Hmmmm ... I wonder if it would be possible to capture at a higher frame rate and *average* two frames together in real-time? If done properly, it would reduce the rolling shutter effect and -- I would think -- simply produce more motion blur.

(This method would also work on a very-high-frame-rate camera like the other Micron chips we've discussed. Of course, at a 450 fps frame rate we'd have to do a lot of real-time averaging! But it would be an integer operation, assuming you're doing it pixel-by-pixel ...)

Hey Obin,

Just curious, how come there's no motion blur on any of your footage? It looks as though everything is shot like the opening of "Saving Private Ryan". Especially the shots that show the rolling shutter artifact, it seems like the main reason they're even apparent is because there's no motion blur to hide them.

Again, I'm wondering, since SLR's, digital cameras, etc. have electronic shutters that have chips with rolling shutters, how come they don't exhibit these motion artifacts?

because the shutter speed is high, it's outdoor light have to put the shutter speed high to get a nice DOF

So, you could reduce the "Private Ryan" effect by using a slower lens or using a lens with an iris?

Added motherboards to Wiki
 

I added a 'Platforms' category to the Obscuracam Wiki under Hardware.

I spent some time looking at potential processor solutions. We are processing a very large amount of data, which places us at the top end of the embedded market. I would like to have the system be at least somewhat portable, with an ability to run on battery power even if for a short time.

Opus Solutions is working on an automotive mount chassis for a Mini ITX motherboard that looks like a perfect fit for our needs. It has a built in high-efficiency DC-DC converter so power is not wasted, and is ruggedized to handle shock and vibration found in cars.

http://www.obscuracam.com/wiki/wiki/...Page=Platforms

RAID is really hard to find in a portable system. The motherboard on there has support for 2 channels of IDE, but I don't know if it can be striped to RAID 0--I'm checking on this. Looking at Rob's calculations from a couple messages back, it appears that we can capture a 1280x720 24 fps stream with a single drive, but not 48 fps. There will have to be some experimentation here, but I can see a situation where a laptop/lower power drive is used for portable applications and the big RAID is used for studio applications where high frame rates will be used.

Eliot

ND
 

Camcorder users, as I'm sure Obin knows, use ND filters to keep the Fstop open for less DOF.

Throwing a few stops of ND in front of that lens would slow the shutter way down to avoid the short shutter angle look.
But the rolling shutter would look much much worse.
Until camera firmware is developed that allows longer integration time with a fast readout, the camera will only be good for that 'Saving Pvt. Ryan' shows.


Is that firmware being worked on, Steve?

-Les


<<<-- Originally posted by Rob Scott : So, you could reduce the "Private Ryan" effect by using a slower lens or using a lens with an iris? -->>>

I am not sure your right about that..I think with ND you can still keep your mhz fast..I am only using hugh shutter speed so that the image is not blown out in the highlights

OK, maybe I need some education here, but this is what I think. There are a number of ways to control the light integrated by the sensor. All of these can be independent of the frame readout time which should be the only variable that matters with rolling shutter artifacts.

First, the sensor has an electronic exposure control. The rolling shutter cycle is read, reset and start integrating for each line. What maybe I didn't say was that if you shorten the exposure time, there is a delay before the line is reset. This means that you can reset the line as short as one line prior to readout giving very little integration time. This does *not* change the rolling shutter artifact because it didn't change the readout time - time from the top line to the bottom. I suppose this is the equivalent of shutter speed since less integration will have less blur, but digital camera people call it exposure control.

Next, you get the iris on the lens, certainly influencing the DOF. Then you get NDFs which I don't think influence the DOF but only give the same effect as the electronic exposure control without the change in exposure.

You also have analog gain controls within the camera that let you integrate for long times but set the gain to a minimum. I think that if you start with a NDF and some gain, decreasing gain is like adding a NDF.

Now that I think about it, if you have separate color analog gain controls within the camera like the SI-1300 does, by changing them inidvidually, you are applying different color filters prior to digitizing. This means that you still have the dynamic range in that color as opposed to applying them in a post process step. I don't think you need color optical filters at all.

Photons are photons.
If you want to have motion blur, it means keeping the sensor 'on' for a longer period of time. To do this longer exposure, or 'integration' as the electronic cam people call it, you have to limit the number of photons hitting the pixel well to avoid overload ( blowout, clipping,etc )
There are only three ways to do this.
1> reduce the photons with an ND
2> reduce the photons by closing the aperture down
3> Darken the scene

Film people like short DOF. That leaves us with method 1 and 3.
Method 1, the ND filter is the easiest. Unless you can ND the sun!

-Les

Steve,
Turning gain down works fine, as long as the photo site ( well) has not been saturated ( blown out , in photo terms ).
If too many photons have hit the sensor, you have lost image information, you can't bring that back with a gain setting.
I just wanted to clear that up.

So where are the two 10 bit consecutive frames?
Is the noise on this cam that bad that it's too embarrassing to post?
Is this really an 8 bit camera, for all practical purposes?

-Les

I believe the 8-bit capture problem was a limitation of Obin's computer right now (not fast enough drives) or something like that. He's mentioned it in past posts.

He can still just grab one still image, save it, then grab another right after that, and save it.
Two images, a few seconds apart, is all we need!
-OR-
Save a small window of the sensor, at speed.
-Les

Les don't make me angry!

do you have a LIFE?? I do and I spend EVERY waking moment doing the things I *must* do and the rest testing the camera and after that talking with you and the gang - calm down


tell me what you want 2 frames in 16bit? we do not have 10bit or even 12bit all we can get is 8 or 16 what do you want

check this:
http://www.dv3productions.com/test_i...studio-HD1.jpg

shot with blue gain at 11db and red-green at 4db in the studio with studio lights

NO white balance..just blue gain higher then the rest..did the trick
guess a better way would be to adjust the RGB when doing the bayer conversion

UPDATE:

I now have raid 0 drives and get 55MB/sec write speed I can capture 48fps at 8bit and 24fps at 12bit maybe more then 48fps at 8 have to try and see...

Obin, beautiful shot. I think you will get better overall dynamic range by balancing the color the way you did first using the analog gains. We know that the blue in the Bayer filter has less optical throughput - not just your lighting temp.

thank you Steve, I setup our lights and shot that how I would shoot a "real" gig and I am VERY happy with what that image looks like after we did some color work in post..as you can see the Bayer plugin is bad but that will be fixed ;)

the footage downsized to DV and played on a big TV set looks just amazing! it would pass as 35mm to my eyes onscreen...it's so much more organic then dv or traditional "video" and yet is super high-res looking..like watching a feature film on DVD

Obin, sorry for pestering so much about the two frames, I've must have asked about 4 times now !
This data, the noise, is one of the most important measures of the camera. As most of you know, CMOS has noise issues, both fixed pattern, and random. It's a big issue with CMOS. People poo poo CMOS because of this. I think Micron and the newer sensors have fixed a lot of the concerns.
I just wanted to see where it's at, noise wise.
The main reason to even do this project is to get more than 8 bits from a camera. And yet nobody has bothered to see if the image is any good in those lower bits.
It's fun to look at the 8 bit images, and >8 bits on stills, but motion ( as I described before ) shows a whole different set of possible 'gotcha's'.

I've been digitizing motion picture stuff from back in the days of working on 'Willow' where we did the first morph shots in a feature film.
I'm not a newbie. I'm not asking for unimportant useless info.
Sorry to bother you.
BTW when I say 10 bit, I don't care what file format it's stuffed into, or how the bits are shifted in a 16 bit word, it's 10 bits coming from that cam, irregardless where they are shifted to.
-Les



<<<-- Originally posted by Obin Olson : Les don't make me angry!

do you have a LIFE?? I do and I spend EVERY waking moment doing the things I *must* do and the rest testing the camera and after that talking with you and the gang - calm down


tell me what you want 2 frames in 16bit? we do not have 10bit or even 12bit all we can get is 8 or 16 what do you want -->>>

Obin: please keep it civil. The reason everyone is asking you is
since you are the only one to have the camera yet. I'm sure we'll
be busting on Rob S's door when he gets one as well.

No-one is asking for shots 10 minutes after they post a question.
They are just asking (as I am/was) about certain types of shots
to understand how the camera works and wether it is good
enough to pay a large sum of money to buy a chip of their own.

Personally I'm not going to pay a lot of money and then have a
chip performing below what I was expecting. I'm NOT
saying that this performs below expectation. But we are all just
trying to figure out how well it works for movie making in regards
to noise, motion blur, rolling shutter and latitude.

Those are fair question. If you are busy and need time to compile
these requests that is very fair as well. But we would be great
if you can supply us with the information we need. No need to
get angry about a simple request. Just indicate whether you
can do it or not and we'll wait for when you have the time.

Again, no-one has requested HD frames in a movie. We are only
look at still frames which can be deliver at 640x480 for all I
personally care. HD is nice, but we've seen that. We are interested
in other features which don't care about resolution. So if you
have trouble with high data rates / frame rates / resolution just
lower some stuff.

Again we approciate what you are doing on this and I'm greatfull
for your last movie because it actually showed what we all have
been thinking about lately.

Now it is time for some more tests. If you can do them, do them
at your own pace and time. That's fine!

As Les indicates he his very knowledgeable and would only ask
the questions if it is important to ask them.

No offense to you at all Obin.

Thanks Obin, Steve, Les and all others that contribute!

i have lots of stuff on the disk drives now, I shot a bunch yesterday and have it all. It's all 16bit tiffs tell me what you want - frame number 1 and frame number 2 from a scene? in what format? what size? and waht bitdepth? I will extract what you want from the raw files

everyine should not forget that I have a very cheap lens on this camera..it will effect the image

Steve how do you adjust analog gains?

I need help in the edit department!

anyone care to poke around and try to find a codec that can be used to edit this footage on a standard pc?? sofar I can't edit on my 3.06ghz p4 with premiere pro at all....we all need to pitch in and find a codec OR NLE software that a standard computer can edit with...I am not sure if it's a datarate issue or a cpu load issue or both and more..SheerVideo can play fine on the system if you open the file in quicktime but can't play in premiere pro..how could this be? it's only 15-18MB/sec datarate!

Premiere Pro is no longer Quicktime native. It'll work with Quicktime files, but it's not like FCP anymore.

SheerVideo will playback fine on a Mac.

I think Avid's the only NLE other than...something obscure like Razor or Linux's Cinelerra...that would cut 10-bit.

Vegas does YUV 4:2:2 and can import/export all Avid 10bit codecs -- but internal processing is all in 8 bits (not that anyone's cared to check if this matters in real world tests...)

I'm of the opinion that, for the moment, we should be sticking with 8-bit, 4:4:4 uncompressed or realtime lossless compression -- downsize the data stream, and the project's needs become simplified.

Personally, I think the idea of lugging a PC around is laughable -- if the project's not portable then it's of little use to anyone looking to shoot: outdoors, on the run, rougher conditions, etc. What everyone's proposing so far is a good studio cam, and for those of us without studios...

That said, anyone know of realtime hardware encoders that we might use? Looking for something small, fast and cheap :D

I think we need to invite Dan Vance in on these talks. He built his system from scratch -- not around a pre-built camera core -- and did it all for under $3,000.

- jim

Have a look over at the Viper thread, I've summarised some new technologies, and potential camera configurations. Steve I also found some good fast cheap interface information and camera network compression idea that may help with your camera line. I also found reference to big tape backup, and low powered processing arrays that can be used for camera head compression, that canbe reprogrammed in C.

I forgot, MiniFlex motherboard form factor.

Thanks

Obin

I was going to ask about the lense, it is doing a reasonable job, the footage also has very little washout compared to the HD10 park footage, it is doing well.

I think Les was just after some standard stationary shots with reasonable lighting contrast in your normal bayer pattern tiff. Frame 1 then 2 then 1-2 seconds after another (though he only asked for two). Your existing outside shoots would probably be good (with some plain surface to really show trhe niose).

<<<-- Originally posted by Obin Olson : the footage downsized to DV and played on a big TV set looks just amazing! it would pass as 35mm to my eyes onscreen...it's so much more organic then dv or traditional "video" and yet is super high-res looking..like watching a feature film on DVD -->>>

Cool, that's what we need.


Steve

Actaully the HD10 uses some sort of complementary filter hybrid to get more res than Bayer.

I'm detecting a lot of light drop off in the pictures Steve, is it direct lighting or is it the filter squashing the blacks? It is like a strong ND filter, or 35mm adaptor, but the detail is still there when I turn the monitor up? Niose looks very good.

<<<-- Originally posted by Steve Nordhauser : Wayne on speeds: Yes, buffering in the camera or grabber would reduce peak speeds to average. Not sure if it is worth the cost. -->>>

Yes but 4+ MB or relatively slow memory for a behind chip buffer, is a realtively small cost compared to system costs (real costs). Actually some mebbeded processors have more memory than that. Arms and NEC chip are probably the best chioce I can remember. With processors like that you could also reprogram them to do some on chip manipulation (like with clearspeed parrallel array processor compression). Actually using a control processor with frame buffer and a clearspeed would be a good programmable comrpession platform.

<<<-- Originally posted by Steve Nordhauser : Now that I think about it, if you have separate color analog gain controls within the camera like the SI-1300 does, by changing them inidvidually, you are applying different color filters prior to digitizing. This means that you still have the dynamic range in that color as opposed to applying them in a post process step. I don't think you need color optical filters at all. -->>>

Robs:

Yes, I was going to suggest that, especially if that canbe computer controlled on the fly as well as with external controls. Those are other things we will need in the software eventually that would be desirable at capture: basic lite (too much gain will increase niose) clour balance, gain exposure control and shutter exposure control for field work ( I would add selectable auto focus, Iris (Through auto electronic slr lense), and image stabilisation but at lasss that is all upto us ;) and niose elimination (would help compression). Most of these would require analysis and control cammands rather than much extra processing, what do you think?

Eliot, Rob and Obin

Flash bootup, low power requirements (believe me a shoulder case with any normal CPU/fan is going to drive you or your sound tech nuts). ITX has low power, speed, Raid interfaces, and onboard flash. There are convertors also allowing you to hook a compact flash to a standard IDE channel.


The problem with flash is that it is really slow, you might be better off booting from disk. M-systems is also another place for flash drives. There are cheaper better alternatives to flash comming. Intel is trying to develope plastic memory, and Onvul or something is developing somethingn that uses material they use on Rewritable CD/s. There have been numerouse other scheems, but failed or normally do.


As somebody mentioned it works better if the OS is on a seperate drive, That's why I suggested 1GB or Ram and cleaning out the rubbish inbetween shoots, to keep most of the OS in virtual memory (or Ram drive, and use the same image everytime). If you do do virtual memory then USB2 external drive (to free a IDE channel) or flash could be used, as most requests should be comming from memory.

The embedded OS issue:
That is why I suggested Toas Intent/Elate platform, the emmbedded realtime virtual OS core is kB/s in size, very fast and efficent (but use/compile your C to their virtual code). These guys really know how to code (as I was trying to piont out a few days ago), it should be much better than windows. Both me, OAK (now Java) and Toas started around the same time on our VOS/s. Your code then can run (unmodified except for custom interface issues) unmodified on Playstation like machines, Mac, PC, Linux etc. As long as they have the VOS for that machine. They are light years ahead. It is used in many embedded consumer electronics, and actaully some of the consumer el giants are part owners.

ANother two OS/s of interest (they both use parts of Toas tech as well). IS QNX an old but very good Real Time OS with Unix capability, and Amiga OS (which is a rebadged version of Toas with their own custom libraries). These are among the best available.

You can goto the MS deevelopers website and check if you can download a exprerimental Windows embedded XP for free (there done that sort od thing in thepast with CE). Maybe there is information how you can strip down normal XP.

Thanks

Wayne.

And only a Meridian Avid or Symphony, or AVID D$!!

FCP will work fine at 10-bit. It's the cheapest 10-bit solution out there. Which means Obin that you could take your footage, render it in After Effects with the BlackMagic 64-bit (16-bit codecs), codec, and then export that 10-bit BM codec file back to FCP and play it back with no problems. It's a very nice solution.

You can see a sample of the codec here http://codecs.onerivermedia.com/enco...=bmd-10tri_osx, and here's a description from Marco from the website:

This codec uses 16-bit technology, but doesn't create a 40-megabyte per second file like the Cinewave 16-bit codec. No wasted disk space, no extra bits thrown out the window. For CGI/animation/visual effects artists, this is your codec.

So you can see the the Mac here is nicely set-up for this type of work. Not trying to be one of those obnoxious mac-pushers here, or a "I'm-better-than-those-PCee's" type of attitude. I just think that some here are overlooking the best tool (and only think of it that way, not as a platform) to do the job of editing this stuff at the highest quality with the least amount of pain.

oh, Jason can you download a small sheervideo file and try to edit on FCP HD?? do you have FCP HD? this would be a great test..I really want to see if we can edit this stuff at all...what about Sheer being 8bit...that sucks right? or should we do our color work in Combustion and then output sheer codec at 8bit and edit FCP?

Jason do you think we would get any realtime stuff even a fadeout in FCP with our footage in SheerCodec? or will everything we do take hours to render?

problem is that Cineform could do it for PC NOW and we have all PC systems in the office running premier pro and a pc videoserver ..I don't really want to switch to mac ...I wish cineform had a product forsale now for this system.....

Jason do you think premiere can't edit because it's a quicktime sheer file?

Good cameras normally take in 10-12bits process it and store in 8 bits, because the image manipulation leads to accumulated chromma error in the reds and such forth in 8bits. It is stored in 8 bits because that is the resolution of human site (actually lower but it is not scalled linearily). But for post production effects and editing I think it would also be benefical (as Obin has allready demonstrated).

Which leads me to a question fro Steve, the response curve for camera and human sight is not the same, are there any on camera adjustments for this or do we rely on post processing and higher bit rate?

<<<-- Originally posted by Jim Lafferty :
Personally, I think the idea of lugging a PC around is laughable -- if the project's not portable then it's of little use to anyone looking to shoot: outdoors, on the run, rougher conditions, etc. What everyone's proposing so far is a good studio cam, and for those of us without studios...

That said, anyone know of realtime hardware encoders that we might use? Looking for something small, fast and cheap :D

I think we need to invite Dan Vance in on these talks. He built his system from scratch -- not around a pre-built camera core -- and did it all for under $3,000.

- jim -->>>


HA, ha ;), reminds me of a picture I saw over at Tomshardware (I think) of a guy with his portable system, a tower PC strapped to his back like a backpack and all the rest of it, including the monitor strapped to his front. Now those pro camera men are fairly butch (lots of spinach and weight lifting etc) they should be able to handle something easy like that ;). Seriously by the time we finish portable is defintely going to be possible. But when we are finsihed we should put together a system like that and all gather at a NAB/CES and show off it off, then after we have stunned them in disbelief, bring out all the sleek sexy models (I mean camera cases) ;).

Hardware encoders (the good ones at least) are very expensive, I have suggested the clearspeed parrallel array processor that is progammable in C mysdelf as a good alternative, and in the home made thread there is threads to a Russian guy that designed his own in open source FPGA.

Vance's been around on the Home made camera thread before. Has anybody invited Scott Billups, he might be interested, he's done this sort of stuff before.

Good having you here Jim.

Thanks

Wayne.

<<<-- Originally posted by Obin Olson :
problem is that Cineform could do it for PC NOW and we have all PC systems in the office running premier pro and a pc videoserver ..I don't really want to switch to mac ...I wish cineform had a product forsale now for this system.....
-->>>

Yes we can do it. We are experimenting with real-time compression of CameraLink data, but our editing products are fairly mature. The problem is we have a mid-range real-time 8bit product (Aspect HD) and a high-end real-time 10bit product (Prospect HD). What this (indie) market needs is a mid-range 10bit product with a price to match. We need to work out how to make a suitable product without creating price pressures on our high-end solution. That means we need to be convinced of the market and the feature set that works for you.

There might not be a market here, as the constant pressure from user adopting free tools to kludge together a solution seems to drive a lot of the discussions. But I would love to be convinced otherwise as this seems like a lot of fun.

i would pay $$ for that system now

Just so you know Obin, that Boxx system starts at $22,995. Not cheap, and again, we've bought systems from Boxx for our 3d-guys, and they're nice, but often the base config is never enough, and addtions cost $$$. In othewords, you could easily be north of $30,000 very quickly.

Hey guys,

Just so you know, you're all griping about co$t of systems, we'll, when we're talking thousands of dollars here, just to give you a head's up, you get too expensive, and you might as well rent Cinealta's. I'm about to shoot a short film next weekend on the Cinealta, and it's only costing me $2,200 for the rental, that's a complete kit with waveform monitor, sticks, Zeiss digiprimes (the best lenes available) and insurance. On top of that, HDCAM is a proven workflow (albiet compressed), but still, it works nice with a lot of systems.

So, if you end up spending $20,000 minimum in the end for your system, then that's a five-week shoot on the Cinealta (you can get nice package deals for $4K a week)!!! You could possibly shoot 2 features with that money-if you don't pay anybody else ;-)

I just want to keep cost in perspective here-go too high and you might as well shoot with the real-deal instead of kludging something together.

Comments like Waynes are exactly thoughts that say there is no market. When HD shooting editing becomes everyday prosumer you will see $100 products, or in other words send me a list of a 100,000 customers for this $100 product. Today when get between $500 and $1200 for an 8bit HD products, and up to $23,000 for a 10bit product. Which will do much more than you need, yet is $100,000 cheaper than a similarly performing AVID. This is this market today. Do you all agree with Wayne that you do not value software? Software only real-time 10bit doesn't exist today, and so how could be valued at only $100. I'm I wrong to be frustrated by this?

Obin, just two or three raw bayer (B&W) frames from a capture sequence , at the higher bit depth would be enough. Any file format. The lens can be soft, it actually helps if it's defocus-ed a tiny bit. The shot should be without motion.
Thanks for all your hard work, Obin!

A very usable edit solution would be Adobe Premiere Pro, with the front end render engine replaced with a 16 bit one. This is what Cineform did. Too bad Vegas is stuck at 8bits!
I've been looking for a >8bit codec, and while a couple of companies do have them, they only seem to allow >8bit imports from the capture card that they sell. Like Bluefish cards.

A first step workable solution would be like the Prospect/Prem Pro system with a front end tiff or Cineon image sequence import.
These prototype cam systems can all be made to produce these >8bit images after the Bayer is removed. Non real time is fine.

Combustion can do primitive NLE stuff, but it's very clunky at it, and costs a lot.
Did someone say that Speedrazor does full 16 bit NLE ? Gotta look into that!

Cineform could also make a command line tool that reads image sequences and makes a high bit depth AVI for import into PremPro. That would work for me as well.

Economics take a back seat?
 

Wayne, your ecomonics do not work. That is what drives price, not greed, simple ecomonics. If my company (or any NLE company) could be profitable selling a $100 10bit HD product today, we would. That is at least years away. Your other suggested prices you were suggesting for an even smaller market, economics are still bad. I've been in this business (designing and marketing NLEs) for my whole engineering career, it is very competitive on pricing and features. I'm just hoping to inject some realism.

Les, It would be certaining fairly straight forward to convert tiff or Cineon image sequences into CineForm CFHD AVI format for real-time editing. However we don't have that yet.

A thought occured to me last night that is completely undercooked, but I figured I'd pass it along in the hopes that the programmers here might be able to use it --

One of the greatest challenges of this project is keeping the data flowing from the CCD/CMOS small enough to be compressed quickly and/or passed onto disks quickly and error free. So, aside from minimizing the data by going 10 to 8 bits, why can't we:

1) Split the frames in half, writing each half out to separate disks, or...

2) Write even and odd frames to separate disks

In the case of 1) I'm not speaking of interlacing, I'm speaking of somehow cutting each frame's data in half -- sending the parsed streams to separate drives, and writing a stitcher that re-assembles them back at the workstation.

And in the case of 2), I'm just looking to address the same solution differently. It seems to me that, given our (my) desires for variable framerates and not wanting to comprimise the quality of the stream -- and also given the substantial cost of a realtime compressor and our needs of portability -- these solutions may be viable.

Of course, I'm neither a programmer nor an engineer, so I might be talking out my ass completely :D

What say the pros on the thread?

- jim

Obin: I'll get back to you privately on gain progamming and copy the Robs. No need to be public on camera specific stuff.

Wayne on buffering: Memory in the chain only reduces the data bus rate from the peak to average - like going from 44MB/sec to 40MB/sec. It could at some serious $$ to the camera cost.

Jim on disks: Essentially, you get the same speedup you describe by using a RAID. 2 disks give you appox. twice the disk bandwidth.

Jim: that's one of the things I have been thinking about. This would
greatly reduce the need for any actual RAID system. You can
just hookup two harddisk. Although you would probably need
an extra IDE controller or one with more than 2 channels (if
you also have an OS drive).

To everyone with other OS thoughts: that might be a direction
where we or perhaps others might go. For now the attention
is on getting a custom software solution to work. Then we can
start thinking about porting and whatnot. Without the basic
platform there is nothing to port.

Les: didn't you want obin to do some tests regarding noise
as well? I personally would definitely like to see some shots
(from the same scene) at 8 and 10 bit exported as bayer (any
file format).

Then after this some motion blur tests would be nice, but perhaps
Rob can try that when he gets his camera in.

Hello, back again before the end of the week.

I have deleted the previouse post as I do not want to distract from the companies I was planning to approach in an effort to develope this market, to grow volume. Companies interested in mass market profits of Coal and Sugar.

Just looked at the posts:
Summarising: $100K example, poor.
Good business: With HD moving to large volume mass market (how many millions of cameras to be in the market is unkown). Loss leader to eventual low volume, maybe 1-10K (possibly 100k). Multiple product level marketing stratergy. Existing package coding, business and marketing, is paid for by eventual large volume from all HD, and the high end product. The new small features/code modifications (bit depth, bayer) for "Custom Cam" eventually will be needed for newer mass, and upper, market HD formats (except for cameralink controll) anyway. Just $10 dollers pure profit x10K is $100K profit that the company would not have gotten otherwise, for code modification that would take a $20K a year programmer a few months to implement, and that largerly will eventually need to be shared with newer formats. $100 pure profit then becomes $1 million dollers. But I agree it is too early to decide.

It is simple economics, some choose Microsoft economics, some choose Intelliegent Systems economics (makers of the "Compucolor I & II" the greatest colour computers of the mid 1970's). I have seen many fail.

Again, I don't wish to talk about it anymore, just a matter of two opinions.

<<<-- Originally posted by Steve Nordhauser :
Wayne on buffering: Memory in the chain only reduces the data bus rate from the peak to average - like going from 44MB/sec to 40MB/sec. It could at some serious $$ to the camera cost. -->>>

I mention this only as a way to reduce shutter times, and to reduce rolling shutter effect, over slower interfaces (USB and Erthernet) something that will become more important as mainstream camera resolutions increase. I've been around a long time with people in the industry (also used to spend most Friday mornings going through electronic engineering journals at Uni) and there are cheap ways (and a very limited number of suitable components) to do it rather than the expensive ways. I can discuss it further via email if you wish.

Les, Obin recently posted some footage (I assume that it is straight unfiltered bayer). It is not stationary, but then again the filter pattern will be.

About the issue of saving alternative frames between disks, this is something I suggested long ago (but not as sexy as RAID, or software Raid) not sure if it was here though. It is also the reason I suggested large main memory (aswell as stop the system from going to disk) to buffer the frames. Also notice the problem with HDD head over heating and going into cool down mode, by using a stratergy of maximising write speed and pulling back before this, while overlaping with other drives. I think that by doing this it might be possible to break the 50MB/s per drive barrier, but will need a lot of research (a drive manufacturer engineer might be able to advise on the stratergy).

Rob, the reason for your Windows slowing down FPS (mentioned in the wiky), is why I did my beginners to advanced perofromance programming overveiw post. You should be able to stop windows from doing that in an unscheduled manner.

I am not sure who thinks that $100 is the right price to pay for a CineForm plugin to edit 10bit. I would pay $1000 for a plugin and compression codec for editing in Native HD under premiere pro..the only other option for me is FCP on a MAC and I will spend about 5 grand for that system soon if we don't have a way to edit PC