YEs Steve..I am talking with I/O about that board..and the Savant software..looks like we have no luck with our software...I will have a demo of Savant in a few days to see if they can save on our system.if so I could use the SDK and write a GUI around it...argggg I wish this thing would work

A cheaper alternative is that I can get you an OEM version of StreamPix that lets you use their underlying disk code and you can build a GUI around it. Contact me off-line if you want to persue that.

Hi Steve & Obin,

some points here:

a) You are right about these peak limit issues. I guess I assembled enough FC / SAN and HDTV editing systems to know about the difficulities one can run into reaching "expected" speed limits. I've been working on SCSI based systems doing real 800+ MByte/s sustained & random record & playback from disks, given RAID0 conditions, but NTFS! For writing the RAID subsystems caching is the simple (!) key, as long as all other parts comply within the required limits (though stay on average above the required bandwidth). This said, a physical limit of 500 MByte/s means to me to expect something around 350 to 400 MByte/s to be really satisfied. There are technologies that allow "easy" writing of 800/1600 MByte/s, small enough to consider even portable environments.

b) When you consider the DVR express for Obin's camera, you are going for the SCSI one, right? Given HD at single chip, SCSI is fine.

c) I still wonder if its simpler to reach the goal of writing back 4:4:4 uncompressed with "off the shelf" hardware puzzles compared to developing a "good enough" light compression scheme (I know, that would be a "givin up" compromise somehow).

d) Given the thread title of "4:4:4 10bit single CMOS HD project" I still wonder how many pixels you consider to be a 4:4:4 10 Bit HD signal? 4:4:4 would usually means you record 4*13.75 MHz bandwidth per color component (if I remember video electronics well). In total this should be ~165 MPixel @ 10 bit. But then your chip would need true RGB representation in full resolution. Somehow 4:4:4 isn't the best acronym in the context of a single chip camera to me, since a typical single chip Bayer pattern does a "hardware" 4:2:2 (now talking in weighting of pixels).

I guess the approach will be to write back the Bayer pattern in realtime and do the processing to RGB afterwards? Excuse me if that has been said somewhere in the thread, I haven't read all 186 pages :(

Given a 10 Bit 1920x1080y chip it would be 20736000 bits per frame, ~2.5 MByte/frame Bayer pattern, around 60 MByte/s @ 24 Hz. That should fit in a small housing. Am I wrong in any point of the project?

e) Leutron just told me they expect the x1/x4 cards to ship around June. WinXP64 support could be there in time if required (probably not necessary for Obin anyway).


Axel (just trying to understand :) )

I need some help bad.

Our software works.

Our CPU and dual hard disk drives are more then fast enough to record and display..my motherboard the DFI 855GME has a problem. we can't record AND display at the same time as things seem to crash inside the chipset...this is also with the Video Savant software, this tells me what we are working aginst is REAL and not a fault of my code writer..I need a new motherboard that has SATAx2 PCI-X x1 and a mobile CPU socket for the INTEL MOBILE cpu


does anyone know of such a beast that is NOT running on the INTEL 855 chipset or using the 6300ESB SATA controller??

all Dev stops till we get this fixed ...so please help asap..thanks a bunch gang.. I REALLY don't want this to be "dead in the water" after all the effort I have in it!

please post or email direct links if you have any of hardware I can try

Hi Obin,

so you search for a board that has

- mobile CPU
- PCI-X slot (for the capture card)
- Either onboard SATA controllers or place for another controller.

Right?

I will have a look. If I find something I'll post it here.

Btw, is AGB required or would a simple onbaord graphics card OK?

Axel

on-board is fine for the graphics as we are only using 2% cpu for display!

asus makes an intel pentium m to socket 478 adapter so that you can use a pentium m in a regular p4 board

http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_cont...ookie%5Ftest=1

It means you can use almost any p4 mainboard, and pick and chose one with pci-x for your framegrabber.

Hope this helps

not so much help..that is ONLY for ASUS boards and they don't make boards that have PCI-X that work with that adaptor...bummer

anymore help anyone?

I hope these links are of some help to you:

http://www.advantech.com/local_inc/s....x=0&image.y=0

http://www.advantech.com/local_inc/s....x=0&image.y=0

Hey Obin, this can't end like this!! I don't know if this will work but here is a link

http://www2.computeruniverse.net/url...urlmapped=true

After looking around it seems that there may be a suitable ASUS board for the pentium M adapter just not in North America, I think there may be boards available in Europe. Look half way down the page on this link and there is a socket 478 board with PCI-X, hope it helps!

I tired searching some more, but pentium m chipsets are limited in number and then finding one with pci-x is also limited.

The advantech aimb750 is also based on 855.

I think you might be better off finding a p4 or opteron based computer with pci-x because i've gone through almost all major manufacturers of mainboard and haven't come up with any pentium-m mainboards with pci-x except the dfi

I guess that doesn't help at all - sorry

How do people feel about the limits of Gigabit @ 30fps 1080p video?

I may change direction with this project and tackle the Silicon Imaging Gigabit camera setup instead of CameraLink...the market does not seem to have the perfect board for us at this time...but we can use Gigabit on many many boards..

Future updates could include fast PCI EXpress cards and cameralink systems for higher framerates...

thoughts??

I think that is a great idea, I have been behind the Gige since I first heard about it. Remeber you can always drop down to a lower RES for higher framerates. GO FOR IT!

looks like we are going to stick with cameralink because it's more flexible with the datarate and it's more of a direct path to the disks..I am going to get a Coreco board in and test with that on the DFI mainboard ..it has 32MB/ram on it to help smooth the data out before it hits the pci-x bus..lets see how things go

Hi Obin,

I am going to test a fast camera by monday or tuesday, using a PCI-X framegrabber and CameraLink. Just to let you know...

For the Gigabit approach:

I wonder if the link will be fast enough. Is this Gigabit stuff just using the interface, but running a proprietary protocoll, or something like Jumbo Frames on TCP/IP protocol?

A typical Gigabit ethernet connection will not be able to transfer more than ~40 to 50 MByte/s using TCP/IP protocoll. We have server style Gigabit cards from all kinds in use (3Com, Broadcom, Intel, ...), and NOTHING is really so fast in real life situations. In a pure peer to peer connection the situation gets slightly better, but then its just around the 50 MByte/s as we have seen it.

At least the Gigabit approach is nice, because you can have a long cable or even a fibre optic converter to have really long distance between camera head and recording side.

Be aware: For recording 1920y1080y Pixels @ 10 Bit/Pixel you need to record about 75 MByte/s. I have no clue if the Gigabit camera connection really works that fast (from hardware side its possible, I simply doubt that if the protocol would be TCP/IP, which I really don't know).

So, Steve & Obin, could you elaborate what is the protocol and possible speed on the Gigabit camera connection?

If it would be TCP/IP there could be convenient small NAS systems around for compact storage, using Linux or the like.

Regards,
Axel

Obin,

you may written it somewhere in the thread, but I ask as its quicker than searching:

Is your aim to have a small mobile computer with as few power consumption as possible?

Should the camera man have the PC "attached" or should it even have been build into the camera itself?

You need PCI-X for the grabber card. Which one do you use and what is the price level?
I've info that the Leutron PCIexpress cards will be around 1500 US$ (which is quite much given you aimed total price), just to let you know.

I've just visited Steve's company homepage and following part seems to be the important one on GigE camera link (IMHO):

Given this to work, the GigE approach will solve you a lot of problems. You can use a simple Notebook now as recording system. There are even notebooks that handle dual or triple disks (such as from 1beyond), but these don't run nicely without "power wire" - so there are moveable but not like mobile. If you consider that in most sets you will have light anyway and you can work with a mostly wire PC system, you might turn to a barebone shuttle or the like with a fast enough RAID.

Why do you want to have Pentium-M? Just for its power saving?

Axel

Dothan is a Low power chip
I will have a complete camera system like a video camcorder when all is said and done....I am still looking into CameraLink VS Gigabit

Axel,
You are correct about typical gigabit rates. With a custom high performance driver, we get 100MB/sec over gigabit - point to point or through a switch that supports jumbo packets. Another advantage of this driver is that it uses less than 2% of the CPU for acquisition. With the standard windoze stack, we get about 200Mbps and 30% CPU usage.

Gigabit will limit you to 1080p@ 30fps, 12 bit however.

The reason that all of us are interested in low power motherboards is to embed the CPU and disks in the camera head. Ideally, we would like to run on batteries, but even on AC you want minimum fans.

Hi Steve,

thanks for this clearing comments. I expected that Jumbo Frame thing. Bypassing the windows stack is a nice idea.

One question:

Do you intend to have a mainbaord small enough to fit INTO the old 16mm camera? I thought of some of these Blade servers currently hip in 19" rack mount systems. You can get a complete embedded computer with the size of a PCI card. I believe some use low power CPUs for lower total heat dissipation.

All this embedded computing stuff comes with boards nowadays that would be small enough. But PCI-X - I guess there is no chance to have it. I'd expect you would have more luck on mini-versions of the PCIexpress bus then, which might be adapted to work with a standart PCIepxress card then. Just an idea.

Axel

Axel,
Now you are on Obin's turf. He has probably looked at every low power motherboard option. He has examined retrofitting film cameras and designing new housings. He has eyeballed PCI, PCI-X PCIe and gigabit. CPU power and processing capabilities, cache usage, bus bandwidth, DMA transfers - he knows more about this stuff than he ever would have wished. And he has a funny red spot on his forehead from banging his head against the wall. ;-}

It is not an easy path to bring a product this complex to completion.

Hehe, I believe every single word here :)

Am I right that the ONLY goal must be to actually receive the data from the camera and save it to disk?

And potentially having some kind of live feed for viewfinder to a VGA display or the like?

All the rest would be possible in post production, like in regular film development as I see it, right?

Not that it is an easy task to perform...

Steve, was there never any need for a direct camera to disk recording device in the past, in the industrial use? Mmmh, as it seems probably not...

I was thinking of something like these USB / 1394 / card reader style media drives. Just one, that would do higher bit rates.

What is the highes data rate to store away that Obin has to expect from his choosen camera?

Axel

direct camera to disk recording device
 

If you read this thread, you know that i do some things in this direction, because my goal is a cheap 12Bit (or more) direct recording for ultra high speed and/or ultra high pixels cameras without PC. With those unit you need only a PC (or whatever) for fiewfinder and setups, but not for recording. If you need infos contact me, we are on the way...

Axel,
Basically true. Lossless recording with timecodes, viewfinder and camera control are all that is needed in real time. Everything else is post. 1920x1080@12bits packed * 60fps is 187MB/sec or 1.5Gb/sec. So, 30fps *might* go over Firewire 800 (don't know the real, continuous max) and will go over gigabit. Definitely a RAID, not a single drive.

Hi Steve,

yes, the bandwidth to disk is always the problem. Applying a compression to Bayer pattern is one of the problems here, especially that at high frame rates nothing is fast enough to do the actual compression. We just made first shots on well over 500 frames/second and that blows you memory full, quickly... :)

On the RAID side it would not be a too big issue to store that 1080/30p/12bit away. You can do that with approx. 5 disks in RAID5 mode.

I guess the bigger problem is and will be the (small enough) PC subsystem for a while. Damn!

Axel

Do you have a new plan yet Obin?

Plan? ha! ya right!

well I will have a brand spanking new motherboard in 2 days..we will see if all our problems are the EPIX card or the motherboard!

Axel you can get 24p 1080 on 2 raid 0 drives it's only 75-95MB sec packed-unpacked

what about this
 

Well it has been posted in another treed by Steve Mingeon
but
http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT3888835064.html

not stupid at all

well, that's definitly the way to go, i would say... even with a computer based camera, you have enough power (imho) to add even just a little compression to your stream before writing it to disk. A LZW-scheme (like lzo) sound good for the job (window-sliding compression).



(and please spell my name correctly next time ;)

Dear Steve Mingam
 

Well I hope that's correct now, ...
I'm reading linuxdevices often and sometimes
sorry for that
with this thead I'm thinking a reinventing the wheel

so if there is a bulding block...
Thinking of 16mm or even 35mm
There was nothing on the cam as
speed !!
All the rest on the lens, and the lenses
have been better as any DV even HD today !!
and there was sync. nothing else
and what gret movies have been made
and still are made with

So a cam like this and only streaming.
Or even only a clip as 8-10 Minutes
to some "card would be great"

had some good french wine

but not french at all
have fun

I have contacted this guy about working with FPGA to build the camera...I will know more soon

New board does not work. FIFO overflow all the time. same issue

looking at new ways of doing things now.

I guess this is why we don't have cheap camera systems on the market.

Hey Obin,

Have you used the Coreco yet?

That board with it's SDK might make a big difference.

Hey Obin, I'm really sorry to hear that you are running into so many snags this late in the game. I wish there was something that us dvinfo-ers could do to help out, all I can think of is to give a couple words of encouragement and tell you to hang in there. You've come way to far to give up now!

Checking in:

I contacted him last year and he wanted to get involved with our projects (but never turned up) so he should be interested.

Worlds fastest 100GB notebook drive:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/05...velstar_100gb/

Increased drive capacity early next year:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=23186

And Tomshardware recently had a article on building your own bare bones notebook. These systems have many options, including dual hard drive.

FIFO work around solutions will largerly be a programming timing solutions, and system configurations, as discussed previously. Look up those system performance configuration sites I posted previously.

Obin, when will it be finished, your congratulatory present is waiting here to be sent off ;) Anyway, back to designing my portable games system and OS (I only wish I could get around to it).


:checking out

I hope that this is ok for me to post like this.

I just wanted to say that this is a really cool project and that I will really be looking forward to the end of it. I'm a 16 year old junior film and video student at a school called ARTech Charter School in MN and I will be really happy if something that is this good and this cheap comes through. We (my school and I) could have HD documentaries coming out the wazoo and maybe finally get noticed. Anyway I just wanted to say that this is really really cool and I hope I goes well for you and then consequently for everyone else.

dv3productions.com/AltaSens3562.jpg

reactions for this? i'ts the Altasense 3562..I know it's not shot that well but....

this image is absolutely great! is it the SI-1920HD? And could you inform of what is you progress with elphel?
I contacted them too ricently, asking if they can incorporate any of existing 2/3 chip into their camera board. They answered that microns 1/2 that they using are best in price, power consumption and quality (however, what they posted on website isnt that impressive). May be pictures like you posted would change their mind.

Dear Obin, dear Seraf and the jpg image
 

Hi
it's a dammed still...
I've seen so many, quite stunning

It is a dammed still shot inside..
Even Drake is all shot inside

I'm cynic but I've seen quite good
clips shot with a 35mm adapter
on a lousy 3 CCD dv Cam, blown up

never seen real live shot's from any
of the "dream"chips

nothing from Kinetta and all

Wayne gave us the link
to the 100gb laptop disk, way not as fast
as a full blown SCSI ,but an array of 4 could do very well

if there would be a 104 board or slightly bigger
SATa would be a dream board....

Mini ITX
 

Mini ITX...
can have, giga E, dual CPU, Sata etc and a small footprint
take a look
http://linuxdevices.com/articles/AT3470636459.html
and enjoy
Ronald

I have been searching the message board and I can't seem to find the bayer algorithm links..anyone know how to find it?