Project update on St. Patrick's Day ! :-)
 

Happy St. Paddy's Day to all of our Irish friends ! Our project continues and we are moving along, albeit quite slowly, but progress is being made. There isn't much more I can tell you at this point, but as I know, then you'll know. This is an "open" project.

hey mark, how's your project coming along? Any new developments?

Hey David ! Good to know there's still some interest in this project. I'm sorry I haven't got back to this forum more often lately. I'm doing three things at once here. The visual effects on Episode 2 of our series Please Stand By are costing way more than originally budgeted, plus I'm re-organizing my production company, and last, but not least, we're still building our prototype board (s) to start the capture tests. I hope to have something to post/show within a few months. The project is going slowly and most expensively at this point. The good news is my box will blow any simular SSDR away in both functionality, size and at price point in US Dollars. The bad news is everyone and their uncle will be on the market by the time we're showing public demonstrations :-( Many companies are going to beat us to the market, but I can promise you this- No One will beat us in terms over overall practicality, since we're concentrating on a duality concept of use. We insist our SD recorder must function as well as a full HD/SD VTR replacement unit as well as an on camera recording appliance. This crazy little device will have *every* realistic digital and analogue I/O signal path. It will record to SD, SDHC, and SDXC cards. Our device will work with Avid & FCP NLE's.

Oh I'm sure there's quite a bit of interest :)

Mark,

Are there any plans for your unit to be compatible with Sony Vegas Pro 8 or 9 ?

Hi Mark,

At the risk of being tagged a pariah because of my use of Premiere Pro CS4 on a PC, do you have any plans to seek compatibility with Adobe PPRO CS4?

Many thanks,
Alan

....That's good to know. I'm now in the middle of moving to a place which is not quite finished being built yet, so we're crazy busy now. We are still determined to produce a reasonably priced SD card SSDR device. We will get there folks. I promise.

...Yes. We like Sony Vegas. We are concentrating on Avid Media Composer right now, but we wll slowly branch out from this point. I'll be happy just to get a functioning box we can plug into our Canon XL H1 for testing. Man ! This project is a long and winding road. - Expensive too !

...Only via AVI files.

SSDR recording
 

Couple of thoughts based on the last few posts.

Someone wrote about hoping his hands won't freeze off. Whilst doing that ensure it operates where ambient is 35 deg Cent. (95 Fahrenheit) in the shade. And it doesn't need ice-packs to operate.
So all that plastic and rubber is going to insulate too well.

About encoding, even HDCamSR is 440 Mbps or 880 Mbps. That's considered good enough, so that bit rate (as MPEG4 which is what HDCamSR is) should be acceptable and totally uncompressed should be a feature when cards get fast enough. ver. 2.0 perhaps.

An interesting device is the Pipeline from Telestream. That takes in HD-SDI and encodes it with hardware to Apple ProRes, DVCProHD, IMX and MPEG-2 (even DNxHD and VC-3 I think) and passes it through Ethernet. What I'm pointing to is their hardware which is an Ambric FPGA.

FPGA Journal

Well to be fair, HDCamSR is 880 for 10 bit 4:4:4 RGB with 12 audio streams at 24bit/48khz. I don't see anything like that here.

Uncompressed recording is useless. No one wants it anymore. Put 10bit log to preserve the color space, use wavelet which is more efficient than Mpeg4 and call it a day. This is nothing different than you're seeing out of RED. Use the available technology to your advantage.

Jpeg2000 and Dirac are sitting there for the taking. 440 - 880 Mbits of wavelet compression should satisfy anyone outside of George Lucas. Especially at HD resolutions.

No offense but you are the first person I ever heard refer to Sony Vegas as one of the big three NLE's. Sure it is nice but it only has a niche market share compared to Premiere. Just take a look at what Aja and Blackmagic support as their main PC NLE and that will tell you that Premiere is much more one of the big three then Vegas is. There is also the fact that Premiere can be used on a Mac just like Avid and FCP.

Errr.... I want it.

I do as much uncompressed as possible and love the texture (I call it digital grain - not to be confused with noise) and grading head room it gives, it´s CPU friendly and all you need is a bunch of large fast disks.

1 TB HDs are dirt cheap now, so why compress?

On the other hand you are right, the next best thing to uncompressed is jpg2000/wavelett (like Cineform) but it´s a CPU hog. Till you dont have any solid state chip that does the encoding you need a macho cpu. Not good for a "on camera" device with batterys.
Not to mention cooling/fan.noise problems.

Frank

I think we are looking at this from two different ends.

We are talking about acquisition. Are YOU going to drag around a RAID array to your shoots so you can record uncompressed? I'm sure not. I'd like to be able to record near uncompressed wavelet footage onto CF, SDXC, or something similar. Now what we do with it back at the edit bay is a different story. Yes, uncompressed has some advantages there, but honestly, if you're assembling multi-camera work, you are going to need one heck of a RAID system (15k SAS or SSD) to make it work well. Or, you can go to a reasonable intermediate, or if you have a high horsepower machine, you can edit native in what you acquired in.

So I don't get your argument about fan noise and cooling. I'd rather try to keep a small set of chips cool (like my Firestore) than to have to try to drag around a bunch of RAID.

I see your point Perrone.

But the Firestore usualy just records what comes out of the Firewire cable (thou I had the Firewire fan nuise on some recordings) no much processor power is needed here.

But converting a component or SDI signal from the camera on the fly to Jpeg2000 takes a hell of a processor (see Cineform) = heat = fan = noise and not battery friendly.

You are right with the raid, but I don´t do run and gun stuff so I could live with that.
I also could live with a good wavelet based codec in a small Firesore-like device (actualy you can buy one, but they are about $6000).

I wish cineform would finaly come out with the recorder they talked about since about a year.

Frank