Fantastic!

High-color saturated images.
High-luma contrast images.

Overexposed scene. Fill up a room with as much light as you have.

And to make it really cool to compare, the DV versions.

Don't remember if this was ever asked. This will all work at 24P, 24PA, 30P, and 60i? How does it handle this sampling rate?

Peter, in the process of putting some test frames together. Will have to wait until tomrrow to take some outdoor shots, but for now i'm just re-taking the last shot i posted without the speckles.

Yes, it will work on every mode, although there is no difference between 24P and 24PA at the RAW level, because there is no pull up/down whatsoever. you get the actual 24/30 frames.

Juan

Here's a quick and dirty(not any more) frame. It's very dark, and i'm so happy i got rid of the speckles i can't color-correct straight...so i just uploaded a PSD file with the raw R,G,B layers for you to color correct(align?) at will:

http://expert.cc.purdue.edu/~pertierr/cap7_RAW.psd

Next, i'm gonna try some different lighting and up-rezing....

If anyone was trying to download the .RAW film strips for the 3-second clip, i apologize because i went over quota and had to remove them. I will put together a clean clip with no dummy pixels...

Juan

Why are the frames your posting tilted?

Because the camera casing is still open, and that is the position that puts less stress on a flex cable which units the main body to the LCD half-shell.

Very clean image. There still are some speckles though. Not many, just a few. Must still be some noise in the lines.

So, once its closed you can post some images that are right-side-up?

Yeah, i forgot to note...since radio shack was closed, i had to borrow a couple of capacitors from my lab and I just grabbed a couple of random capacitances...

There is so much I can do with the few i have, so this is the closest i can get. I need a capacitor a bit smaller than this to get rid of all of it, but i'll get it tomorrow.

Mark,

Yes, and actually i'm going to try one right side up tomorrow if I can get it to sit right.

I figured the angle wouldn't be a problem for assessing the color and clarity of the image...

Fantastic Juan! I've been following this thread very closely. What impressed me most about your last image (the noiseless one) was the latitude it had for correction. I've had to master a lot of footage over the years and this grab was impressively forgiving when correcting for levels and white balance.

Count me in for a mod as well! I trust you'll keep it reasonable =)

If you can get it upright (or even if you can't) it would be great if you could shoot a few different test charts. I'm particularly interested in the gain in resolution that seems pretty obvious by this image and the test HD upres I did of it. If I remember Scott's book correctly, he compared two images side by side of that focus chart... one that was after DV compression and one if a person could "hypothetically" pull the image straight off the chip. Looks like he's gonna have to put out a 3rd edition, huh? Anyway, the book has some sample color charts, (and that focus chart could give us an idea of resolution if you can't find a more detailed pro chart). Record it to DV tape to so we can see the difference.

John

This is my first try and very bad, but i decided to post it anyway since i need to go back to studying.

I'm having a lot of trouble focusing with the tiny DV viewfinder. Even a small change is evident in the RAW R,G,B frames, but until i build a method for pre-viewing the raw footage in real time this will have to do.

The frames are unaligned in adition to being slightly off focus and the rez chart is not perfectly aligned since I can't see the entire frame of the CCD in the viewfinder...

http://expert.cc.purdue.edu/~pertierr/rez_RAW.psd

And yes, those few red speckles will be gone tomorrow when i find the right cap size. :)

TKS Juan,
it's time to change skin and to become one ...Viper!

If you capture 3 seconds worth of frames while you slowly attempt to focus, you should be able to find the frame in your sequence that is most in focus. Its probably only four or five focus points in question, so just focus slowly through them on the viewfinder.

John

Outdoor shot, very dark because it was with ND2 on. completely RAW in photoshop format...push the levels/curves hard, the info is there :)

http://expert.cc.purdue.edu/~pertierr/leaves_RAW.psd

I've got DV counterparts of all this, in the process of transferring all the stuff...

Another outdoor shot...this one makes a bit more use of the dynamic range. There are some speckles in the sky, which will be fixed with a larger cap, haven't had time to get it.

This is completely RAW, but what semed to work for me was to collapse the layers into one, and drop down the RGB level upper margin until it meets the edge of the histogram.

I'll post the DV frame soon...according to DV, the sky, road and houses are white.

http://expert.cc.purdue.edu/~pertierr/cap9_RAW.psd

Very excellent work Juan. I've been following this post for quite some time now and am constantly impressed by your findings.

Lately I've been thinking about getting a DVX100A, but feel that your modified (Juan-ified?) DVX100 would be a much better choice. Unfortunately, the DVX100 is pretty hard to find these days, but the DVC80 (the DVX100's interlace-only, non-filmlike counterpart) is still available. Will this modification work with the DVC80 as well? And if so, will it be as capable of recording 30fps progressive and the wider color/brightness range that you're achieving?

I have a feeling everything will translate to the DVC80 just fine since it is the exact same optical and ccd setup as the DVX100, from what I understand. Since you're pulling the data straight off the ccds, then the digital capabilities of the camera shouldn't come into play... at least that's my uneducated theory.

Nicholi,

I would have to see the technical manual for the DVC80 to know for sure. However, i too think that it probably is layed out in a very similar way, and the critical aspect is actually not the CCD's but if they share the same internal circuitry.

My mod will work exactly the same on either the DVX100 or DVX100A. However, both cameras are identical up to the A/D converters so my mod will produce the same output on both, and thus there will be no advantage to having the Advanced model, unless you want to use the DV output for something.

Cheers!
Juan

Here is my 'best guess' color correction for the last capture, and the DV counterpart. The DV frame might not be exactly the same frame but it is within 24 frames of the correct one :)

http://expert.cc.purdue.edu/~pertierr/cap9_RAW.tif
http://expert.cc.purdue.edu/~pertierr/cap9_DV.tif

OMG Juan, I am at a hotel with the laptop...I just downloaded your TREES shot....it blows my mind what you can do with that image! I would have said it was trash that dark....this is amazing!

this stuff is looking so good I almost want to forget my HD camera project!

Just discovered this thread a couple of days ago, I really think it's cool what you're trying to do/doing. In regards to the noise issue, I'm not positive but I could've sworn I saw some noise in the DV footage as well, so I'm thinking that it's probably not a result of the tweaking or 4:4:4 process. I'm curious as to how the actual image capturing (sequences) is coming along, Also much like adam mentioned earlier I wonder if this can be done with any other camera (specifialy the xl1) But hey it looks awesome so far (especially the tree's raw file) And I can't wait to see how the whole thing reproduces a moving picture!

Juan:

The tree shots are quite impressive. It just makes realize how I hate the DV Codec. I've always suspected the CCD's latitude was for more than "video" was claimed and your results really "highlight" that.

Juan:

I did some analysis on the RAW Tiff on the noise.

In the TIFF, the noise is a single pixel that register either 0 or 1 in Green channel.

The adjoining pixels are perfect and have the same R & B pixel values as the noise pixel.

To my eye, it looks like an error in writing the green pixel value.

stephen:

Thanks for the encouragement! I am pretty impressed myself with the results, and these frames are part of clips, but i have a few more lines of code to write before I can post the entire clips in color frames, and i'm also juggling finals :)

About the noise, i found out what was causing it, and it just takes a larger capacitor to fix, but i haven't had time to get it today. I added a smaller capacitor than what is needed which is why there is must less noise in these pictures...the turning point was finding that the capacitor was needed :) now it's just a matter of buying the right one...

It was just ground-loop noise in the lines.

Juan

So I wonder why everything gets substantially brighter between what you're pulling off, Juan, and the DV encoding. Is this simply the camera's own color correction function doing this to the image. How could a person get a sense for the final look of the lighting on this mod... from this DV frame, it seems that what you're seeing in the viewfinder is very different from the frames you're pulling. And you said you even color corrected this version too... How much darker was it pulled straight off the chips?

I think the best thing about these two frames is the red in that chair... look at all those blockies in the DV clip. In your capture version it's prestine beautiful red.

John

John,

It's not that everything gets brighter, it's just that the 8-bit DV footage clips at a much lower brightness. The reason for this is that given that the DV format standard is 8-bit but the images are captured in 12-bits, the engineers at Panasonic had to decide where to sacrifice the bits that would be missing in the DV footage. They decided to sacrifice hi-end brightness, but gaining more low-level detail. They could've set the white at the saturation of the CCD's and get the same latitude i'm getting, but then they would get much less dynamic range because the 8-bits would be spread over a larger area.

You're right about the viewfinder, it shows you what the DV footage is. Even though the viewfinder is not totally useless, there will be a way to preview the RAW footage out of my device.

>And you said you even color corrected this >version too... How much darker was it pulled >traight off the chips?

The RAW, uncorrected photoshop file is at:
http://expert.cc.purdue.edu/~pertierr/cap9_RAW.psd

That totally makes sense, and explains why the whites are clipped the way they are. And there's no question that you're getting amazing latitude, but mostly I was referring to the low-levels and mid tones. Compare for example the shady area inside the trees. That also appears substantially darker than your DV clip. If it was only due to the way the 8-bits in the DV codec are distributed, then wouldn't the whites be clipped, but the darks and midtones be the same, or at least an approximation. They're substantially darker to my eye.

I did a color correction of the PSD you posted, trying to match the aproximate darks and midtones, while keeping the sky completely intact... it's pretty amazing to see that kind of image, I'll tell you that. Congratulations!

John

i'm observing the cap9 imgs:
1
in the DV frame there's the "same" (or worse) noise that is present in the raw frame
???
Is this caused by the presence of your gear in the circuitery?
If not there's something wrong on your DVX!

2
the DV frame seems to be interlaced: why?

PS
I'm sorry for the dryness of my english but... you're my man!!!

About the noise in the DV frame, i just noticed it and realized that I didn't unhook some test equipment while i was capturing and thus added yet another ground loop...

Now, i have no idea why this is interlaced. It was definitely captured in 24P mode, but apparently it got interlaced when i captured it in FCP or put it into Shake to grab the frame...that's strange.

Juan

How are you getting YUV signals from the ccd's? Aren't they RGB ?

Also: look at the sustained transfer rated for hard drives, not the interface burst rates. Big difference.

Les,

1.)I'm not getting YUV from the CCD's, i don't think it has been claimed otherwise.

2.)The sustained rates for drives IS what i've been looking at. Right now, i am capturing RAW data clips continously on a WD EIDE drive that i bought two years ago. I can capture as long as i want and the data is free of errors and continous. I have tested continous raw video captures up to 15 minutes in length with no problems.

Juan

Jesus........What a Thread !!!!!!! I must confess I am wet !!!!!

Juan you are incredible...

<<<-- Also: look at the sustained transfer rated for hard drives, not the interface burst rates. Big difference. -->>>

Firewire doesn't have a burst rate -- you're thinking of a half-assed format like USB 2. FW400 is sustained 400mbits/sec, FW800 is sustained 800mbits/sec.

Granted, very few harddrives can max out FW400 (50 megabytes/sec), and I don't know of any non-RAID, out-of-the-box harddrive that can max out FW800 (100 megabytes/sec).

If you go to http://www.lacie.com/ you'll see that they have a bunch of cheap FW800 drives that can do anywhere from 55 to 88 megabytes/sec (a nice cushion for Juan's ~35MB/sec). Most pros I know prefer LaCie for high-speed Firewire applications; I know one guy who does uncompressed HD on a PowerBook over two FW800 buses using LaCie drives. He was saying that the LaCie drives were the only ones that could take it...

- ben

Ben speaks the truth :)

I myself use the first LaCie FW800 drive that came out, a 200GB unit. Every benchmark i've run yields a ~70MB sustained write rate, which is more than enough what is needed for this application.

However, like I said, right now the system is not capturing to the Lacie drive but rather directly to a 120GB Western Digital WDC1200BB which i bought a long time ago. I haven't run any benchmarks, but it handles the continous writes perfectly.

I will be done with my finals on thursday afternoon, so i will finish writing the code to handle the blue frame strips and upload a clean clip in raw RGB frames....

I also can't wait to watch one of these clips uprezzed to HD on TV/projector....

Juan

Ben:

Lacie does not manufacture hard drives or hard drive chipsets. All they are doing are getting IDE drives from Maxtor, Hitachi, Seagate and/or WD and putting them into an external enclosure with a firewire (and/or USB) chipset.

Any other manufacturer or user can do just the same with identical drives and firewire chipsets. Lacie has no properiatary technology to boost the speed of their drives (unlike Medea).

Lacie is just repacking components (doing it well, especially with their big drive series), but I just put a 500 GB RAID 0 setup in my computer using Hitachi 250 SATA drives for $390. The Lacie drive goes for $580. An external box (firewire, USB and/or SATA) with RAID chipset runs around $100 if you must have it external. As long as you pick the right chipset, you save almost $100 over Lacie plus Lacie only warrants drives and box for one year whereas my Hitachi drives come with 3 year warranties.

I'm aware that LaCie doesn't manufacture the actual drive mechanism.

However, an external harddrive is more than a drive mechanism and an Oxford chip. There's a lot of supplemental electronics, and it so happens that LaCie is very, very good with that electronics.

Their latest line (the "D2 Extreme") is far faster than their first generation FW800 drives, even though I'm pretty sure they were both based on the Oxford 922 chip, and used comparable drive mechanisms. Clearly, they've got a line on how to put together a drive.

But don't take it from me, talk to any video pro who relies on raw speed from the Firewire bus. If you're pushing the envelope, you're using LaCie...

- ben

Well, I'm not a hard drive engineer, but a Lacie external drive only has three components: drive(s), a chipset (including the RAID0 bridge) and firmware. The extreme uses the Oxford 912 chipset for improved performance, not the 922.

I suggest you read this http://www.barefeats.com/fire44.html for more info. Note the Hitachi drives I just added beat the Lacie drive handily.

I'm not hard drive engineer either (and obviously get my Oxfords mixed up), but if you crack open a case, you'll see a drive and a board -- there's a lot more on the board than just a controller chip. I'm pretty sure LaCie designs their own boards.

I'm not generally given to brand loyalty/mysticism, but few friends and I have used LaCie for many years, and have never ever had a hard drive crash. Other friends have used WD, Seagate, Maxtor, Que, OWC, and they have all suffered catastrophic crashes. I know this is probably 99% what actual internal drive is used, but... there it is. Maybe it's just exceptional QA at the plant.

I must say, RAID is a whole separate issue, and you're comparing an internal RAID to an external one. To use a hated 80's phrase, "nuff said."

Anyway, this is OT...

- b

Ben:

I'm glad you've never had a hard drive crash, but Lacie used the same WD and Maxtor drives you claim are unreliable. I've had and supported thousands of drives over the years, including Lacie and they've all crashed. Brand reliability varies between model, batches, runs and a lot of luck is involved with it.

A good warranty and good back is always best.

Per electronics, the board is just what holds the oxford bridge (and in models with RAID, the RAID controlller). Note all Lacie "Big Drive" and "Big Drive Extreme" are RAID models, they do not contain single drives.

The only big difference in an internal and external drive is the bus used (firewire vs ATA or SATA) - the setup, drivers and electronics are the same.

And this is very, very on topic as Juan's biggest hurdle (IMHO) figuring out a usable and affordable recording mechanism for the drive. I think that will be key to good sales of the unit.

I'm still a fan of SATA 2.0 (specs just finalized and released) as it allows the most flexibility and performance plus already is as low in cost and cross-platform. http://www.serialata.org

Stephen/Ben:

To elaborate on this aspect of the project, i've looked at all the options, and here's what i've found.

The problem with SATA for this project is that afaik it was designed as a protocol for internal drives, so righ away i would have to solve encasing/power supply issues.

But most important of all, SATA requires special, very fast switching circuitry to implement, and I haven't found any hardware(i.e. IC's) that i can buy and use, already made for this purpose.

With firewire, buying an external FW800 drive already has an encasing and it's own method for powering it. Furthermore, it's slightly easier to obtain hardware that supports it, and for other technical reasons it is a breeze to implement in my case.

I felt that if i went with an internal drive, i would have to include it in the capture system encasing, and thus the user could not decide what size drive to use, not sure if that is a big deal...i guess i could have a mount on the bottom of the box such that you could mount it here, but then the tripod mount would be gone.

Furthermore, i don't think SATA cabling was designed to be long and as easy to deal with as a single firewire cable if the drive is to be somehow mounted on a shoulder bag.

I'm also thinking about implementing some sort of output to monitor the raw video...of course it won't be high quality, but it will allow to see the latitude and color of the raw footage for adjustments. This monitor output could be as simple as a standard analog S-video/RCA out, to an actual SDI or maybe separate YCbCr outputs...

Let me know what you guys think...i might be wrong about SATA because all i read was the low-down technical spec paper...but it seems like it's designed to be inside a computer rather than separate from the host and hanging from your shoulder :)

Juan

Juan:

SATA II parts might be a harder to come buy right now but already a number of external SATA 1 parts on the market.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1546751,00.asp is one and there a plenty of DIY kits, including ones that use Firewire for the connector but SATA drive. Note that no drives are Firewire or USB native, they are IDE or SATA or SCSI (or Fibrechannel if you have the bucks) - this is the key advantage SATA has.

The specs for SATA II are here: http://www.serialata.org

I except by mid 2005, SATA will have 50% of the drive market or more.

A transition plan may be to go with SATA drives in firewire enclosures and then SATA drive in SATA enclosures as parts and costs allow. Perhaps offer bpth flavors.

SATA may get 50% of the internal drive market. But it will have under 10% of the external market.

Firewire is the monster in the external market right now, and that certainly won't change by mid 2005.

- ben

Ben:

It's only a monster in the Mac market which is well under 5% of the worldwide PC market.

USB 2.0 has already outpaced firewire for external devices, including drives. Only SATA II could change that, not Firewire 800.

Of course, probably near 100% of DV cam users have firewire 400, but only G5 users and handful of others have firewire 800.

That's why I think a SATA drive in a firewire enclosure is probably the best short-term solution followed by a SATA 2 solution. When PC's come standard with an external SATA II port.

Of course, the ultra high speed wireless USB could be interesting too when it debuts.

"When" PCs come with external SATA II ports? PCs come with USB2 and FW ports right now -- the installed base is massive. 2005 is practically tomorrow, and the spec for SATA II isn't even finalized yet. It's an RC, and after that there will be other standards applications. If SATA II ever becomes a standard port, it won't be for at least 18-24 months.

And let's not even get into the Mac issue -- is this not dvinfo.net? I wonder what the percentage of out readers are Mac users -- if it's not a majority, it's probably close. Firewire is a monster not for Mac users, but for all video/media creators. SATA is great for internal storage, and interesting as a possible external solution, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. FW800 is awesome, it's already on a huge number of machines, and it works now.

As for USB2 outpacing FW, well, history shows that there's no stopping PC users with their hearts set on an inferior technology. But I imagine that if you look at external drives that run at or above 7200rpm, it's not so clear cut.

- ben

Ben:

I see we difffer on this - however, I think your view of the storage market is incomplete and not based on actual sales numbers - a quick google does not seem to back up your points.

While you may be comfortable with Firewire 800, the actual market conditions seem to point in other directions.

Juan needs to probably rely on better experts than you or I in making a decision about market factors and interfaces.

However, SATA II is a final spec (http://www.internetnews.com/storage/print.php/3339821 & http://www.intel.com/technology/serialata/ahci.htm
and expect to see it plenty later this summer and full swing by fall.

A further problem with SATA II is that, looking at the spec, I see no mention of peer-to-peer connectivity. One of the basic principles of Firewire is that you can use it to hook two Firewire devices together without a computer. For example, you could hook a camera directly up to another camera, or a camera to a hard drive. This capability was expanded with FW800.

With SATA II, it seems that you'd either have to build some very sophisticated electronics, or rely on a computer to sit between the DVX100 and your drive. This is clearly non-optimal.

Reading the spec, it seems that the main design goal of SATA II is pretty similar to SATA: to provide an ultra-fast channel of data direct from a disk or disks (they mention RAID configurations often) to a computer.

So SATA II is never going to replace the USB or Firewire families as a convenient general-purpose interface.

And I'd think twice before I discounted FW800. Final Cut Pro already supports DVCPRO-HD over Firewire, and HDV utilizes Firewire as well. If you want to be doing HD work in the next few years, you'll still be using your old pal FW. That'll help keep the entire FW market charging forward...

- ben

"..SATA II is a final spec..."

Huh, that's interesting. Because the SerialATA website ( http://www.serialata.org/ ) calls the draft a "Release Candidate" undergoing a 30 day review as of 4/22/04.

I'm looking forward to buying some SATA II gear later this summer! I'll plug it right into my SATA II port, which is located right next to the Unicorn dock and all six FW3200 ports. We may see SATA II gear in 6 months, but its main relevance will be internal storage and high-end external RAID solutions. When they start putting SATA II ports on laptops, then we can talk.

Clearly we do disagree, and it's not just about the marketshare. But tell me exactly what you searched for in Google. How on earth did you find numbers for hard drive marketshare within the video/media industry? That's what I want to see, since we're talking about uncompressed DVX100 lest we forget, which is a niche issue.

I think Juan should rely on his own experience and intelligence, which has led him straight to FW800, an interface which is fast, readily available, and apparently not a problem to implement. I don't understand why we're still talking about SATA II and "wireless USB" and unicorns...

- ben

I did not save all my google links, but search for "sata" "serial ata" etc...

SATA is peer-to-peer based, though I don't expect it to see it in DV or HDV cams as it is way overkill. But for HD and faster cameras (like the Viper, Arri), the 3 Gb/sec of SATA II might be better than akward SCSI implementations especially now that Seagate has got Native Command Queuing supported.

I had forgotten the name but a google search for serial ata peer to peer gave this link for the chipset company that already has SATA II controllers ready:

https://www.marvell.com/products/storage/sata/88SX60xx.jsp

The built in SATA power connection standard is also something I like.

I'm for the quickest, least complex and most direct solution.

A FW800 port connected to an external FW800 drive - Juan's original idea - sounds great.

It'd be nice to also be able to connect it to a FW800 equiped PC/Mac as to record to a large internal RAID array with lots of storage. Of course that means you are tethered to a computer but hey sometimes that's okay. Plus I think a firewire cable can run a long way.

I don't think it should have an internal drive. Mostly because it will probably delay getting the thing out and about. Real world production will get the proper feedback for a MkII. What, already a MkII being discussed!

A video output would be very useful for previewing and SDI output would be fantastic. Of course keeping with my no-major-added-delays theme.

If I had to add something...
When I hit record on the camera - the tape and the drive start to record. Maybe there is a way to sense that switch-over. But that might involving soldering and I am weary of that.

But really a separate record button is fine. Please add a record light though.

As far as I know, The Viper and Arri are utilizing HD-SDI. The Arri outputs just about exactly 3Gb/sec in normal mode, which is cutting it kind of close for a single SATA II connection. I think it may go over 3Gb/sec in 75fps mode. They're running the Arri over 3 HD-SDI's, each of which have 1.5Gb/sec...

Of course, maybe SATA II will come into play for these high end systems, but... so what? Weren't you the one who brought up marketshare? These systems have barely seen the light of day, and are strictly rental material. Whatever interface they're using on those giants has no bearing on anyone here...

My view of the storage market may be incomplete as a whole, but I have a pretty good sense of what professionals and prosumers are using for video. When I make guesses about marketshare, they're simply based on what I see people using, and aren't intended to be taken as empirically or statistically sound... So the next time you declare accusatorially that someone doesn't know the "actual sales numbers" and hint vaguely at Google results from god-knows-where, you might want to be acquainted with said numbers yourself.

Firewire is built into the computers and DV equipment we use now, and the HD equipment that we'll be using -- HDV and DVCPRO-HD. For that reason alone, Firewire will continue to be a massive force in the video world, and is the best forward-looking choice for a portable direct-to-disk box.

SATA II is going to be awesome for renderfarms and workstations, but until I can look at my camera and my laptop and see two matching SATA II ports, we're still living in a FW world.

- ben