4:4:4 10bit single CMOS HD project

[Ben Syverson]

I should add that unless the image coming directly off the Altasens sensor is as bad as the IBIS5 or Microns, you shouldn't need to even use 12bit -- and 10bit may even be overkill if the image is nice enough.

[Juan M. M. Fiebelkorn]

Logarithmic you mean?

[Les Dit]

Here is that dollar bill image grab from my JVC. I think to really compare, we need to post a slightly moving camera image, as the potential for aliasing and crawl is high with the details on the bill.
I put Ben's grab on there too, for convenience.
http://s95439504.onlinehome.us/dollar-bills.tif

The tif is about 3 meg.

-Les

[Jason Rodriguez]

Hey Ben,

I want the full 12-bits off the Altasens. My Canon D60 is 12-bits and it looks phenominal, with plenty of room to modify the image any way I want.

BTW, if you're recording a frame every N milliseconds, can't you get off a bit if you're not recording at the begining of every frame? Say I end up grabbign at the middle of a frame, won't that screw things up? Or will it wait till the begining of the next frame, but again, you're probably going to drop a frame somewhere like that.

Ideally you would grab both frames and then just dump one from the image buffer to disk.

Also the camera has to run at 48Mhz initially, with that info streaming into the card, unless they're doing something on the camera to knock that down. But unless they're padded bits, like you said, it's going to be 16-bits transferring across the cameralink cable.

[Rob Scott]

Jason Rodriguez wrote:
BTW, if you're recording a frame every N milliseconds, can't you get off a bit if you're not recording at the begining of every frame? Say I end up grabbing at the middle of a frame, won't that screw things up?

With the EPIX SDK, this won't happen because the SDK handles breaks between the frames for you.

Ideally you would grab both frames and then just dump one from the image buffer to disk.

Yes, I'm planning to support straight 24 fps and "48 fps-drop-every-other-frame."

[Ben Syverson]

Jason,

I'm not sure what the methodology is, but I mentioned the need for arbitrary FPS to Sumix, and they seemed to think it wouldn't be a problem.

- ben

[Juan M. M. Fiebelkorn]

Obin,
The expose-to-the-right isn't so right!!
Be carefull with that, they make some asumptions about how the binary scale works that are not correct...
Anyway the rest of the info is good...So don't expose too much to the right...Right? :)



Ben and others,

What do you think if, using a 12 bit sensor, I apply through LUT a conversion to 10 log on the RAW Bayer?

Would it be a nonsense?
It would give us a data reduction of around 5 Megabytes per second at 24fps for a 1280x720 source and around 12 Megs for a 1920x1080 same Fps..

[Wayne Morellini]

<<<-- Originally posted by Jason Rodriguez : Hey Wayne, can you share that with the group? -->>>

Not much, except things are developing as I predicted, and if we wait for the next cameras, or Rob's software, we should have a wider range of good options in cameras, main-boards, and maybe compression, to choose from. It really doesn't pay to rush out before suitable components are available, unless you want to experiment. I personally wouldn't mind a $1000 camera head, I'm still waiting to find out how much that $2K?? 3 chip Altasens 1080i/720p JVC HDSDI camera head will cost. You know there are multi mega-pixel still cameras for prices close to $100 (none really any good that i know of) but does a good 720p/1080i camera head really have to cost $1000-$3000 dollers?

<<<-- Originally posted by Obin Olson : that would be GREAT Jason..lets hope!! I see that the VariCam has lots of range even though it's 8bit...I wonder how they did that? it has way more range then run-of-the-mill video cameras

variCam is HEAVY...I wonder if I should ad weight to our camera at some point? sure makes for a steady shot -->>>

The problem is range has little to do with the amount of bit's used to represent it. 12 bits will go into 5 stops or 50 stops of range, the bit's represent the maximum amount of levels in the overall range, and you won't get those unless the camera is sensitive enough and noise doesn't wipe it out. Hence all my questions of sensitivity, range, noise and response curves for each colour (add highest resolution as well) for different gains, and target luminances (3 levels of each should do it lowest, medium and highest). If we had Only that (and lack of blooming smearing) can complete reveal the performance of a camera, even without a test image.

Thanks

Wayne.

[Jason Rodriguez]

that would be GREAT Jason..lets hope!! I see that the VariCam has lots of range even though it's 8bit...I wonder how they did that? it has way more range then run-of-the-mill video cameras

You can read about how they did it with this paper at http://www.hpaonline.com/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=236

Basically in a nutshell they've remapped the output of the CCD's so that it's not so high-contrast. They also added automatic gain in the darks, so you have to watch out when you CC'ing the stuff, since the shadows already have gain added and you don't want to add any more.

[Wayne Morellini]

For the "flash" among us a new card standard, 120MB/s and 2 Terabyte capacity, USB2.0 compatable, hide it behind a large stamp etc etc, now if only they were out and we could afford one ;):

http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20040805A4013.html

Toms have reveiwed the "sticky pod", for us to mount our cameras onto moving vehicles (though if I would mount a $3K camera to such a thing, I don't think so).

http://graphics.tomshardware.com/vid...806/index.html

They have done niose tests on small cases, ouch that is a lot more niosey than my tower case, which is itself too nioise for portable apps.

http://www.tomshardware.com/howto/20...ebones-38.html


Thanks

Wayne.

[Jason Rodriguez]

Crap!

Thats new card is smaller than Compact Flash and stores up to 2TB at 120MB/s!!!

Of course they're finalizing the spec next year, so I don't think we're going to see that until 2006 with our 6Ghz dual-core Pentiums and PPC's.

[Juan M. M. Fiebelkorn]

WOWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!!

Is this the death of Hard drives??

BTW, could someone point me to a raw capture sequence of at least 3 frames, to begin testing of a convertion and compression applet I'm working on?

[Rob Scott]

Juan M. M. Fiebelkorn wrote:
Is this the death of Hard drives??

I wouldn't get your hopes up too high (yet). It doesn't use any new technology that I could see, it appears to just be another packaging of standard Flash. The 2TB and 120 MB/sec are just attributes of the interface. A 1GB Flash card costs around $300, and I don't see this affecting the price. 2TB at that price would be around $600K (!)

[Wayne Morellini]

"Mass production for the new card will begin in early 2005." but it is still going to cost way too much, unless, you backup to tape or something. That 2TB is probably going to take years to get hear.

Also reading the new Scientist lately somebody has got the 3D 1cm cube, with 2000 Gigabyte, the stated limitation was reading and writing speed, which has been the limitation for many years stopping it going to market

Somebody posted this on that news article:
10 to >100 Terabytes of Storage

http://www.nanonewsnet.com/index.php...ub&tid=4&pid=5

It's a bit hard to glance through but it still looks like 3 to 5 years away, but then we can finally do Surround Super Ultra HD cheap ;)

Now, back to the final minutes, of the final episode, of The Apprentice.

[Jason Rodriguez]

BTW Wayne, those small enclosures you're talking about have big AMD or P4 processors in them, so they are going to be very loud.

Try something with Pentium M, that should be quiet.