight crop of image at 100%)
(same image at 200% zoom)

See the weird "zippering?" If you look at the red + blue channels, they are at half resolution, and the green channel is all wiggy. This is the result of nearest neighbor "interpolation" -- it makes the image look pixelated, even at 100%.

One solution is to do a 1-pixel box blur on the footage. That seems to clean it up pretty nicely:
(footage with box blur, 200% zoom)

That's okay, but now the image is a touch soft. What we really want to do is an actual interpolation between the color sites on the sensor -- nearest neighbor isn't really interpolation in my book. There are tons of available methods -- spline, bicubic, etc, but I'll stick with plain old linear interpolation, because it's extremely fast.

I wrote up an After Effects plug-in to take footage with half-a$$ de-mosaicing and produce nice images. The result is something like this:
(footage with "linBayer" filter, 200% zoom)

My algorithm leaves the original pixel values untouched and deals only with the in-between values, so you retain as much of the original data as possible. Also, it offsets the color channels so that they match up better. Simply interpolating the values leaves you with a slight offset that looks like chromatic abberation.

You can download the Mac version of the plug-in here. I'll compile it for PC a little later if anyone's interested.

If anyone involved in the coding of this HD cam project wants the source for the algorithm, let me know.

Well, that's it for now!

- ben

[Jason Rodriguez]

DCRAW isn't a very good bayer demosaic algorithm, it's just using a version of variable gradients, and tends to have a lot of color moiré and/or "zippered" edges-at least compared to the Canon converter or the Phase One Capture One software.