The data is 12 bit. I believe the camera is as well.

- ben

Sorry, not to change the subject (too much),

but I was thinking about Hard-drives needed for the Altasens camera. I'm estimating around 3MB per frame for the 12-bit 1080p HD stuff in RAW Bayer format. Now at 24fps that's around 72MB/s for throughput, and at 60fps, it's going to be a whopping 180MB/s. Even 48fps is going to be a pretty hefty amount of throughput.

So will 2 SATA drives in an RAID 0 have the capabilty of recording this stuff? The Kontron board that we were looking at with PCI-X, I'm not sure how many PCI-X slots it's going to have. We'd need at least two slots, one for the frame-grabber card, and another for something like the RocketRAID 1820a to support all those hard-drives needed for that amount of throughput.

Hmm, this will be interesting.The data is 12 bit. I believe the camera is as well.Then how come Steve has said that the Micron has a 10bit A/D? Is this something in the framegrabber that's expanding the bit range to 12-bits?

I have no idea. All I know is that the data in this file goes from 0 - 4096.

hey ben,
when are you getting your camera? i want a review.

Eric, I got the camera yesterday -- I would have been all set up, but my ancient Iomega USB cdrom drive bit the dust. So I had to go out today and get a new drive to install XP with (instead of an optical drive on the recording laptop, I'm putting a second hard drive in the bay).

You can see a photo of the cam here (http://www.bensyverson.com/hd/images/photos/computar-on-150c.jpg)

It's seriously teeny! Check out its tiny C-mount lens here! (http://www.bensyverson.com/hd/images/photos/computar.jpg) I'm used to C-mount lenses for 16mm which are about twice as big.

The lens and the camera both are really well put together -- 100% metal construction. The optics in the lens are exemplary -- it looks like a mini Nikkor. :)

Hopefully I'll be able to post some images in an hour or two -- once Windows XP is done vaccinating itself with 7,692 critical security updates ;)

awesome,
did it come with that lens?.. if so, what's the focal length (in 35mm terms)?

No, I bought the lens separately. I'm not sure exactly what it would be in 35mm terms, but it has about a 60 degree HFOV. It's 8mm -- I would put it at maybe a 30 or 35mm in 35mm terms.

So Ben, how does everything look?

If you can post some footage that would be very cool :-)

I bought a cool 8-51mm zoom for mine..nice glass..gota tell you guys today was HELL.....never again will I try and shoot a "real" project with such a beta - no alph level product - if you can even call it a product!! I about lost it today trying to get everything setup for the shoot - after about 2 hours of dicking around I gave up and shot the scene with the dx100....!!! this is in NO WAY SHAPE OR FORM ready for production..NOT EVEN CLOSE AT ALL!!!


BTW this chip SUCKS! I was shooting a scene with lots of windows in the background and the smear from the hot windows was REALLY BAD...I don't think any of you could shoot professional stuff with this chip - I know I will never try again,,,I am sure the Altasense will be great but the Micron is bad

the whole computer on a cable is bad...I can see that I need to really focus on the camera-as-one-unit design and get that made...

O well I guess I learned somthing today atleast!

good news is that the capture software is moving along at a good pace..


anyone want to poke at making a proggy that converts the RAW format I sent you guys into a tiff/jpeg/avi/quicktime/some new codec? that we can edit from? in maybe 10bit? David? Rob?

BTW David does Combustion support your codec in 10bit? what about AfterEffects? how does color work in AfterEffects if your using the 10bit file and AfterEffects is 8bit OR 16bit but not 10??

I will now use this camera as a TEST camera only...when Altasense comes out I hope it's a "real" product ;)

Obin,

The CineForm codec can be used within Combustion, but only as 8bit RGB (limitation of VfW.) AfterEffects is the same today but we are finishing up the IO module for AE to support the 16bit RGB (per channel) mode. This is only a couple of weeks away. I assume that combustion would need a similar IO module -- I haven't got their SDK.

David could your codec support 1080P editing with Premiere Pro? in realtime? with 10-12bit?

Obin, could you show me what is the "Smear effect"????

I will get you a snapshot when I get the camera from work

<<<-- Originally posted by Obin Olson : David could your codec support 1080P editing with Premiere Pro? in realtime? with 10-12bit? -->>>

Yes, it basically does that now with the product Prospect HD, 1920x1080p24 10bit real-time, but you probably know that by now. I've been working on the smallish modifications to support bayer direct encoding, this would be an extension to Prospect's features. We have already discussed that the turn-key Prospect HD system from BOXX is too pricy for this market, so we have been thinking of ways to introduce a lower cost product that doesn't hurt the higher-end market -- we are still working on this marketing issue (that part always seems harder than completing the technology.) There are some cool ideas in the works, nothing I can mention yet.

I think a little explanation might be in order:

Imagine if I make an image with a paint program, and I use only the following pixel values: 0, 1365, 2730and 4096.
Only 4 distinct values. Very 'posterized' looking.
Ben, do you see how this is not a 12 bit image?
It's a 2 bit image. It only has 4 code values. I could save it as a high bit depth TIFF, but that does not make it a 12 bit image just because it has values of 4096 or whatever.
It has lots and lots of missing code values.
Now, imagine a 10 bit image that has a thousand possible values, but spread them out to still reach 4096. The image will look kinda normal, but it's still a 10 bit image.
A true 12 bit image has no missing values if there is a shaded ramp in the image. You can verify with a histogram, of just look at pixel values with a viewer other than photoshop. All values should be there, sprinkled with a dose of noise, of course!
( I'm talking about a RAW monochrome image with no demosaic applied, BTW )

End of "basic Bit depth for dummies" 101..... ;-)

-Les


<<<-- Originally posted by Ben Syverson : I have no idea. All I know is that the data in this file goes from 0 - 4096. -->>>

@Les: End of "basic Bit depth for dummies" 101

I don't need the lecture. I think I understand bit depth as well as anyone on this list. I'm the one who figured out it was 12bit data in a 16bit file fer chrissakes.

Begin Advanced Bit Depth 159, lecturer: Ben Syverson.
If you open the image in Photoshop as a 16-bit RAW file, you'll see it's dark -- if you do a levels with an input white of 16, you'll expand 0-4096 to the full 16bit range. I'm not sure if PS uses full 16bit (65535) or After Effects-style 15bit+1 (32768), but either way you're not losing any data.

Now do a levels call like input black: 100, input white: 116. This is to see if the image is 10 bit or 12 bit. If it's 10bit, the histogram will show banding. If it's 10bit, the range between 100 & 116 should fill up the histogram. In fact, it does. The data is 12 bit. Don't ask me how it got there, I'm just telling you what's in the file.

And why wouldn't it be 12 bit data if the max value is 4096? Why on earth would they output 10 bit data to a 16 bit file but multiply it by four? That makes no freaking sense. If you were going to multiply the data anyway, why not multiply it to fill the full range of 16bit? Why stop at 4096?

The reality is that it's simply 12 bit data padded out to 16 bits for ease of use. Save the condescension for someone else.

- ben

Ben, it looks like LES know what he said. And i know, here the people who make the post, also use histograms to check bit deeps. Send LES the test frames and we will see.

Sorry Ben,
So if you saw 12 real bits, no missing code values in the RAW image, there are two possibilities:

The camera is making 12 bits ( perhaps 2 bits of injected fake noise! ) and SI didn't know ? !!

Or:
The image isn't really RAW and was tampered with.

Where is that Steve guy ?


Bring it on!

Send it to my gmail account. Gotta use up that free gig they gave me ;)
lesdit gmail com ( fill in missing stuff in address )

-Les

Les is right -- after looking at it more closely (Photoshop's histograms do lie), this is in fact 10 bit data, multiplied by 4, and stored in a 16-bit file.

That's got to be the worst idea I've heard all month. I think I just couldn't believe that was the case. That and I was calculating for 65535 when I'm pretty sure PS maxes out at 32768.

If you open up the image in After Effects (where we know for a fact that the max value in 16bit is 32768) and set the input black to 256 and the output black to 512 you'll see banding in the histogram (you have to apply another Levels in order to get the histogram). Those 256 values would fill the histogram if we were dealing with 12-bit footage. Instead, there's a spike for every other value -- it's half what 12 bit should be. Since it's already been cut in half by AE, the histogram shows 1/4th the data of 12bit. In other words, it's 10bit.

Utterly ridiculous...

In other news, I did shoot some tests tonight. When they say the IBIS-5 is low-sensitivity, they mean it. It's similar to shooting with 100 ASA film. If you're not outdoors, you better light the heck out of your subject.

I'm still getting used to the controls, so these images clip at black. The thing is, the camera outputs downsampled 8bit from 10bits. We all know how hard it is to work with 8bit files, so with this setup my strategy is to do as much of the image/color adjustments as possible on the camera. The software basically controls a 10->8bit look-up-table, so you can do things like gain and gamma in 10-bit before it gets knocked down to 8. Anyway, unlike 10 or 12 bit, you're not creating a "digital negative" that you can tweak to your heart's content -- the image you capture is pretty close to being the final image.

At 40mhz (the top speed), the image gets kind of unstable. I think it's an issue with the USB2 bus on my laptop, because I tried it on a CardBus USB2 card, and it was even worse. But 24mhz is pretty much perfect for my use. At 1280x720, you get almost exactly 24fps. Since 1280 * 720 is so close to 1,000,000, you can pretty much look at the mhz, and that's what your frame rate will be. So at 40mhz, it hovers around 39fps.

Direct-to-disk recording is way slow right now (4fps), possibly because I'm using the 7200rpm drive through USB2. Hopefully that will improve once the drive is installed as the second internal (the HD bay is coming on Mon/Tues). But the software has a built-in Record-to-ram function, and it works great. I'll be returning the 256mb chip I just bought and buying two 512 chips instead (the max this laptop can do is 1gb). Even if that's my only option, figure 700 megs free out of 1024, at 21megs/sec, that comes to around 30 seconds. That's workable.

And my cute Computar lens is not the greatest piece of glass ever to grace the film plane. It's awesome at around F4 -- anything under that, and it's diffused. It's weird -- it doesn't go soft, it just starts to look like you're shooting with a ProMist, and it changes with the focus. The good news is that 8mm with a 2/3" sensor is really nice and wide.

The real champ in my toolbox right now is the ancient Angenieux 25mm f0.95. At f0.95, it's over a full stop faster than the f1.4 Computar. In other words, it lets in over twice as much light. When dealing with this sensor, that's a life-saver. Also, it's far better at every aperture than the Computar. It hits a sweet spot around f2, but even wide open it's gorgeous.

Case in point:
phone.png -- Angenieux 25mm (http://www.bensyverson.com/hd/images/footage/phone.png)

Here's a close-up test:
face.png -- Angenieux 25mm (http://www.bensyverson.com/hd/images/footage/face.png)

For comparison, here's an image taken with the Computar from the same distance as the last shot. This gives you an idea how wide it is in comparison.
head+shoulders.png -- Computar 8mm (http://www.bensyverson.com/hd/images/footage/head+shoulders.png)

You can see how washed out the colors look. I kind of like it -- it's like a bleach bypass effect. The controls are a little picky, but this camera is definitely usable. I have to plan something to shoot on it now.

Tomorrow I'll head outside and take some daytime shots around the neighborhood. We'll see if the colors stay washed out in the daylight.

- ben

The adventure begins, please help me...

I will order a camera set next monday. Also some hardware and maybe software.

But i am not shure about the camera. Obin and some others use the SI-1300 but now Obin wrote "... I don't think any of you could shoot professional stuff with this chip..."

What´s going on? Maybe he had a optical (lenses) problem, maybe with UV-light. Or is the camera unusably?

Before i order a camera - set i need sample uncompressed video pictures (1280x720, 24 or 48fps, 10bit) as RAW File and maybe 24frames/second as TIFF or TGA, from all cameras from any of you here. Is this possible? We know the different between good or bad lenses, but we dont know the data details comming out and can save to Disk.

We need only 24fps/ what is the thing with 48fps?

The next question: My software people said: It will be better to use a matrox grabber-card with 32MB on board (because lost frames). Matrox also have grabber software tools and with matrox germany we can work together to develop a own software.

I am not the man for software, but i and my company made opto mechanical parts and solutions so we can make (and have) all things to build a prof. solution. Everyone who can help me in software and storage problems can have parts from us, or we can work together on a different way. Also if the first movie shoot with this kind of camera, dvinfo and all this people can be mentioned.

Till monday i must have all details.

Thanks to all

those stills look very promising ben. i messed around with them in after effects alittle and they can actually be color corrected quite a bit... if you post some video, could you please shoot something with some fast pan or something, to get a sense of strobing? thanks.

good work.

ya Ben cheap lens! Computar! I have one and it's the same gets all fuzzy at wide open..weird huh?

I really need to check with that chip of mine and do some tests with hot spots in the frame. It SUCKS when you get smear all across your image!!!


Rai:
I will try and post my shot from last night on the dvx100 so you can see what sorta of shot is bad with this chip..just an fyi

Ben,

Does their camera output RAW Bayer files? It seems like their software isn't so good at the demosaicing stuff, and while your software does remove a good portion of the artifacts, it can't seem to remove the aliasing and color moiré.

BTW, that RAM recorder sounds like a really good idea. You can buy 2GB DIMM's now, and maybe with some smart hard-drive buffering you can get a little more time out of the chips. But I would think those small ITX motherboards could take a 2GB DIMM, at least one, and maybe two, for a total of 4GB? If you could get 4GB on a board, that would be about 1 minute at 24fps 1920x1080 on the Altasens.

I think RAM recorders are for highspeed filming...in short bursts for slow motion stuff

Not necessarily. At NAB this year there's was a RAM recorder called the CineRAM that I saw everywhere with the big cameras because it was very portable and could record dual-link HD at 1920x1080 (around 215MB/s). You could stick up to 32GB in it via normal PC2100 DIMM's. I believe they're also working with ARRI for a design that attaches to their camera for portability.

So with a good RAM recoder, we won't have such problems wondering what hard-drives we're going to use.

For instance, right now on pricewatch you can buy 8GB of RAM (8 sticks) for $1900. That's two minutes from the Altasens chip at 24fps. The only problem is that there are no motherboards/computers that are small and support this amount of RAM (Supermicro boards are not small, nor are G5's).

I did see a frame-grabber card that had an on-board RAM disk, but it was serious $$$$'s.

Sorry to hear this Obin. Listening to everybody here, I got to hoping that this would not turn out to be the case. It was plain that cameras shouldn't have been ready for a major production before the software was. Steve has offered upgrades, maybe he can send you some screen shots. If you put "Sponsored and Filmed on Silicon Imaging Cameras" in the credits, they should think of giving it to you, as sponsorship.

Sumix is, supposedly, putting more effort into supporting us, but we are yet to see anything.

I can hear those Jerks over at other forums mocking us now, but in a few months we will be in a much better position. Everybody take heart, if you look at pictures of old cinema systems the cameras were so big and heavy that they would require real cranes and trucks to carry them, yet blockbusters were shoot with them. A big system is just a hassel, not a death sentence. When we get the cases and finale software, we will be beaut.

Wish you the best.

Check out these Solid-State Disks:

http://www.bitmicro.com/products_edisk_transit.php

They can go up to 230MB/s sustained. Wow.

They can also store up to 152GB or something like that, although I'm sure that's a really expensive disk at that size. We'd only need around 8GB.

Okay, here's something that's not vaporware.

http://www.cenatek.com/store/category.cfm?Category=9

This can hold up to 4GB for $3,000. It fits on a PCI slot, but it will sustain up to 115MB/s, I don't think two SATA drives (while being cheaper) will do that right now.

Laugh all they want! it's a Joke as it stands but I will fix that as soon as I can ;) and I am sure all on the list will do the same ;)

Ben,

How many f-stops of dynamic range do you think you're getting?

Or another way, do you think you're getting a useable 1000:1 dynamic range with the IBIS?

From previouse posts in the threads (usually Steve's).

Micron is 10 bit, I Steve said there was 12-bit support. Data is packed in multiple of 8bits (interface is not serial) 10 bits goes to 16-bits. Maybe for some strange reason 10 bits was also packed into a 12 bit mode.

The 48fps, is because to have a 48th/s film shutter, we have te read the chip at 48fps (doubling the peak badwidth on the interface, but it is read out even faster than 48th/s (I think, it is in the thread messages) then the 8bit 16 bit packing makes things even worse, which is one reason why USB is not really suitable for 720p. Gigabit Ethernet cameras, and compression should solve this.

Obin overcame problems with his camera being dark in the shadows by pulling up the shadows out of the 10 bit values, maybe the SI can be induced to move it's range, even in the 8bit mode.

We have asked Steve about pixel packing and cheap memory buffer to smooth out peak bandwidth requirements to actual recorded fps before.

Maybe we should have approached Cinelerra to do the software, they have a HD capture system allready, it would only need to be converted to cameralink etc. If you want a quick solution it might still be the best option, they might even do it for free (Opensource). They either are going to say "yes, soon", "yes, eventually", or "no, get lost".

www.heroinewarrior.com

Rai, that is good suggestions on the Matrox, I wasn't aware they did cameralink cards. I have talked to Robs' and SteveI about getting help before, even to pay them for their work so they can work on it more, but they haven't expressed any interest yet. If Matrox would support it that would help.

You have a deadline, and obviously your company has some money. If you need something now, I posted a link in this thread (or the Viper thread) on the RAID camera unit they used to film Starship Troopers II. Cinelerra might also be ussuable with something like a blackmagic HD-SDI capture board (but I don't know if they have Linux support). It will cost a lot more money for these, maybe you could rent some of it and use us our system for your next production.

I will probably be emailing you over the next few days about manufactured parts (cases etc), if you can produce them, or help in design, it would benefit us.

Thanks

Wayne.

Ben, Obin and some others here using cameras.

I've seen (thank you Ben ) that the IBIS chips have a great quality.I've never seen a DV camera with so good quality at the shadows as the images Ben posted!!
About sensitivity: You cannot know how sensitive the cheap could be using those crappy lenses.They're too small to gather enough light.The only way to test this correctly would be using a SLR lens (50 mm would be okay) with an optical adapter (a lens) to reduce the projected image to the most suitable size for this chip.
This little trick would give you more light to work with.
Remember how PL Cinema lenses look like.When you look at their front lens it looks like a 6x4 one...
Also the faster they are, the bigger their front lens.

<<<-- Originally posted by David Newman :BOXX is too pricy for this market, so we have been thinking of ways to introduce a lower cost product that doesn't hurt the higher-end market -- we are still working on this marketing issue -->>>

Good to hear, David. I don't think your high end system is too pricey, as there will allways be some people with the extra money that want to shoot the best quality is SHD+ etc.

Ben, I just turned my monitor way up above it's normal range, and like Obin's footage, your still's have a lot of details in the shadows. It's not too bad. I also have another tip, somebody mentioned it on a XL1s 35mm adapter thread, and I also asked about it in a thread last year. By making an 35mm adpator with suitable codensor, instead of projection surface, you can pipe all the light down to the chip (no loss from the projection surface). You don't get SLR DOF, but you get the angle of veiw and extra bright image.

Jason, I agree those flash disks are great.

Ben, the only problem I see with the images is their color balance (they are a little bit green )and that pedestal is way too low...

@Juan: You cannot know how sensitive the cheap could be using that carppy lens.They're too small to gather enough light.The only way to test this correctly would be using a SLR lens

That makes no sense -- SLR lenses are designed to cover a larger sensor size. They're neither better nor worse at gathering light. At 50mm, an SLR lens will be faster, but at 8 or 25mm, a C-mount lens will be faster.

And the 25mm Angenieux is an incredible piece of glass. The image wouldn't improve that much if I were using a $3000 lens.

@Jason: yes, you can capture raw bayer images. They also have a nearest-neighbor color mode, and a bilinear and laplacian mode as well. My plug-in still produces the sharpest and smoothest images out of all of them, although as we've discussed, there are artifacts that can crop up. If they get to be really bad, just go with bilinear or apply a very slight blur to the image after my filter.

@Wayne re: real-time processing: My Pentium M 1.6ghz can only capture at full-speed when set to raw bayer mode. In other words, it's not quite able to de-mosaic the image in realtime. Your hopes for a 1ghz machine that can de-mosaic, compress and write the files at 24fps are now officially crushed. :)

@All: yeah, the footage can still be manipulated a good deal. It may be 8bit, but it's a damn clean 8bit. Remember that until very recently ILM did all of their work in a custom 8bit mode. You can adjust the gamma of the channels a great deal before you see problems.

- ben

Ben, could you read again my post and give me a complete answer, so I can explain you what I'm trying to say? :)

For example: You have a 100 ASA stock, a sensitive area of 36mm x 24mm and you have a lens which gives you a light intensity A.
So if you CONCENTRATE (like a magnifier, sunlight and an ant)
that A intensity over an area of 18mm x 12 you are getting a higher intensity for surface unit, isn't it?

<<<-- Originally posted by Ben Syverson : @Juan: @Wayne re: real-time processing: My Pentium M 1.6ghz can only capture at full-speed when set to raw bayer mode. In other words, it's not quite able to de-mosaic the image in realtime. Your hopes for a 1ghz machine that can de-mosaic, compress and write the files at 24fps are now officially crushed. :)
- ben -->>>

Re-read what I posted, I am still aiming for raw storage at 1Ghz, with optimised software, maybe compression. Still those real figures off of a celeron 416 are much more optimistic. The performance speedup for good programming, and optimal system setup (I sent Rob some links) canbe many times. It is not that simple, most things on PC's are crap and canbe greatly spead up by opotimisations and tweaking, end of story.

@Juan:So if you CONCENTRATE that A intensity over an area of 18mm x 12 you are getting a higher intensity for surface unit, isn't it?

You don't understand lenses at all. That's what a proper sized lens does. An SLR lens adapted to a smaller sensor does not "concentrate" intensity over a smaller sensor -- it's designed to deliver an image for a large sensor, so when you use it with a C-mount camera, you're only using the center of the lens -- the rest spills out around the sensor and is unused. You're wasting light, not concentrating it. That's why all the digital SLRs have a multiplication that you apply to the lens to figure out how wide you can get. For example, a 28mm is wide in 35mm still format, but with most SLRs, it's not very wide at all. The extra FOV is being thrown away. You need a good primer on optics.

Go look at a C-mount adapter. There's no optics on it. It adjusts your SLR mount to the C-mount thread. The video sensor is just acting like a tiny crop of 35mm film. That's totally worthless to me, since I like to shoot wide. They don't make many 8mm lenses for the 35mm market, and the ones that are out there are expensive, slow, and rather bad. (The Sigma jumps to mind).

A c-mount camera is designed to concentrate all the light it gets onto a smaller sensor. But there is a whole world of C-mount lenses, from 16mm film lenses to 1/3" video to 1/2" video to 2/3" video. Every lens family is specifically designed to cover a certain sensor size.

Now quit keeping me in the house -- I want to go out and shoot! :)

- ben

You don't understand me.I mean CONCENTRATE (put a lens between the SLR and the sensor), not WASTE.

Anyway you don't like what I'm saying :(

Please if someone here could explain him what I'm trying to say, it would be nice :)

Oh, you're talking about a "real" SLR->C-mount adapter.

I don't think that would work, or else it would have been done before. I don't think there's enough room to mess with that without changing the back focal distance or focal length. Why wouldn't the C-mount adapters on the market incorporate that? It would be a great selling point. I think it's not possible (or at least, not easy).

But if anyone has a way to do that, I'd be interested to see it.

As it is, SLR lenses are basically useless to me unless I want to shoot ultra-telephoto. The 25mm Angenieux is a magnificent little guy, and is telephoto enough for me.

- ben

here is the dv image we shot lastnight for a scene:

www.dv3productions.com/test_images/hot_background.jpg

the windows in the back of that shot about 30min before that was shot looked very hot and they smear all the way across the shot

Obin,
So?
Do you have a frame showing the smearing?
Are you running the sensor at 48 fps?
What happens with the smear if running at 24 fps?

You mean that white portion of the blue window that goes white??

I've had absolutely no problem with smearing. Sometimes when I run the shutter at certain speeds, I see some... I would call it "throbbing." It's like a slow pulsing of the image values, and it travel downward. But it's easy to pick a different shutter speed, and that usually takes care of it.

To answer the question about dynamic range, I see nowhere near 1000:1. It seems to be higher contrast than DV. I've played with the image for an hour or two trying to increase the range, but I think it's a sensor issue. If you can control the lighting, you can get good effects, but it's really really easy to overexpose.

- ben

As every video camera, isn't it :)

Hi everyone I found a link to viper shooting techniques.

some of this may be of help.


http://freespace.virgin.net/shaw.clan/dpviper.html ]





http://www.digitalpraxis.net/


http://freespace.virgin.net/shaw.clan/scene-to-screen_rev8.html

Ben,

If you saying that it's high contrast because you can't get a well-exposed image, isn't that because you're shooting linear images?

If the camera is outputting a signal with a gamma of 1.0, then I'm assuming that's going to be very dark looking. You'll have to add gamma correction to that after the fact, like a gamma of 1.7 or 1.8 to fit your display.

For instance, I added a gamma correction to the shot that you sent, and I could see way into the shadows, probably a bit too much. But that's just the nature of a linear image, again if the camera is outputting an image with a gamma of 1.0, then you'll never see a "bright" image like you'd see with DV without it clipping severly in the highlights, or you have no contrast in the scene so that everything can fit in the last couple bits.

I've seen this plenty of times before when I've worked with Linear files off of my Canon D60. They are very, very dark, (esp. because they're padded zeros in the last four bits), and they have no gamma correction, those must be added in Photoshop via a color profile. So initially you have a very bad looking, practically unwatchable image, and then it springs to beautiful life with a good deal of contrast range after the gamma correction and color balance is added.

So again, if you're outputting linear images (which it seems like you are), then things are going to be very dark, but that's not an error on the camera's part, or a "there's so much info in the shadows". The only reason there's so much info in the shadows is because the gamma of your monitor is not matched to the gamma of the image so the monitor's gamma makes the image look like it's all in the shadows, but the bits are there, they just need gamma correction.

link to viper techniques

http://freespace.virgin.net/shaw.clan/scene-to-screen_rev8.html

http://freespace.virgin.net/shaw.clan/dphd.html

Hey Ben,

Here's a color-corrected version of your shot with gamma correction and a little saturation bump. The only problem I see with it is that there is a good amount of noise and banding in those shadow areas, actually it would be quite interesting to see this stuff in motion.

http://home.mindspring.com/~jrod/head_shoulders_B.jpg

Tell me what you think, does your camera have potential now?

BTW, it would be interesting to see just how dark those shadows were, but you don't have a light meter for me to tell what the dynamic range of that scene is. If that's a table lamp lighting you though, and there's no other lights in the room, then you could easily be looking at 8-9 stops in that room.

Curious to see how your outdoor stuff came out.

Also can you see on the monitor how the camera is exposing, i.e. clipping the highlights? Also are the demosaiced images you posted with your plug-in or Sumix's? It looks as though it's with the ones from Sumix.

Jason, your link doesn't work.You cannot put direct links to files at free hostings and expect them to work.
Just link to a page which contains the image or a link to it and that will work.
Tahnk you.

Jason, the camera has hardware gamma, contrast and brightness controls. If you want to affect the gamma, it's best to do it on the hardware, because it happens in 10bit instead of 8bit.

The thing is, since it is linear, gamma acts strange -- gamma is really only useful when you have a 0-1.0 range. If you have a larger range than 0-1 (like this camera does before it downsamples to 8), increasing the gamma actually darkens your highlights and brightens the lowest black. So you have to increase contrast and decrease brightness. But that's not too difficult to do. It just makes everything more fiddly.

The problem is really the color contrast -- it's almost non-existant. And as you see, if you increase the saturation, you're asking for color noise. The problem with the noise is that it doesn't move -- those patterns are static. It's not signal noise, it's sensor noise.

You can see exactly how the camera is exposing -- they provide a live histogram for you to use as you adjust all the parameters. And as I mentioned before, the de-Bayering is via my plug-in, not their stuff. I was able to get far sharper and smoother images with my software than with their built-in bilinear or laplacian.

I can't stress to you enough how far this is from 8-9 stops of information. The light on me was a 150w bulb about 18" from my face. There's a perfectly bright overhead light behind me (3 60w bulbs) but it looks like blackness.

And I do have a light meter. :) Never assume.

- ben