If it is comfortable on your shoulder that is what counts.

Your thoughts about other ENG-style cameras were sort of what i thought when i built mine, shoulder mounted cameras are huge, so a big computer on a shoulder shouldnt be so bad. I guess when it comes down to it build and balance probably matter more than actual dimensions. A poorly balanced small camera is probably less comfortable than a big one that is well balanced. Mine was not well balanced and I didnt get around to reorganizing, but that is often the case with computers since everything is usually mounted against a wall rather than situated toward the center/bottom for best balance. An internal skeleton to mount things onto would just add more weight though. Also, most ENG cameras have an in-set shoulder mount built in, so they are 1-2 inches less tall at the top of the shoulder than in front and behind the shoulder.

Worrying about size and power consumption make things very complicated very quickly so i can appreciate not wanting to worry about those things. But I would think anything ready for a real production environment would probably have to take those into account somewhat since you wont have much luck getting a lot of types of shots without a camera that can run outdoors and for extended periods of time, not to mention isnt just comfortable but safe and reliable.

So what do you do for power? ac cable out the back?

Daniel,

Did you develop the capture software, expand on elphel's code, or was it bundled with the camera device?

I'm really curious to see your rig! Very interesting indeed.

If it is comfortable on your shoulder that is what counts.

Your thoughts about other ENG-style cameras were sort of what i thought when i built mine, shoulder mounted cameras are huge, so a big computer on a shoulder shouldnt be so bad. I guess when it comes down to it build and balance probably matter more than actual dimensions. A poorly balanced small camera is probably less comfortable than a big one that is well balanced. Mine was not well balanced and I didnt get around to reorganizing, but that is often the case with computers since everything is usually mounted against a wall rather than situated toward the center/bottom for best balance. An internal skeleton to mount things onto would just add more weight though. Also, most ENG cameras have an in-set shoulder mount built in, so they are 1-2 inches less tall at the top of the shoulder than in front and behind the shoulder.

Worrying about size and power consumption make things very complicated very quickly so i can appreciate not wanting to worry about those things. But I would think anything ready for a real production environment would probably have to take those into account somewhat since you wont have much luck getting a lot of types of shots without a camera that can run outdoors and for extended periods of time, not to mention isnt just comfortable but safe and reliable.

So what do you do for power? ac cable out the back?

Sorry. I know you asked earlier but I forgot to cover that.

Yes in the back of the camera leads an AC power cable, the greatest shortcoming. There really is no chance of using a battery with this hungry system. I have been considering a car battery with an inverter but I doubt it would last very long at all.

A final thing is noise. This is a pc, which has to cool the CPU and will have 3 extra fans on the ram. The case will have a 140mm fan on the side, and a 80mm in the front cooling the PSU components. There may be another fan on the side with a duct to the cpu. Two hard drives on Raid 0 will only make things worse with spinning and grinding. This will all add up, even with very quiet fans of ~30 dBA sound on location will be a problem.

Daniel,

Did you develop the capture software, expand on elphel's code, or was it bundled with the camera device?

I'm really curious to see your rig! Very interesting indeed.

The capture software is mplayer for recording / preview. I have been expanding it to make it easier to work with the cameras by using SDL to get input and other libraries to set settings ect... I have not had time lately to work on it. I have to get ready for Saturday so im setting everything up to work on windows shortcuts and macros. If i have any issues I can use the touch screen to resolve any problems, but the touch screen is only for emergencies. Its not the ideal way to operate a camera.

I should probably just start a thread later and get this one back on topic :)

We're heading a bit away from the Sumix cam but, Daniel, did you consider a MiniITX board? They support up to 2Gb of ram, Core2Duo processors... And they fit in the palm of your hand. Some are even smaller and come fanless. In fact I'm thinking of getting one for the Sumix and build a standalone cam.

We're heading a bit away from the Sumix cam but, Daniel, did you consider a MiniITX board? They support up to 2Gb of ram, Core2Duo processors... And they fit in the palm of your hand. Some are even smaller and come fanless. In fact I'm thinking of getting one for the Sumix and build a standalone cam.

Yeah I did consider them, I would be interested to see how well they will do. But as I mentioned earlier size was not a deciding factor. At the time I was most interested in the peace of mind of having a quad core chip. Im probably just crazy and its overkill but this sure did turn out to be a great HD editing system.

Im guessing this is the ones you were talking about:
http://www.mini-itx.com/store/?c=32

I was talking about these in terms of ITX boards supporting socket 775 Core 2 Quad:

http://www.american-portwell.com/product.php?productid=16133
http://www.icpamerica.com/products/single_board_computers/motherboards/mini_itx/kino-9654G4.html (might not be good ethernet chipset for this application)
http://www.commell.com.tw/Product/SBC/LV-676.HTM (no PCI-e)
http://www.ipoxtech.com/ADE-6040.php (may not support quad)

Booting from flash, recording to a 2.5" HDD, and an undervolting the CPU and no dedicated graphics this could make very powerful compact system that could be powered by a small m3-atx psu. quad core with 4GB of ram you could take this on the road easily and probably fit it all in a box as small as 7"x9". might even be able to rig it to run on standard camera batteries. or pretty much any battery you throw at it that can handle the power draw (more likely NiMH/SLA than LIon, but then there are quadcore laptops running on LIon so it would probably be fine with the right battery). So basically like the Silicon Imaging DVR body that comes with the SI2K only twice as fast and probably waaay less expensive (but then again time is money).

If you dont need quad core and want to go with mobile processor (higher price, lower CPU and FSB clock, more efficient, more resistant to heat) then there is no shortage of ITX boards for merom processors...

http://www.logicsupply.com/categories/mainboards/intel

... Might be some santa rosa boards around if you look hard.

Oh yeah, we should probably get this thread back on track though :)

Well, since everyone planning to use a Sumix camera will need a computer I think this would be a legitimate topic...

Im pretty impressed with the ITX motherboards you brought up. Too bad I didn't see them before. I'm still a little skeptical if they have the same power as an ATX but things are looking promising. I wish I could see a benchmark, I can't find much data on any of them. In fact, I can't even find a price for any of the 4.

Sorry if I missed it but were are the links to some footage. Thanks.

Sorry if I missed it but were are the links to some footage. Thanks.

They have not released the camera yet...

They say they'll post some footage within the next days.

I'm not sure footage is as important as more information about software and workflow. I mean we all know what this altasens is capable of, and with cameras like these, footage doesnt mean much unless you are using the right LUTs and frame decimation settings etc. now if sumix were to post some video with synced audio (more than a minute worth ideally) to prove that they have a solution for making sure video will always sync to audio and for dealing accurately with recorded vs encoded framerates without extra hardware or software, then that would be something worth looking at closely.

I guess you are right about that its totally appropriate for this to partly be a system building forum. I just dont want to get too caught up in it since this is primarily about the sumix camera and there are plenty of other forums discussing hardware that can be used to build a portable dvr box. (plus people have a tendancy to link all kinds of new technology that isnt really relevant and never actually becomes available). I guess i'll just try to be as practical as possible when talking about ways to build a system to run the sumix camera.

I just noticed that Sumix has a sample image from the 12a2c up on their website... http://www.sumix.com/img/screens/smx-12a2c.png

Hopefully they will post footage. Do they have footage posted from their other cameras? I could not find any.

They posted something captured with their M73 model but it was small and didn't show the actual potential of the camera. I hope they post a 1080p60 clip.

By the way, the image looks really good.

Does it? I mean it kinda looks like the bayer algorithm could use quite a bit of work. I wonder what debayer mode that was taken in. The green channel has a pattern to it, and the other channels arent well interpolated so they seem quite steppy and aliased. Also there is an odd ghosting which is offset about 6 pixels to the right. Also the color channels dont seem to quite line up. All of those specular highlights on the water droplets especially on the red rose are noticeably offset in the blue channel, and if you look closely it looks like there is alternating red/blue banding, particularly noticeable on the white rose.

Other than that, noise level is great, although possibly masked by the patterning from the debayer. And the image could use a saturation boost, but that is trivial to do i suppose, and wouldnt be representative of the raw image. If this is an uncorrected raw image then im impressed, although it looks like it is at least gamma corrected. Seems possible this image is just using a bilinear debayer, although i cant imagine why they wouldnt use only lapacian debayer if they want to show off the camera. if it is their lapacian debayer, it may need some work...

Obviously there is a lot of potential here, but we shall see if sumix is able to unlock that potential enough to make this camera a worthwhile investment for those of us interested in inexpensive digital cinema.

I think if the price is right, what I'm seeing will work for me. If I can sit through a movie made with this thing and not be drawn to the flaws in the aethetics of the image itself, I'll buy it. I just had a conversation with somebody about 92khz 32-bit audio capture and how it was wasted space capturing all that extra data when people don't hear much difference past 48khz 24-bit. I think the same thing might apply here.

It won't cost nearly as much as the SI 2K system, so I don't expect it to look nearly as good--yet it almost does already (to my eyes).

I.... I just had a conversation with somebody about 92khz 32-bit audio capture and how it was wasted space capturing all that extra data when people don't hear much difference past 48khz 24-bit. I think the same thing might apply here....Your right....but I think in this scenario, just like in video, the idea is that it's better to oversample, getting as much info as you can, and then downconvert. 92khz 32-bit might be overkill though...I myself just stick with 48khz 24-bit.

Wow Noah!! All that from just an image?? Calm down man!

The only thing I don't like about that image is that the whole scene is a bit dark and yet all highlights are overexposed. I'm looking forward to seeing more images or footage.

And again... What else do you want?? You're getting almost the quality of a SI2K for 2 grand!

:P

Sorry if I sound like a downer, but I'm trying to be realistic. I mean there is a reason we dont just all go out and buy a bunch of altasens sensors from altasens. It is useless to us without having a worthwhile system around it.

I wouldnt worry too much about the poor highlight handling yet, if the gamma isnt corrected correctly and image exposed accordingly, things end up linear. remember raw sensors react linearly to light. in the case of 12bit as this camera is, there are 4096 possible luminance levels, and the whole upper stop of light (top ~10% of the brightness of the scene) is represented by all of the values 2048-4096 (50%-100%). most people arent use to seen raw sensor images uncorrected, so this will look off.

lemme know if ive gotten any of this wrong. But I sure know working with the M73 if you leave the gamma at the uncorrected default value, things look way too high contrast. Youve gotta be able to monitor with the gamma correction or LUT in effect or it gets pretty tough to judge where middle grey is supposed to be.

Im pretty impressed, thats great.

There is a pattern or something to it. I hope its not more obvious in a video. If there is a constant fluctuating pattern it would be very noticeable.

Also there is some kind of dark line going across the image just below the flower heads.

I may have already mentioned this, but keep in mind that silicon imaging came out with a similar industrial camera head almost 3 years ago, granted it was $5k (wonder how much it is now). They took that and made the SI2k eventually, but ive never heard of more than one person trying to use the SI-1920HD-RGB for digital cinema even though it is less than 1/3 as expensive as the si2k mini.

The thing about HD on cheap industrial cameras is that $10k on a proven camera is an investment, whereas $2k on an industrial camera that is missing even one essential feature is likely $2k down the drain.

Dont get me wrong though, I'm still hoping sumix will come to this forum and tell us about all the amazing features they are including to make this camera head perfect for digital cinema and completely make all of my concerns irrelevant. I'm even thinking about cancelling my plans to build a new (my 3rd) DIY 35mm adapter since i sure wont need one if my next camera is a sumix altasens. Only time will tell, im just suggesting we not hold our breaths till we get real details.

Also there is some kind of dark line going across the image just below the flower heads.

are you looking at it on a trinitron?

Looks quite good to me... I'm also curious if this is raw or not??

Noah - If they allow access to fine tune the settings you could help us all get the most out of the sensor... right?

No, im on a 37" lcd

Im not crazy, the line is there :P

http://www.buysmartpc.com/temp2/smx-12a2c-line.jpg

I tried to bring it out a bit so its easier to see.. but its defiantly there.

I tried to bring it out a bit so its easier to see.. but its defiantly there.

Ah. I see. good eye...

On my b/w version, what is that grain on the areas out of focus? Is that sensor noise?

Thank you all for the feedback you are providing in this forum.
This camera is new and we are just getting use to tuning the sensor's settings for improving images. The debayaring algorithm is really not a limitation. The key is to produce low noise 12 bit raw video and provide accessibility to all features of the sensor. Depending on optics, illumination, etc. the optimal debayering will be different. Although We will keep improving a few default debayaring algorithms, eventually it will be up to you to decide what suits your needs and share what you will find among yourselves. As we will upgrade to newer and better sensors you will also need different algorithms for everything.
This camera has really impressive possibilities built in it that which will be utilized as new firmware software upgrade will become available.

As we will upgrade to newer and better sensors

Any plans to move toward the altasens bitsdream sensor eventually?

Thank you for joining the discussion!

that graininess in the out of focus areas i believe is that green-channel pattern i was talking about you can see it if you display only the green channel

actually im not totally sure what it is, it does appear in the other channels it seems

Noah, can some of those anomalies be avoided using a better debayering algorithm?

I don't mean to sound like im nitpicking. Im just so excited that im probably over examining it.

The image really does look great, much better then what I get with the 333 in almost every way. I hope they post more pictures and a video soon.

I'm sure the color offset could be fixed with an improved debayer. the other stuff im not sure.

No news i guess? I've been using 16mm film more lately and it makes me realize how wonderful a nice inexpensive altasens camera would be. all that latitude and resolution and a big enough sensor not to have to use 35mm adapters, all without replacing mags, spending money on development/transfer... Even if one factor doesnt quite work, at this price it would still be a great camera. With the new Intel Penryn cpus that just came out, a portable quadcore capture box seems even more reasonable (or it will when the desktop versions are released, needing FB-DIMMs would probably kill any chance at portability).

Sitting at the edge of my seat... Its past October and nothing so far.

I sent them an email last week trying to get an update on when the camera will be avaliable to buy... Have not heard from them since, which troubles me.

Im debating if I should buy the first version or wait for the 2k sensor to be released.

well i wouldnt expect to be able to buy it yet, i believe they told me the prototype version would be available in mid-november, and they will add features over the following 3-4 months. It is not totally clear if those features are all software activated or if the hardware will be completely different once all the development is complete.

It is not totally clear if those features are all software activated or if the hardware will be completely different once all the development is complete.

I'd like them to clear that up as well...

Either way, i would probably hold off on buying the camera right away... unless you are a developer or have lots of money sitting around or are an alternative imaging methods philanthropist/early-adopter who is willing to buy an in-development camera just so you can show us all what it can do and post a ton about it and we'll love you for it.

BTW it would appear there is a new sample video from the 12a2c on sumix's website. its at some odd 35.9583 fps framerate... my hope is that is the framerate chosen because it is the highest 8bit 2:1 frame decimation framerate available at 1080p, since it is almost exactly 75MP/s (camera would be running at its max 150MP/s). the video itself isnt that informative though... just a lot of resolution and low color saturation (but thats normal for uncorrected raw i believe).... i just wonder if that framerate is any indication of some difficulty accurately and consistently setting a particular framerate.

To my inexperienced eye, there appears to be a problem with the debayer algorithm that was used... visible as a grid pattern in the footage. I wonder if they would be willing to post the RAW footage so that the more experienced among us could try out different debayer algorithms. It does seem that the other issues (horizontal line, ghosting, etc) were dealt with, or at least not present in this shooting environment -- though it is hard to tell with such a dark shot.

I am still excited that this camera will yield amazing results, and look forward to seeing more footage.

BTW it would appear there is a new sample video from the 12a2c on sumix's website. its at some odd 35.9583 fps framerate... my hope is that is the framerate chosen because it is the highest 8bit 2:1 frame decimation framerate available at 1080p, since it is almost exactly 75MP/s (camera would be running at its max 150MP/s). the video itself isnt that informative though... just a lot of resolution and low color saturation (but thats normal for uncorrected raw i believe).... i just wonder if that framerate is any indication of some difficulty accurately and consistently setting a particular framerate.

Here is a .WMV of the clip, color corrected and slowed to standard 24fps:
http://solomonchase.com/sumix.wmv

Just thought I'd also mention sumix now has a "sample videos" section of their website. they posted some more videos with the 12a2c camera. seems like they would be better off posting in some format besides uncompressed rgb avi and it might be worthwhile for them to apply an LUT or something. might also be interesting to see a video in their raw format once they release their software for processing the raw video.

looks like sumix has a new video that is 1080p60. thats pretty impressive, for some reason it is mono, but since there is no extra overhead for color capture, i imagine raw capture at the same rate should be possible. they must have their compression scheme working to be able to push 60fps at 1920x1080 over gigE... would be great to get some real updates from them. all of the lapacian color videos still have some odd patterns on them, the pattern is not visible at half res, but at full res, the pattern sure is weird, it's somewhat maze-like. im not sure how else to describe it, those sure are some sharp pictures though.

Thanks for the heads up on the videos.

They are indeed sharp, although the patterns are distracting. I found them to be most prominent in the yellow colors. I hope its something they address soon.

Tuning the sensor in this camera has been not so straight forward to get optimal images for various frequencies and illuminations. We are now ready to post more sample videos with 1080p60. We have some difficulties with FPN which is higher comparing to our other cameras with micron sensors. However random noise is not even detectable at unity gain. With extra 15 dB gain we see some noise comparable to that of our lowest noise camera SMX-M72C without gain. This is very encouraging as proves not only the sensor is not noisy but our electronics/PCB design has been satisfactory and changes will not be needed for the time being.
We are considering to move to newer sensor P4562-3T as quickly as possible and limit this version of the camera with P3562 to production of 20-100 cameras. Therefore, this version will be more like a collector item. By the way, the case is made of military corrosion resistant aluminum alloy in one block with only the faces screwed. The inside is fixed so solid that it can take several hundred G shocks with out losing the sensor alignment.

The sharpness in images that have not been debayered by a good algorithm is natural. The difference in the levels of neighbouring pixels is always there because each area has different levels in each of the three colors and each pixel can only have one of the three colors. So, the material will have high frequencies that are not present in the real optical image. If you don't debayer at all, the image is even sharper because the bayer grid stands out.

good to hear from you farhad and john. that is one of the most exciting things about that range of altasens sensors, the latitude/low noise.

regarding the bayer artifacts, that is a bit above my head, but the lapacian bayer on the M73 camera seemed quite useable to me, certainly fewer artifacts than what we are seeing with this new camera. anyway im sure sumix knows we are counting on them to make the debayer as clean as possible, it certainly will make a big difference regarding whether the camera appears attractive as a digital cinema camera.

and in terms of build quality, sounds sturdy, my M73 sure is sturdy, but the paintjob seemed pretty iffy and the black coating would rub off on my hand, i hope this has been improved with this camera. the new camera does look better balanced and a bit more substantial, which is good. the other sumix cameras are nice in their simple design, but its not that conducive to attaching to a tripod or rig since there is little surface contact with a tripod plate or rod system plate. this new one looks like it could be better in that respect.

How much easier is it to debayer a single image, as opposed to a video sequence?

The rose image debayer seemed much cleaner to me, but I am new to digital video and still do not fully understand it all. I do understand that other factors come into play when dealing with motion, but I am just wondering if a different algorithm was used or if it is just that video is harder to work with.

Farhad, Is the difficulty "tuning" you mentioned responsible for some of the horizontal and vertical lines that seem apparent in both the videos and the rose image?

Will the new sensor help with these difficulties at all?

Noah, For this camera we are using special "hard anod" coating that can not easily be scratched. This coating is usually used for gears and moving parts and quite sturdy. We are considering to use this coating for all other cameras also. However for industrial uses the cameras are not touched regularly.

Seth, correct, tunning changes the FPN and not easy to figure out how. New sensor must have reduced FPN. Altasens claims that in Altachrom family sensors the FPN is completely removed. But the sensor with 2/3" format will be only available end of 2008.
All debayering in the sample videos are done real-time. And our engineers insist on optimizing the performance/speed in real time. I think only with heavy statistical processing and only off line we can bring the best RGB images out of the raw data. Algorithm must look at statistical data, image parameters, many reference images for correcting for FPN, etc. In my graduate work (many years ago) I developed some non parametric statistical methods for estimating a desired signal from multidimensional data. For this you need example training data. For example samples of non-moving images at low frequency can be acquired and used as training data for algorithm to match the high frequency images to them.

There is little difference in debayering video and still images. There are some issues that have to do with how debayer stands heavy processing (which debayer algorithms are not designed for) but still image quality should look good even in a realtime debayer solution anyway. It all depends on the debayer technology, its efficiency and quality.

This algorithm does more than 400 720p frames per second on an average pc and it doesn't look that bad, does it? It can run multitrack 1080p editing easily.

http://img112.imageshack.us/img112/1435/dbframevb0.jpg

This 2/3" 1080p cmos camera is similarly priced to an 1/2" 720p CCD solution, so if anyone does not need CCD, it could probably be added to our camera sensor options. Does it output uncompressed? The image appears to be very unsaturated in the flower and phone samples though and it does appear to not have very clean shadows. Similar to an old Altasens head I tested.

Reconstructing RGB from Bayer images indeed is a fascinating subject. The more information is preserved in the Bayer images the better the result using an "optimum" algorithm. I would prefer a sensor that even has more FPN but preserves the information rather than a sensor that does not have FPN but also smooths out visual clues that are used by eyes. Early vision processes in eyes before even the transmission to the brain detect such features as edges, motion, 3D from motion, 3D from shading, enhances color and contrast, etc. Therefore a good deBayering algorithm must preserve as much as possible those features used by early vision. Removing of FPN is possible with intensive use of conditional histograms. Any spatial filtering must preserve or even enhance those visual clues used by eyes. There is no easy way but to experiment. First finding out what sensors are more information rich, it helps make our experiments more productive.

Even minimal artifacting is distracting though, while a small reduction in test chart performance will only be visible in test charts and only when comparing side by side. A natural image is a lot more important than test charts. I remember the test charts after the introduction of a low resolution HD camera, shapening setting was probably at maximum, there was aliasing all over, the contrast transition profiles were unacceptable due to tons of overshoot, there were 5 pixel halos, and everytbody was arguing about the resolution shown in the charts! A properly implemented imaging system has smooth transition profiles with zero overshoot and is free from artifacts. Film is like that, good scanners and cameras are like that when operating with good settings, and every single scientific imaging system has these qualities.

I believe there is a bug in the debayer implementation in the sample with the mobile phone. It shouldn't look like that. This is not sharpness, this is 100% artifacts. Try creating a bayer image out of a high quality test image by keeping only the color info a bayer sensor would get, debayer with that algorithm and compare with the original image. It's not detail, it's artifacts that are not present in the original optical image. I have seen implementation errors before, the Fire-I app I tried when we were starting this project has a bug in the blue color debayer compared to any other bilinear implementation and still nobody noticed:)