Although this is very CineForm related, this is actually a camera announcement. CineForm has partnered with Silicon Imagining to create a camera designed from the compression up to be a digital cinema camera : the Silicon Imaging SI-1920HDVR. There are lots of juicy specs in the press release (http://www.cineform.com/press/rel-SI1920HDVR.htm) and over at the Silicon Imaging web site (http://siliconimaging.com/DigitalCinema/). What makes this mobile, battery operated, direct-top-disk camera (4+ hour record time at 1080p24 10-bit) even possible is the new CineForm RAW™ (http://www.cineform.com/technology/CineForm_RAW.htm) compression. CineForm RAW allows for direct compression for the CMOS sensor data for the highest image quality, dynamic range and post production flexibility. See a fully functioning camera at NAB in he Adobe booth. Places you orders now. :)

P.S. I have added some history on this projhect on my blog at cineform.blogspot.com

WOW! Amazing! David, congratulation!

I have to admit that I haven't taken the time to pay much attention to the alternative imaging side of DVi. Well, you've got my attention now!

If this doesn't shake up the HD world, I don't know what will. Are there any pictures available, or do we have to wait for NAB to get a peek? Looking forward to meeting you and learning more in Vegas!

Congratulations to you, David, and to all your partners in this effort as well!

That sounds brilliant! Well done. I guess the obvious question that will be asked is whether there will be a 'rolling shutter' effect from the CMOS sensor? Also, how portable is it?

David: this sounds very promising. Can you give us any hint about the size and weight of the camera and some sort of rough price range? Or at least indicate whether these details will be available at NAB?

Pete Bauer
http://www.siliconimaging.com/DigitalCinema/gallery_stillimages.html
http://www.siliconimaging.com/DigitalCinema/gallery_footage.html

I think Cineform Aspect HD codec is very high quality, it lets you have the job done fast, and I wish it was hardware-supported on EVERY HD(V) camera.

Kevin,

Those details and more are to be revealed at NAB.

i've been yes/no/yes/no on buying prospect HD ...

now it looks like i can get it free ( packaged) with the Digital Cinema camera ???
now , if i buy it before the camera comes out will they give me a 2K discount/refund/credit/trade in ???

can't wait to see more images !!!

i'm not rolling over my $CD when it comes due this sat.

Silicon Imaging has licensed an OEM version of Prospect HD Edit to ship with the camera -- so it is not the full price product -- but they (SI) may offer the camera without PHD-E (for some discount,) for users of PHD-Ingest or Prospect 2K. This is an SI discussion.

what is the difference between a OEM and a full price version?

is the trial version equal to OEM or full price version ?

also when the trial version expires is it going to affect connect HD on my system ?
if i remove trial - will that take out the cineform codec for connect HD/Vegas ..

OEM pricing is never revealed. Trail and OEM are not related -- sorry I don't understand your question.

Note: you should not have mixed Connect HD with AHD or PHD installs. You will have to uninstall both and install Connect HD (or PHD if you purchase that.)

OEM pricing is never revealed.

Could be mistaken, but I read his question to mean, "what is the difference in features?"

Best,
Christopher

does the OEM version have the same features/work the same as prospectHD sold on cineform ?

is the trial a full working version ?

Trail version is a fully working (15 day license) of Prospect HD-Edit (not Ingest.) OEM is just an agreement for another compant to bundle the product, this is the same as Prospect HD Edit sold through CineForm.

The pics that SI has posted on their site, cant be true.

They expose 700 x 394 pixels pics to illustrate the ultimate quality of disk based HD ????
David dont let them ruin your brilliant project/product !!

Full res images are going up after NAB, all part of the tease.

Congratulations on this product David. We've just finished up editing a low budget music video shot on DV - we took this on to see if we had the editing prowess to make a decent fist of this sort of work. Going forward we'd like to do more of this kind of project in HD, and the facility to slot footage of this quality into our existing workflow makes it simply irresistable. It also opens up very interesting possibilities for our existing HD video games services.

A 'free' Prospect HD/Premiere Pro 2.0 set-up with the camera is the icing on a pretty extraordinary cake.

From a technical perspective, I'm pleasantly surprised that the 5,400rpm SATA 2.5" drive is good enough to handle 720p at up to 72fps! Is this using the equivalent of your DirectShow encoder's high quality setting?

From a technical perspective, I'm pleasantly surprised that the 5,400rpm SATA 2.5" drive is good enough to handle 720p at up to 72fps! Is this using the equivalent of your DirectShow encoder's high quality setting?

There is a high quality setting than "High" in all our Prospect HD products, that is what the camera is mostly using. However the bit-rate for CineForm RAW are about that that of CineForm Intermediate (it is a RAW vs 4:2:2 -- RAW is easier to compress to lower bite-rate.) 720p at 72p may peek to 15MB/s (or 180Mb/s) to drives can handle it.

Excuse my ignorance, but can this camera integrate into a Final Cut Pro HD environment? Not for me, I'm Vegas on the PC... but many people I know would only be interested if they could post on FCP.

Yes, FCP compatibility is planned in the time the camera's release.

Okay, so I saw the pics of the new camera. To me, it appears to be what really is happening is you are taking a PC on other small board configuration, much like a Shuttle mini configuration, adding a CMOS sensor, a lense mount, various monitoring capabilities, and capability to capture large data streams and a hard drive. There are no moving parts, except in hard drive, right, and maybe auto focus and zoom capabilities. I recognize there are a lot of technical issues, but, the simplicity of this approach has got to me scaring the hell out of Panasonic and Sony. Remember the days you had to buy a PC from IBM for $10 k, now you can build one your selve for $600.00. Nice going Cineform people for moving this forward. Time to start stocking up on harddrives, though...

Chris,

Are the pictures of the camera online?

Richard:

Yes. But damned if I can locate right now. I recall I may have gone to the SG Support site, and registered there, and eventually got to a site where they had still of a film being shot with camera. Try that route. I don't have time to retrace steps right now.

I'm sorry, should have said SI (for Silocon Imaging)

You can see pictures on my blog and on the Silicon Imaging support forum (under virtual NAB.)

David, sorry if this was covered before... but if you put SLR lenses on the cam directly, aren't you always getting extreme telephoto due to about 7x SLR lens factor on the small imaging sensor?

David,
I'm a confirmed Propspect user for close to a year (bought it bundled with a hefty Boxx NLE)and have convinced a foreign investor that this is way to post a proposed tv series and feature film. When he gets financing in place, we were going to purchase a couple of fully outfitted Boxx or HP workstations (loaded with Propsect and Premiere Pro, of course) and a couple of Sony CineAlta packages. Call me crazy but would I be doing the wrong thing by steering our guy over to the Silicon Imaging for a couple of their cameras instead?

Alex,

There is not that much magnication, as the sensor is not very small, this camera with have the FOV characteristic of a 16mm film camera. Yes you can put Nikon F mount lens on it, as a cheap lens solution, but 16mm lens are also inexpensive (rent or buy.)

Jim,

The SI camera might very well serve in place of a CineAlta, although as this looks a different, the F950 will get the best HD look, whereas the SI camera will be more filmic.

David,

In your blog you said "Prosumer HD cameras pump up the image to make it look cool straight out of the box, this limits the dynamic range the degree the image can be corrected in post."

My question is: To what extent the "pumping of the image" can be undone in the HD100 (varying the settings) to avoid limiting of the dinamic range, so indeed it can be used as RAW footage that could be modified by the CineForm Color Matrix Settings without burning the data into the RAW image, same way you are doing with the SI camera?

Thanks,

Luis Otero


PS

Somehow, I always felt that using my single sensor HD10 was giving me great footage, even better than any footage I have seen by the Sony 3CCD cameras, inspite the limitation of parameters control of the HD10. I love my new HD100, make no mistake about it, but I never was bodered by having a single sensor HDV camera since my footage was always great...

David,

In your blog you said "Prosumer HD cameras pump up the image to make it look cool straight out of the box, this limits the dynamic range the degree the image can be corrected in post."

My question is: To what extent the "pumping of the image" can be undone in the HD100 (varying the settings) to avoid limiting of the dinamic range, so indeed it can be used as RAW footage that could be modified by the CineForm Color Matrix Settings without burning the data into the RAW image, same way you are doing with the SI camera?

Thanks,

Luis Otero


PS

Somehow, I always felt that using my single sensor HD10 was giving me great footage, even better than any footage I have seen by the Sony 3CCD cameras, inspite the limitation of parameters control of the HD10. I love my new HD100, make no mistake about it, but I never was bodered by having a single sensor HDV camera since my footage was always great

You can turn much of the processing off on the HD100, yet you only have a somewhat heavily compressed 8-bit, so it my not be the optimum use of the available bits to run the image flat (unless you capturing pre-MPEG via an Xena LH, then you can use 10-bit.)

OK, running your scenario (10-bit capturing), would it be possible to use that image as the RAW footage obtaining the same results with ProspectHD?

Thanks,
Luis

Yes and no. RAW is deferent frame structure, so you don't get "RAW", however you do now have the abilities to color correct the image to a wide range than you could previously. It is quite a flexible a the SI camera, but turn off or down color matrix and sharpening with the camera is a common step to get you more control in post.

David, why do you not want to make implementation of Cineform RAW in fpga?

Yes and no. RAW is deferent frame structure, so you don't get "RAW", however you do now have the abilities to color correct the image to a wide range than you could previously. It is quite a flexible a the SI camera, but turn off or down color matrix and sharpening with the camera is a common step to get you more control in post.

David,

As there are currently reported 12,000 owners of the HD100 (plus the owners of the new two versions anounced at NAB), would Cineform contemplate the possibility to get involved in a project like that in which you would help with the camera settings to obtain "as RAW as possible" footage out of this equipment so we can use Prospect the same way is being used with the SI camera to manipulate the color correction without affecting the original footage? I imagine it would makes business sence for Cineform due to the amount of potential buyers/users, right?

Luis Otero


PS

I would be more than happy to get involved in a beta group like that if the final results will help us to get such great images as posted in your blog and in the SI site!

camera settings to obtain "as RAW as possible" footage

In the end doesn't work that way. You have a 3 chip camera, that is good thing, RAW technology applies to single chip CCD or CMOS cameras. The idea of removing as much camera processing to presevere post flexibility is a well known technique, it can be applied to a HD100 with any extra software development.

RAW technology applies to single chip CCD or CMOS cameras.

The Reel Stream Andromeda records uncompressed RGB (4:4:4) direct from
3 CCD of Panasonic DVX100 camcorder, before any processing is done.
This uncompressed RGB different from RAW of CMOS?

Serge,

The Reel Stream Andromeda case is in fact much more like RAW bayer than than the three CCD solution with HD100. As each of the color planes are offset with a pixel shift the image can be developed into a high resolution, just like bayer processing of a single sensor. I have spoken Reel Stream a few times now, include demostrating CineFormRAW in action at NAB.

David, why do you not want to make implementation of Cineform RAW in fpga?

Who said we didn't want to do that. :)

WOW! When and who next beside of SI? Imo, CineformRAW for RED camera will be good choice:)

In the end doesn't work that way. You have a 3 chip camera, that is good thing, RAW technology applies to single chip CCD or CMOS cameras. The idea of removing as much camera processing to presevere post flexibility is a well known technique, it can be applied to a HD100 with any extra software development.

David,

This is the great thing about this community: you learn something new every time you are participating.

To be completely honest, I was not aware that it is "a well known technique" to do such procedure. So, would you point me to any particular area where that is taught/explained (basicaly, how it is done)? Also, I am not sure I understand what do you mean by "any extra software development". Are you referring to Prospect?

Thasks for iluminating me,

Luis Otero

Luis,

Techniques I refer to are probably not written up in any concise form, the basic idea is you don't want the camera to do things that you can do in post, but can't undo in post. A good example is sharping. Camera will sharpen the image, all CCD/CMOS image do need some sharpening, however removing the camera sharpen in post in not possible (short of blurring the entire image), yet added the sharping you need in post is much easier. Same goes for color the matrices and saturation controls. So much in camera will limit what you can do in post. In the ideal post world you can use everything the sensor "sees" and store this with high accuracy, however the 8-bit limitation of most cameras do limit how much you want to go without some camera processing, 10-bit gives you a lot more freedom to do this.

Luis,

Techniques I refer to are probably not written up in any concise form, the basic idea is you don't want the camera to do things that you can do in post, but can't undo in post. A good example is sharping. Camera will sharpen the image, all CCD/CMOS image do need some sharpening, however removing the camera sharpen in post in not possible (short of blurring the entire image), yet added the sharping you need in post is much easier. Same goes for color the matrices and saturation controls. So much in camera will limit what you can do in post. In the ideal post world you can use everything the sensor "sees" and store this with high accuracy, however the 8-bit limitation of most cameras do limit how much you want to go without some camera processing, 10-bit gives you a lot more freedom to do this.

David,

Thanks for the information. The sharpenning area is well known, however other areas are not. That is why there are so many scene files being developed and shared within this forum, and I was wondering if you are aware of them, and have a professional opinion as to which one will give you the "like-RAW" footage. That could be a good start for us, the owners of HD100...

Also, I am aware of the 10-bit issue, so I am taking that for granted: it needs to be aquired through the component output into a computer using Prospect.

Thanks again,

Luis

Scenes files take the "raw" (lower case for non-bayer) sensor data, apply a color matrix to give a target result close to your color corrected look. That is fine if you get the look right and don't clip the data. The same look can be generated in post if you didn't apply the scene file. The advantage of the raw approach is all the color correction output are possible, using a scene file you narrow your post options. The disadvantage of the raw approach is you have to color correct everything. It will depend on the project whether you setup your color in camera (faster) or in post (more flexible.) I don't know the menus well enough in the HD100U to turn the color matrix off.

Who will buy this configuration:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=68113

. . . will already have a solution to post?

Full online editing (native & final resolution) allowing color correcting and grading tools?

Without any other software and/or hardware needs?

Not clear what you questions are. The SI camera work very tightly with Prospect HD Edit -- which cames bundled with the camera. PHD Edit enables Adobe products - AE, PPro - to operate seamlessly with CineForm RAW; enabling you use any color correctly or gradient tools you like that plug in to these applications. Prospect HD also comes with RT color correction.

Merci

My first question is if when we are buying a laptop for the cam capture if this hardware is enough for editing work with the software bundled with the camera head. Is it? Or for online editing will it be necessary other hardware?

And secondly if the software could be or not to be licensed for online editing work purposes, the same is possible to ask about the CineForm RAW. If . . . is it allowed final online editing output from the camera head CineForm bundle?

(Could there be any kind of restriction for our information, isn't it? Like those small letters on the bottom of the insurance contracts . . .)

The Cineform Prospect HD license is separate from the camera head software . . . so you can run the camera head on one computer and keep your Cineform/Premiere Pro software license on another computer for editing.

The high-power laptops should be plenty of juice to work in Premiere Pro/Cineform for editing. The only issue with a laptop will be no HD-SDI output . . . but if you're burning HD-DVD's or something like that, I'm guessing there would be no issues.

But output to tape would be an issue from a laptop, and why you may want to use another workstation as your editing platform, depending on the output path you want to take, and what you'd like to use for monitoring.

Also if you're wanting to-do a film-out, you may want another monitor besides the screen on your laptop . . . those screens are not going to be very representational of a digital projector or film projection.

Well seen.

The high-power laptops should be plenty of juice to work in Premiere Pro/Cineform for editing.Like your minimum laptop requirements? Core Duo at 2.0 Ghz?

The only issue with a laptop will be no HD-SDI output . . .Any solution available from any external device?

Also if you're wanting to-do a film-out, you may want another monitor besides the screen on your laptop . . . those screens are not going to be very representational of a digital projector or film projection.Indeed. Again: any suggestion? Any external solution?

BTW to monitoring from a laptop, will there be any sort of HDMI signal output solution out there, isn't it? If even my home HD/DVD tuner recorder has it . . .

*EDIT*

Nevertheless, the major concern regarding the laptop that will work with the camera head is to know if . . . will it be enough also for online editing without hassles? As a true 1080p or even 2k editing & color correcting/grading workstation? In a simple laptop?

I'm coming from the filmmaking side so . . . but if that's true it will be an extraordinary achievement, a real revolution without historical precedents. As Mr. Coppola predicted two decades ago.