Luis Caffesse
March 9th, 2005, 12:04 PM
Does anyone think there is a chance that Panasonic will make their new HDX-100 a 1 chip camera?
(I'm not sure if this belongs on the HDX board, so feel free to move me around if need be).
In an email discussion with Jeff Kreines recently (maker of the Kinetta) he explained how he is able to get 110 minutes of uncompressed footage on a 480 GB raid. After doing the math, I had figured you could only fit 36 minutes of uncompressed footage in that much space. He explained that because his camera is only using 1 chip, he can capture a 12 bit image uncompressed, whereas with a 3 chip camera that same frame would be 36bits. So, my calculations were correct, 36 minutes for a 3 chip camera. But you can get 3 times that with a 1 chip camera, with no added compression.
This made me think, DVCProHD is 100mbs, as defined by the spec. If Panasonic were to make a 1 chip DVCProHD camera, could they achieve the 100mbs stream with LESS compression than the 6.7:1 that the varicam is using now? (closer to 2.2:1)?
By the same token, would this mean that 1 chip DV cameras actually have lower compression than 3 chip DV cameras, because they are starting out with less information to begin with, but both are being compressed to the same size (3.125 MB/s)
It doesn't seem to make sense, and I'm sure I'm probably wrong in this thought process, so please let me know what I'm missing. I'm no engineer, so I'm just sort of putting things together from what I seem to understand.
It just seems like the human eye can't really see the difference between a modern 1 chip vs a 3 chip image. And, in general, most of the problems I see in image quality (from DV and DVCProHD) are really caused by compression.
So, if they released a camera using only 1 chip, they could not only increase the chip size, but lower the compression. This would give us potentially higher image quality, which would hold up better in post, yet take up the same amount of drive space (12.5 MB/s) making it still practical to work with.
But then again, I'm probably way off.
:)
(I'm not sure if this belongs on the HDX board, so feel free to move me around if need be).
In an email discussion with Jeff Kreines recently (maker of the Kinetta) he explained how he is able to get 110 minutes of uncompressed footage on a 480 GB raid. After doing the math, I had figured you could only fit 36 minutes of uncompressed footage in that much space. He explained that because his camera is only using 1 chip, he can capture a 12 bit image uncompressed, whereas with a 3 chip camera that same frame would be 36bits. So, my calculations were correct, 36 minutes for a 3 chip camera. But you can get 3 times that with a 1 chip camera, with no added compression.
This made me think, DVCProHD is 100mbs, as defined by the spec. If Panasonic were to make a 1 chip DVCProHD camera, could they achieve the 100mbs stream with LESS compression than the 6.7:1 that the varicam is using now? (closer to 2.2:1)?
By the same token, would this mean that 1 chip DV cameras actually have lower compression than 3 chip DV cameras, because they are starting out with less information to begin with, but both are being compressed to the same size (3.125 MB/s)
It doesn't seem to make sense, and I'm sure I'm probably wrong in this thought process, so please let me know what I'm missing. I'm no engineer, so I'm just sort of putting things together from what I seem to understand.
It just seems like the human eye can't really see the difference between a modern 1 chip vs a 3 chip image. And, in general, most of the problems I see in image quality (from DV and DVCProHD) are really caused by compression.
So, if they released a camera using only 1 chip, they could not only increase the chip size, but lower the compression. This would give us potentially higher image quality, which would hold up better in post, yet take up the same amount of drive space (12.5 MB/s) making it still practical to work with.
But then again, I'm probably way off.
:)