I can finally make my first posting here, as the final parts arrived for my new system to capture HD video to disk using the Intensity card. I've started a video project and got quite interested in the hardware. The system is a small form computer operating on battery power, with a small touch-screen lcd monitor stuffed in the bag on my chest. It records using the MJPEG codec from Blackmagic, and writes to a 2.5 inch external hard disk. This disk can be swapped out for an empty one giving functionality similar to tapes.

I originally planned for this machine to record lossless using the HuffYUV codec, but the data rate was a little too high, 58MB/s, for the external hard disk I got (WD Raptor - minimum write speed around 50 MB/s). More complex solutions are possible to solve this, but in less than a year the next generation of hard disks with higher bit densities will solve it for me.

The CPU is an Intel Core 2 Duo 7200, so processor power is not a problem. Windows is installed on and runs from an internal flash memory drive, so the machine should be able to take some physical abuse. Battery life is yet unknown. The battery is a 60 Watt-hour lithium pack, so I guess 40 - 60 minutes or recording and 2 - 3 hours of idle use.

I'm an engineer and software developer, so I'm planning to create a custom case that's smaller and more robust, as well as a software package to streamline recording and playback of the video. For now, the Blackmagic recording application works quite well.

Some photos are included, and I have sample video but don't know how to attach it.

I'm impressed ;)

I'll soon be doing a field recording with an HV20 connected via HD-SDI to a Mac Pro powered by a car with a DC-AC inverter, but it won't portable be like *that* what you've done! That's truly hand held. If somehow, you can get Cineform or DNxHD as the codec of choice, you'll really have something else - not that it's not overly impressive already!!

The fact that you used FLASH memory for part of the rig is sweet.. in a few years, a flash based system with HDMI will be the size of the HV20 itself.

Good work!

Wow, very nice.

Pics of the "guts" of your wearable computer, please.

Also, the touchscreen LCD deployed in action.

-Ed

Cool set up!

What stabiliser are you using? I have been looking for a replacement to the glidecam 2000 pro (which is driving me mad!)

Finally a first compact system. Congratulation!
Please provide more info about mobo used for this project.
Next step is use eMagin OLED HMD instead of lcd display:)

in the meantime, i suggest to put on the forearm a 7" liliput touchscreen lcd.
i am currently thinking about such system. my opinion is that backpacks made of soft fabrics are no good. an aluminium frame will be easier to fix and cool everything.

Here are a few more shots. I'll try and get some video for this evening to show the lcd screen usage and resulting video. The screen is 7", too big to be strapped to your arm, which is what I wanted to do originally. The computer that Predator had was pretty cool.

I want more details on that 7" screen - how much? Where did you get it?

Looks great. Where are you going to keep the monitor?

You need to switch to a CineForm encoder for better quality, plus with the CineForm NEO HDV/HD tools you can removal pulldown on the fly -- saving you disk space and post production time.

That's great Kevin! Please, can you take a look at this thread

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=96349

and give us a couple of ideas for our little 2K cinema camera project? We already have the camera head and we're capturing very good 2k@24fps clips to the computer but we need the hardware and software to make it portable.

Thanks!

Jose, this wearable pc use Intensity card which can not capture 2k.
For 2k you need solution alike SI2K with CineformRAW capture through GIGe.
But better way is use Elphel FPGA solution instead of c2d based dvr used by Silicon Imaging.
Do search "Drake project" where Rai Orz to describe process to capture RAW straight to 2,2" HDD:
CMOS->FPGA->HDD (SDD)

May be Canon CMOS imager is better than Micron ? Real resolution of Canon's HV20(10) CMOS is more than 2K.
Need hack to take output straight from CMOS. You need ask this question at developers of reel-stream (Andromeda).

Hi Serge,

I apreciate your advices but there're some things you say that don't quite fit what we're trying to do.

First of all, my project consists in building a camera from scratch. That means we're not using any already made camera. There're a few posts in the thread suggesting to use the HV-20 or a modified HVX-200. The sensors those cameras use may be better than the Micron or the Omnivision ones, but we're trying to keep it simple, cheap and as original as possible. The Andromeda project may be good for people who actually own the HV-20, but not for me.

Second, we decided we want to go for the computer solution because there're other issues appart from recording the stream to disk. You need to set up the sensor options to those you want for every take, so unless we find someone who can create a whole FPGA system to control the camera via touchscreen LCD, encode and record, we need a computer. In fact, the Elphel may be able to do direct to disk recording in the future, but it will still need a computer to set up everything first.

And third, I wasn't asking for an Intensity card solution. I just read that Kevin had something similar to what we're trying to achieve. We almost have everything but we need to find out a way to low down data rate before recording so the computer doesn't have to handle so much info. If we can do it via hardware and it's doable, perfect. If we can find a way to do it via software in real time, great.

Kevin, I'm sorry if I went off-topic. Your project's just great. Keep it up! And if you have some time to come and help us a bit, please fell free to do it.

Nathan and David - the monitor is a 7" touchscreen made by Xenarc. They can be purchased online for about $400. So far I'm keeping it in the blue bag seen on my chest, but a waist mounted holster may be a better spot for it. The image quality on the monitor is much better than I expected considering it is a touchscreen and has an 800 by 480 resolution.

Here are some shots of me reviewing some video on the lcd screen. The video being reviewed was taken just prior to this. Othe pics are using the computer.

The motherboard is an AOpen mini-itx unit, and can be purchased online but only from a few stores like logicsupply.com.

The stabilizer is a Steadytracker ultralight. It seems to work well and was my preferred tradeoff point for price/performance.

Unfortunately the attachment utility fails when I try to upload a video sample. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Kevin:

What about latency issues ? Can you use the touch screen as the monitor, or is there a lag ?

Hi Jose,

I checked out some of the huge thread discussing your project with the Micron sensor and had the following thoughts:

1. The USB interface has a maximum throughput of 60MB/s, and if you want to capture 12bit/4:4:4 1080/24p video that creates a data stream of around 220 MB/s. That is a major limitation and the reason why HDMI and HD-SDI have been created to handle video data rates. If you are capturing video from your system at that resolution and color space, then the video stream is compressed and sent over the USB connection. Even 8bit/4:2:2 1080/24p would come it at around 100MB/s.

2. Speed limitations of serial connections will be the problem for all DIY image sensor projects. Working with and creating imaging hardware is not a DIY task, but connecting existing hardware, lenses, and data transfer connections is. An image sensor developer kit would need 10 GB ethernet to properly transfer HD data to a computer, which can be handled through a PCI express bus and compressed and recorded in real-time. A high-speed processor and RAID array would be needed to handle the video data, but is possible with today's hardware. Good luck making something like this portable in the near future without a huge budget.

3. Using SLR camera lenses is wonderful, it frustrates me so much to see camera manufacturers force us to buy high-end prosumer video cameras in order to get the optics quality found on $700 still cameras.

So the only thing I can suggest for your project is that a portable computer setup (like mine) to record video is not needed, since you have your data stream on the USB bus, just use a cheap laptop with fast hard drive. The portable computer I made cost more than $2000. My idea was to show the ability to capture HD video to a portable computer, from an HDMI source, or with a better camera over an HD-SDI connection. I am totally willing to help you out with any questions though, feel free to ask.

Hi Chris,

There is no latency with the touchscreen, absolutely none. It works just the same as any computer monitor and is connected to the VGA connector on the motherboard.

Hello, Kevin!
Do you tried to capture with use Cineform NeoHD or NeoHDV ?

Hi Serge,
I haven't tried any of the Cineform products at all. So far I'm using the MJPEG codec from Blackmagic. NeoHD is pretty expensive so I'm not buying it quite yet.

You can try NeoHD trial for 15 days and compare with BM JPEG.
Cineform codec is a really piece of Art.

I'm very interested in cpu (c2d T7200. right?) usage on the board like this AOPEN i945GTt-VFA (http://smartbuildingnet.com/webstore/shop/item.aspx?itemid=97) with FSB667.
You can ingest full raster 1920x1080p24 use BM JPEG without dropped frames?

Kevin, keep this tread alive, please do more tests ! ;)

Kevin,

I echo Serge when he says you should move to CineForm HD - with the material I use it's a night and day difference. Put simply CineForm is as close to uncompressed as you'll get but with extremely low bitrates. I only use Huffyuv for 24-bit RGB work now - CineForm is king for 8-bit YCrCb, no doubt about it.

That said, CineForm absolutely flies with a desktop Core 2 chip so I'm wondering if there's an equivalent Mini-ITX board using socket 775? Or an announced board for Santa Rosa?

I've got to salute your ingenuity here - running XP from a USB flash drive in particular is genius. I'd like to build my own unit, and possibly mount the Xenarc monitor into the case. Any chance of a more detailed parts list?

Nice project. How's the image quality? Is all the extra cost, bulk and work really worth it over the HDV tape? Any clips or comparison frame grabs?

Did I miss something, or why hasn't anyone asked about the computer overheating in a backpack? How would any PC get the right amount of air into its fans?

I love this idea, but it seems cumbersome. I think you've done a great job gathering the right equipment, and I'm sure you'll figure out the optimal way to carry it all with future adjustments. Thanks for posting!

Wow, very good idea Kevin.

I thought about doing this with a laptop or something and mounting that to the body somehow using the PCIe to Expresscard slot adapter... but that would be a little too sketchy...

What case are you using for that? It looks smaller than anything i've seen recently.

Any idea as to how long the batteries will last running this rig?

Great execution though - it's very impressive.

It really astonishes me though, how there's this HUGE need for HDMI direct-to-disk recording, but it's just like the developers are asleep or something. How hard would it be for Canon to make something like this? Or Blackmagic even?

Is anyone listening? A fortune is at hand for anyone who can come up with a cheap box with HDMI recording with a decent codec. The only thing i've seen is at www.colorspaceinc.com. IT looks very intriguing, but no mention of cost is made. It could easily be a 10k piece of hardware, but hopefully not.

Sorry to veer off... great job Kevin!

Steve, the bag can had mesh on the sides for ventilation.
With small (sub)mini-ITX motherboard as Gene-9310 (ftp://data.aaeon.com.tw/DOWNLOAD/2007%20datasheets/ECD/GENE-9310.pdf) possible to create a dvr-on-the-belt or device similar to Codex Portable (http://www.codexdigital.com/portable/index.php) in size as mac mini.

Just ran across something...

I was spec'ing out my own rig similar to this, and looked at batteries pretty in-depth.

The battery you're using Kevin is a pretty good one, but i found one for a tad cheaper on Ebay. You're paying (if you got yours for 80 bucks like i saw it) about $1.33 per Watt Hour. I found some on Ebay that came in at around $1 per watt hour.

http://cgi.ebay.com/8-10-hours-Dark-Blue-Universal-external-laptop-battery_W0QQitemZ230154943516QQihZ013QQcategoryZ11169QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem#ebayphoto hosting

There's the link if you're interested...

Correct me if i'm wrong, but that the AOpen Mini-ITX states it's 19VDC at 4.7 Amps - so that should be just under 100 Watts. If you got a battery that states it's 133 wH, that should last about 80 minutes or so right?

running XP from a USB flash drive in particular is genius.

Here is a fairly significant problem. If your entire OS is running on the flash drive, including the page file, the flash drive will have a short life. I've read maybe 3-6 months. And when it dies, it won't go nicely.

Not the end of the world as flash memory is cheap these days. I'd be more concerned about the unpredictable moment of death. May want to keep a spare loaded up with XP ready-to-go in your bag as a backup.

Chris

That's an interesting tidbit of info...

Where did you hear that? I read that they're going to be integrating Flash Disks (up to 512 Gig has been announced) more and more into consumer products such as small form factor laptops and things. Wouldn't this be the same? They estimate in a couple years that flash memory will occupy about 30% of the storage market - if this is a problem, they better figure it out soon....

I was thinking of getting one of those samsung 32 Gig flash drives and install it in the computer, then record using Cineform which is about 10mb/sec? You'd have like 45 minutes of record time, then during a break or a set up or something, you could dump it to a external RAID-1 hard drive for backup and storage, and repeat...

This way you wouldn't have to worry about jarring the computer during capture (these flash disk are rated for like a million G's) and you wouldn't have to carry around another component. It would be better on battery life as well.

Just a thought...

http://www.storagesearch.com/bitmicro-art3.html

Interesting article on the topic... if you have time

http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html

This in particular

I read that they're going to be integrating Flash Disks (up to 512 Gig has been announced) more and more into consumer products such as small form factor laptops and things... ... ...if this is a problem, they better figure it out soon....

It is a problem and they have solved it already in the Solid State Disks. The problem with USB flash drives is that a sector must be erased before new data can be written to it. And the conservative estimate for the number of erase cycles for flash memory is 100,000 cycles.

This is no big deal if you are just copying a few files to a USB thumb drive here and there to transport from one PC to another. But if you are using the devices as a scratch disk or as virtual memory... (and if his entire XP install is running off it, then the page file/virtual memory file is running off it as well) ... then you significantly decrease the life of the flash drive.

From what I've read the 32gb SSDs have onboard RAM that handles constantly changing data without writing it to the more sensitive flash memory. Also the drives have onboard software that monitors how many times each sector has been used and decommissions/retires the sectors once they have lived a good life, but before they physically kick the bucket. Meanwhile the OS is oblivious that this is happening under the covers.

USB flash thumb drives do not have these features. They will just up and perish one day without warning. Hopefully not during a crucial moment.

It is still an awesome idea, but like I said before. It's a good idea to keep a backup installation on a spare flash disk to minimize the impact.

Chris
http://dewde.com/videos

Hello Everyone,

Thanks for the interest - I'm in a small town in Manitoba on vacation for three weeks so my internet access is sporadic. I've seen some things that need answering though:

The OS is on a 4GB IDE flash drive, not USB drive as some people have indicated. This drive should have reasonably intelligent circuitry to randomize write locations and prolong the life of the drive. The form factor is tiny so it fits right into the IDE pin socket (or so it should but the USB risers get in the way).

I'll try out Cineform NeoHD, maybe even in the next few days as I'm going to do some filming here with a new generator.

The cpu, T7200 with 667 MHz RAM, has enough power to record 60i without dropping frames using BM MJPEG. The data rate seems to be 13 MB/s. What most people may not know is that BM supplies a second MJPEG codec that isn't used with their recording app and has selectable quality values. Upping the bit rate to 20MB/s makes a noticeable difference in visual quality. They number used is similar to JPEG compression quality numbers, where 100 is supposed to be lossless, and 80 is default. 20 MB/s is 92 on the scale.

The batteries I'm using are 60 Watt-hour units. The power specs for the motherboard show 19 volts, and some current rating which is the max possible. The max rating is with all USB ports sucking a full 500 mA each, ethernet, compact PCI, PCIe and cooling fans all running with full current draw. Fortunately my setup does not use this much power. Running out of juice in the middle of a shot sucks though, so I got a new 118 watt-hour unit.

Like Serge wrote, a mesh bag will let air through. There is a cooling fan in the case. It doesn't seem to get hot at all. My backpack has the case strapped on the outside for maximum cooling.

OK, have to wait for more info later.

I have video to share, does anyone have any great ideas on how to share it?

Hi

You won't be able to do cineform on these, yet, but look up pico itx, and nano-itx motherboards. They start at around 7cm*5.4cm. If an PCIex1 interface is ever available, you could it with Intensity card, and power supply disk and battery along side the motherboard next to the card in an much smaller case.

I think we will see an Expresscard version of the Intensity some day, which would fit an wider range of these Nano/PICO ITX boards.

Ultra Mobile PC tablets might be available in 5inch + forms, and if there was full Expresscard. and Intensity available in Expresscard, you have something the size of an external display.

There is an company, Zero technologies I think. Designing an wireless HDMI transfer solution using UWB (wireless version of USB). They use Analogue Devices Jpeg2000 (wavelet like cineform) codec chips to compress. If anybody makes an USB version that can feed 220mb/s (dual codec chip) 4:2:2/4:4:4 to computer then it would make an great solution.


An friend did an white paper proposal fro an HDSDI standard to transfer an raw bayer video. While David is here, I would suggest that it might be beneficial for cineform, and others it would benefit, to do an proposal for an raw bayer/single chip format for HDMI and it's derivatives (UID and Display port) basically using existing greyscale, with an designated pixel format. Most cameras are now, or moving towards bayer/signal chip, and you could fit far better images compressed in the same bandwidth, particularly HDTV/cable in CineformRAW. 4:2:0 color is dated.

Hello Everyone,
The OS is on a 4GB IDE flash drive, not USB drive as some people have indicated. This drive should have reasonably intelligent circuitry to randomize write locations and prolong the life of the drive. The form factor is tiny so it fits right into the IDE pin socket (or so it should but the USB risers get in the way).

Very cool. I read that some of the upper end flash drives do have firmware that intelligently distributes write/erase cells in order to maximize life. Also, the fact that it is high capacity helps a good bit especially if you don't use all of it. The bigger the pool of unused cells, the better. Because it reduces the frequency in which each individual cell is used, thus prolonging its life.

Chris

So I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that the computer does not have enough processing power to encode to Blackmagic's MJPEG format in real time. I didn't find this out for a while because I thought my 3:2 pulldown removal process was the culprit. It turns out the system was gracefully dropping frames, and since the codec isn't totally multithreaded, CPU usage only showed 56%. Unfortunately 33% of frames were dropped so the video was ugly and pulldown removal wasn't ever going to work.

The good news is that I have been using the trial of Cineform's NeoHD and it works great. CPU usage was up as high as 99% (but never 100%) and no frames are dropped. This is using the medium quality setting. Real-time pulldown removal simplifies my workflow greatly - take the removable disk from the portable computer to the workstation and start using the capture files directly in a project (or copy them locally first).

Other news, the system over all works very well. With the new battery I've done about 15 minutes of recording and 30 minutes of other use with the battery still showing >80% charge.

Samples next.

So here are two samples, same shot recorded simultaneously on tape and computer. Computer recording was with Cineform's NeoHD, medium quality setting. Tape recording was HDV.

Both files were encoded to an XVid format to keep the file sizes reasonable. Encoding settings were identical except I added a 16:9 aspect ratio flag for the HDV based file. HuffYUV was used as an intermediate codec for processing the HDV file, the Cineform file was encoded directly in one step.

www.hydraclime.com/Cineform_Sample_3_XVid.avi

www.hydraclime.com/HDV_Sample_3_XVid.avi

If anyone is interested, I can provide other types of shots (any requests?) or both of these in HuffYUV versions for an accurate comparison.

CineForm would really benefit from the 2.33GHz Core 2 CPU. That said, what type of video are you acquiring? 1080p/24? 1080i/30? If the latter, are you doing the pulldown on the fly?

So I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that the computer does not have enough processing power to encode to Blackmagic's MJPEG format in real time. I didn't find this out for a while because I thought my 3:2 pulldown removal process was the culprit. It turns out the system was gracefully dropping frames, and since the codec isn't totally multithreaded, CPU usage only showed 56%. Unfortunately 33% of frames were dropped so the video was ugly and pulldown removal wasn't ever going to work.

The good news is that I have been using the trial of Cineform's NeoHD and it works great. CPU usage was up as high as 99% (but never 100%) and no frames are dropped. This is using the medium quality setting. Real-time pulldown removal simplifies my workflow greatly - take the removable disk from the portable computer to the workstation and start using the capture files directly in a project (or copy them locally first).

Other news, the system over all works very well. With the new battery I've done about 15 minutes of recording and 30 minutes of other use with the battery still showing >80% charge.

Samples next.

Kevin, with yours hardware possible the best choice for injest is NeoHDV at 1440x1080p23,976 in 8bit. CPU usage can be less than 90% w/o dropped frames. And if you than compare 1920x1080(NeoHD 10 bit) and 1440x1080(NeoHDV 8bit) visually no difference, because 1920x1080 is upscaled on-the-fly 1440x1080 (need more computation). Also Intensity has only 8 bit video processing. You can always make upgrade from NeoHDV to NeoHD/2K :)

HuffYUV was used as an intermediate codec for processing the HDV file

Why not Cineform? Use HDlink Of NeoHD for transcode HDV to Cineform with same setting as used for injest.

My guess is that he's trying to retain as much quality as possible. By using huffyuv he's losing NO detail whatsoever.

The only problem is that by encoding to XviD afterwards, the purity of that workflow is badly compromised in trying to show the quality difference.

My advice would be to extract stills from your streams for comparison and upload them here in the .PNG format. Then we can see the difference. Try to take some shots with plenty of motion or fine detail as that's where you should see a huge gulf between the direct CineForm and the HDV capture.

Here's some comparison shots. In the first one you can see the detail in the bricks and the pine trees in the background.

www.hydraclime.com/Cineform10000.png
www.hydraclime.com/HDV10000.png


The second shot show better colours in the foreground bushes.

www.hydraclime.com/Cineform20000.png
www.hydraclime.com/HDV20000.png

Kevin, assuming this (http://www.logicsupply.com/products/i945gtt_vfan) is the board you're using, have you max'd out the RAM across both SODIMM slots?

Sometimes you can squeeze a bit more bandwidth out of the number crunching if you use two smaller RAM modules instead of a single larger...

Serge,

I don't understand why I would want to capture the HDMI/1080i signal with NeoHDV? Was there ever a consensus on how the HV20 processes the video signal internally to HDMI and HDV (is HDMI output just an upconverted HDV signal?)

Kevin,

If you PC can handle it, run some CineForm captures at higher quality. Medium quality was not designed for live HDMI captures, while it looks better than HDV it can look better still.

Andrew,

I'm using the AOpen motherboard without onboard RAID, similar to the one you linked. Both RAM slots are in use. The computer won't go any faster unless I overclock it, which I'll probably do next. Faster mobile CPUs are available, but I don't want to upgrade yet.

Have you tried playing around with setting CPU affinity?

The encoder may not be multi-threaded, but if you can set the capture process to one core and the encoder process to the other, you might be able to speed things up a bit more.

The CineForm encoder is N-way threaded, it use all the cores it finds for improved performance.

Thanks for the clarification, David.

...And looking back through the thread I see that Kevin did have better success with the Cineform encoder. It was just the BlackMagic codec that didn't appear to be multi-threaded. D'oh!

Serge,

I don't understand why I would want to capture the HDMI/1080i signal with NeoHDV? Was there ever a consensus on how the HV20 processes the video signal internally to HDMI and HDV (is HDMI output just an upconverted HDV signal?)

Because:
a) you have cpu usage 99% when do capture upscaled 1920x1080 10 bit stream.
b) cost of codec - NeoHDV $249 vs NeoHD $599.

NeoHD is pretty expensive so I'm not buying it quite yet. (http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showpost.php?p=721020&postcount=20)

c) HDMI output from HV20 is 1440x1080/4:2:2/8 bit. NO 1920x1080 10 bit ! HDV is heavy compressed mpeg2 4:2:0 8bit
NeoHDV can remove 2:3 puldown (do inverse telecine) and fully utilize output 1440x1080/4:2:2/8 bit from HV20.

But after intensive tests you already have own opinion, and money for right choice :)

Serge,

The HDMI output on my HV20 runs at 1920*1080/60i. That's part of the reason to record the HDMI output, aside from the higher quality 4:2:2/8 bit color. Only the HDV is 1440*1080.