Back to the Future: Cineform to TAPE

[Alex Raskin]

Cineform has announced a beautiful concept of the mobile recorder, see here:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=107885

...that would capture HDMI out of camera, transcode into Cineform Prospect HD, and record onto a solid-state media (and hopefully external drives.)

Now, I'm a *huge fan* of the concept.

Slight problem: the device is still external to the camera.

Meaning, you have to lug it around; remember the cables, cards, batteries etc; and it adds weight to the setup. So if you are an indie movie guy like me, suddenly the proposed box looks larger and more cumbersome than it actually is :)

(Oh, and mounted on camera, especially with external hard drives attached, it will make the operator tired faster.)

So.

Can the same thing be done in-camera?

So no added parts, weight or extra issues. You power the camera up, you choose which format to record to - mpeg2 or Cineform - and off you go.

If you chosoe mpeg2, have your narrower bandwidth and blockiness/tears of the fast-moving images.

If you choose Cineform, have everything in beautiful 1920x1080, practically perfect quality.

(Guess what... personally, I'd settle for Cineform *only* on any camera. Mpeg2? Nein, danke for me :) But hey.)

Then camera records in the chosen format onto whatever the media it was designed to record to - P2 card... SxS card... internal HDD... or... o blasphemy... even tape.

Why not really? Since the tape simply holds a *file*, why not record Cineform file on tape, then "capture" it to PC.

The advantage would be about 100 times less edia cost than the solid state solution, or about 10 times less cost than the heavy-weight HDD solution.

The disadvantage would be no immediate random-access playback, and waste of time after the acquisition to capture (transfer really) into PC.

If the costs and convenience *at the time of the shoot* are taking into consideration, I personally would go for tape. (Please don't misconstrue: I'd *love* to have the solid state on-camera solution, but at the current $$$ costs it seems just too expensive.)

So, Sony V1U with Cineform codec choice, anyone?

[David Newman]

Get CineForm into cameras is one of our goals. We are in the Silicon Imaging SI-2K, but we want to be in more. See my blog entry on why CineForm is moring into hardware: http://cineform.blogspot.com/2007/11...m-on-chip.html

As for tape, CineForm is not a good fit as our data rate varies. I don't think tape is long for this world, and I doubt we see a new tape format for cameras ever. While the media is cheap, the mechanisms are not, camera companies can save money by replacing tape with commonity drive or flash media.

[Steven Thomas]

Could you imagine a camera with the Sony XDCAM EX1 features using Cineform internally, sign me up!

[Alex Raskin]

EX1, and V1 too.

I remember the time when mp3 was considered an underground, almost illegal codec.

Not too long ago, by the way.

Now it is ubiquitous.

Cineform should be adopted/licensed/bought as a standard for camera manufacturers - and the faster, the better.

Is Sony listening?

[Marc Colemont]

A file-format plugin for the DR-HD100 would be nice with Focus Enhancement.
That way it would be recorded strait into Cineform instead of m2t file format.
It would save me hours converting through HDlink afterwards.

[Alex Raskin]

Marc, but Focus does not have HDMI input, does it?

The whole point is to capture the video *before* the mpeg compression... not to transcode m2t to Cineform on-the-fly...