New DIY HD Cinema Camera Project

[Jose A. Garcia]

Just a question: is Cineform Quicktime compatible already? Because I'd like to have full compatibility with Final Cut.

[Serge Victorovich]

Yes. You can easy change container avi<->mov without recompression.

P.S. Jose, do you like music of 80's ?;)

[Wayne Morellini]

Originally Posted by Serge Victorovich

I've 100% agree with Gottfried Hofmann.

CMOS->RAW BAYER->FPGA->COMPRESSED 5:1 RAW (alike CineformRAW)->HDD(SSD)

ELPHEL camera is sensor agnostic and only need a good codec to encode bayer raw at 5:1. Best codec for this task today is CineformRAW - NOT FREEWARE.
But David Newman (CTO of Cineform) also have interest in new cameras based on Cineform RAW.
http://dvinfo.net/conf/showpost.php?...31&postcount=4
http://dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=71873

From what I understand, yes you can upgrade, and people over at Elphel thread are doing that. I think I remember Andrey dropping hints of wavelet. The Dirac codec is freeware and for professional TV work streams, FPGA version is being done. I think they have been in contact with each other. What they are attempting is probably going to be relatively simple, but still aimed at 2:1.

I have been in contact with David about licensing Cineform RAW before. it is available relatively cheap in quantity on certain terms, on the camera side (but of course you also need it on the editor side).

H264 professional is interesting, but that Jpeg standard that Microsoft is trying to make, comparable to Jpeg2000 wavelet, might be easier. Likely somebody will want to make Open-source or Open core on these, and I wonder if anybody has already started. The advantage of these codecs is probably 2:1-3:1+ lossless, 4:1-6:1+ visually lossless (rough guess). In visually lossless you can start dropping contrast in the detail for entropy, lossless will look more impressive in that way.

[Gottfried Hofmann]

Originally Posted by Wayne Morellini

I wonder if PNG can be made any good, and if anybody has done Open core for it?

Judging from the documentation Micron offers an option to compress RAW Bayer still images using PNG.

[Wayne Morellini]

Thanks. Can you link me to the documentation? What style is it, hardware, fpga, software?

I wonder what the compression performance is compared to normal, should be just as good as many.

[Gottfried Hofmann]

Originally Posted by Wayne Morellini

Thanks. Can you link me to the documentation? What style is it, hardware, fpga, software?

I found it in the docs of the Micro CD Jose posted on page 10 of this thread:

Originally Posted by Jose A. Garcia

http://www.cus-cus.net/dvinfo/microncd.rar

Here it is.

The GetRawImage() function can return a PGN image, but it seems to be not Bayer Raw in this case. Also, it does read wether they do the compression on FPGA or in Software.

[Wayne Morellini]

Thanks for that, would probably take too much to download an full CD image. Be worth looking into, PNG has sophisticated lossless compression techniques, and if it comes free..

[Steven Mingam]

Well some smart guys didn't wait you for testing it out, CorePNG codec has been out for years now. It's slow and doesn't compress that well (well it depends on the content.. iirc it performs really welll animated content)

A good lossless video codecs comparaison :
http://www.compression.ru/video/code...s_2007_en.html

(not to mention a tremendous number of doom9 topics on the subject, like this one)

Nothing new under the sun, HuffYUV and some ffdshow VLC variant are the ones who provide the best trade off between speed and compression ratio.

[Wayne Morellini]

Thanks Steven,

But do they have open cores, or any? The problem is that like, h264, compression can vary an lot from the best because of implementation, so I wonder how good the CorePNG is, and if it is oriented towards picture and video scenes (video=blur). But if it's been done, obviously it doesn't mean they are going to improve it's performance. I am also, always curious on how an product goes on low noise footage, as it is tempting to test it on noisy images which is an disaster to some of the techniques used in PNG.

Just looked at the summary, and appears to get acceptable performance at slow rate, but still interesting at the fast end. You are implying this is FPGA, can it get much of an speedup from and better FPGA.

[Wayne Morellini]

Hmm, intre, and not FPGA?

[Gottfried Hofmann]

Thanks Steve for the Link to this excellent study.
As expected HuffYUV is the fasted method and has a ratio sufficient for this project.

[Steven Mingam]

@Wayne : i'm not really following you. I'm talking about lossless codecs, so the quality can't be impacted by the implementation, only the speed and the compression ratio. And this is not FPGA core or anything hardware, just software codecs, which is good anyway to choose the right one. We need the simplest one (because it's already damn hard to just write a huffman coding block in a fpga) and the fastest one (because of the video resolution and because FPGA aren't that fast, yes). The compression performance is clearly my last worry, any good algorithm will do 2:1 anyway.
That's why you can forget about PNG as you can see it's a very bad contender.
So before thinking of and ultra-sexy-but-complex codec, get real, we have to write it in a fpga and that's a very long and time consuming process.

Now if FedEx could deliver that package, it would be nice...

[Wayne Morellini]

Originally Posted by Steven Mingam

only the speed and the compression ratio.

That is what I am talking about, except I was talking about the possibility for an existing FPGA/Hardware PNG implementation (simpler than writing an new one) as people are looking at FPGA.

Just reading the rest of your post, politely, I think you are completely misunderstanding where I came from, which is much more realistic than writing an new FPGA. I don't mind if talented people want to do FPGA, I appreciate few can, even in the computer world, last time we had people wildly wanting to write FPGA but no real experience/talent (except for the guy that did one, that I was in step with, then that was only an straight raw recording, and he started with an non FPGA solution from what I know). Being totally real. If PNG existed in FPGA I would say go for it, not the easiest solution (going for Elphel lossless codec project, or software, is easier). PNG is not the most sophisticated codec in reference to video compression, if I can remember properly, I think they base it on an simpler codec, but it incorporates an number of different techniques. I think I came across PNG in relation to Jbig2/Fax compression, but have to look that up. Which is not the best for noisy images, but simple.

This all came out of mention that Micron supported some sort of PNG solution, if it's free then why not check it out. But as far as free FPGA compression cores, there is Dirac. And regular lossy wavelet hardware chips there is the JPEG2000 chips from Analogue devices. If I were programming FPGA, any of these things I would investigate before doing such an project.

[Wayne Morellini]

Spent most of the night looking at compression stuff, and I didn't see an reference of PNG using JBig stuff (though I think there is some crossover from earlier fax stuff) so I assume I was wrong in saying that.

[Serge Victorovich]

Guys, look at this GIGe camera head: http://mikrotron.de/index.php?en_cams_mikrotron_mc1325

1" CMOS, Global Shutter...