Retrofit Panny DVX-100A to uncompressed HD?

John Benton · February 11th, 2006, 02:16 PM

Aaarg.
If I already owned a DVX - the Andromeda would be mine by now !!!
I agree, if you already own one & a mac it is the best solution.
Keep up the good work Juan !
This is just the beginning.

I read your post that Sculptor might, in the future, do up-rezzing,
targetting 2K formats for film composition. Wow.
I hope that Andromeda will be around as a solution to many cameras,
in many ways, for quite awhile.
Cheers,
Benton

Aaron Koolen · February 11th, 2006, 02:23 PM

Juan, am I right in thinking that you don't do PAL cameras?

Cheers
Aaron

Juan P. Pertierra · February 13th, 2006, 01:03 PM

Sorry for the late reply:

Wayne:

Quote:

People don't realise that the video look is low stop high contrast look, and that resolution is not the answer to everything.

I couldn't possibly agree more. This statement should be a banner on every digital video site. :)

About recording the analog out, we don't currently have any plans to build a portable digitizer/storage solution, although I guess it is possible. Our current focus, however, is on providing access to real digital uncompressed raw video, as is common practice with the high-end cinematography cameras.

Recording the analog output does usually yield better results than the compressed format, but it's a world of a difference from having access to the RAW data from the camera head. Digitizing the analog out is like attempting to duplicate an uncompressed WAV file by putting a microphone next to the speaker. Our system gives you the actual WAV file, and is more compact and inexpensive than something like a Wafian.

I do know there are other companies working on self-contained digitizing solutions, keep an eye on NAB2006.

Ken:

I think your post correctly summarizes how users should look at this system...it's just another tool with specific strong points like everything else. We understand that, for example, somebody who already has a DVX and a mac will find our system a lot more affordable than somebody who has neither. But this is the same with many products, the HVX is a current example. In order to record HD, you either need to invest in cards(possily P2Store) or invest on a mac laptop to record anyway. If you buy a car, you need to buy gas, maintenance, insurance, registration, furry dice, etc.

Aaron:

That is correct, we currently do not support PAL cameras. Not because the system cannot be installed on one, but because the difference in the amount of data(1 extra frame per second, 100 extra lines per frame) exceed the current max USB bandwidth of the available computers. We would have to make compromises such as cropping the frame or not record full 4:4:4, which we would rather not sacrifice.

Cheers,
Juan

John Jay · February 13th, 2006, 07:26 PM

Juan;

would you like to pass comment on why the Andromeda EIA1956 resolution chart referred to earlier shows the black lines as significantly thinner than the white spaces between them?

my copy of the EIA1956 resolution chart shows the black lines as equal thickness to the white spaces; which is as it should be.

Juan P. Pertierra · February 13th, 2006, 07:41 PM

Hello John,

Can you be more specific? I looked at the trumpets in Photoshop just now, and I don't see what you are saying. I do see edges that lie within a single sensor element/pixel, so there are gray pixels between the black and the white. If you count the gray pixels as black, then the lines are thicker. If you count them as white, then they are thinner.

Cheers,
Juan

Wayne Morellini · February 14th, 2006, 04:32 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Juan P. Pertierra

Sorry for the late reply:

Wayne:

About recording the analog out, we don't currently have any plans to build a portable digitizer/storage solution, although I guess it is possible. Our current focus, however, is on providing access to real digital uncompressed raw video, as is common practice with the high-end cinematography cameras.

Recording the analog output does usually yield better results than the compressed format, but it's a world of a difference from having access to the RAW data from the camera head. Digitizing the analog out is like attempting to duplicate an uncompressed WAV file by putting a microphone next to the speaker. Our system gives you the actual WAV file, and is more compact and inexpensive than something like a Wafian.

I do know there are other companies working on self-contained digitizing solutions, keep an eye on NAB2006.

Pity, most of the solutions are just to expensive, a $500-$1000 could be much more popular.

John Jay · February 14th, 2006, 11:00 AM

Hey Juan;

Not much to add really; but if you look at the black vertical lines in the center square , the black concentric lines in the bullseye and the black horizontal lines on the 200 blind as typical examples and compare them with the chart for the HD100 it shows your chart black lines to be much thinner. The HD100 chart looks about right.

For want of an explanation, it looks as if your chart has had the maximum photoshop plugin applied to it, although I'm not saying it has; but it looks like something of that nature.

Juan P. Pertierra · February 14th, 2006, 11:45 AM

Wayne:

It looks like there will be other solutions to doing what you are talking about...however, It really doesn't seem like any of them will be in the $500-$1000 range, that would barely cover the actual cost of the drive array!

John:

I dropped the image into photoshop, and I still don't see what you are saying. The vertical lines in the center are 6 pixels wide with 6 pixel spacing. However I think I know why the lines may appear thinner when seeing the image at full resolution.

Remember that this image is logarithmically encoded. This means that there is literally no black, but the white/bright areas are still there. Thus, the 'gray' pixels that sit in between the black and white are pushed brighter by the logarithmic curve, and the black itself is pushed to gray. This makes the dark area look thinner, but if you look at it closely in photoshop you'll see what I mean. This is the same encoding used for scanning film because it uses more bits for the darks, where most of the the detail is.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'the maximum photoshop plugin' but we didn't apply any plug-ins, this is standard output.

Cheers,
Juan

Chris Hurd · February 14th, 2006, 12:56 PM

Thread moved to our DVX forum... finally.

Ken Hodson · February 14th, 2006, 02:03 PM

Thats too bad, General HD is where it deserves to be. It is in the same price ballpark as the P2 HDV solutions, and provides many of the solutions that people in the HD/HDV forums are seeking.

John Benton · February 14th, 2006, 08:57 PM

I agree with Ken,
I think this should be in the High Def forums - this is where it will get play and raise the general discussion levels.
But, whoever wants to find it, no doubt will...
personally I feel Andromeda should be more widely known

Peter Jefferson · February 14th, 2006, 09:05 PM

"Is Panasonic DVX Glass just flat out better then Canon XL2 Glass? "

I believe so... but thats jsut my opinion... of teh years ive worked with this range of cameras, i am yet find a better piece of glass. with virtually no Lens abherations, barrel distortion is only SLIGHTY visible depending on your lighting and only in full wide, flare is NICE... most people hate lens flares, but wth this camera, i actually USE flares to accentuate certain scenes and enviornments, static pickup (ie dust) is easy to manage...

i found the that the DVX has the cleanest glass of the lot..

Wayne Morellini · February 15th, 2006, 12:03 AM

I think this is really a question about what to do with the normal Pana, so it belongs in two forums. We have a similar problem with the DIY Cinema Camera threads over at Alternative imaging, the 35mmSLR adaptors simply swamp everything. I have to go through every now and then to locate the odd thread on DIY cameras and subscribe to them (though I don't post to all of them). I haven't really advocated a separate forum for them, because there wasn't an active enough community. But this gives me an idea that ties in with Andromeda.

The SLR lens adaptor technology can be move to their own sub forum, all other alternative imaging products, including DIY camera and original Andromeda threads can be kept in the general Alternative imaging methods forum.

Another idea would be to have an Alternative Camera (Alternative and DIY)forum under HD forums (very few alternative cameras nowadays are SD) or at least all the commercially released ones "Commercial Alternative Camera (Alternative and DIY)" forum and we can shove all those flash cameras into there too.

Many times a thread might belong in more than one forum at once because of the subject matter, like this one. When we start a thread we could get to nominate which forums it is posted to, where a link to the thread goes in each forum. So you could post a thread like this in a Panasonic forum and a Andromeda/HD/Alternative Camera forum at the same time. Single thread so conversation never gets split up over different forums.

What do you think Chris?

Wayne Morellini · February 15th, 2006, 01:25 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Juan P. Pertierra

Wayne:

It looks like there will be other solutions to doing what you are talking about...however, It really doesn't seem like any of them will be in the $500-$1000 range, that would barely cover the actual cost of the drive array!

Cheers,
Juan

Sorry, I slipped up, I have been dealing with concepts of visually lossless compressed to ordinary hard drives too much. So I was talking without drives (user supplies). I agree, uncompressed would be impractical as it either would require more consumer grade drives (I think upto 10-20MB/s) than is worth worrying about, or a few expensive 32 or 50MB/s sustained class drives.

I hope somebody gives us low cost high quality recording for all the low cost cameras out there. I did some estimates and it would be a cheap alternative for a 720p camera and people could opt for the expensive faster drives for the true 1080*1920 cameras. Hopefully somebody in the market will cotton onto this:

Basic 4:2:0 8 bit 720p/25fps (around 32.5MB/s) is doable with two cheap consumer drives. 4:4:4 and 12bit 4:2:2 (around 75MB/s) is doable with four cheap drives but big. For HDV1080 4:2:0 8 bits it is doable with cheap drives, but higher bit rates, format, or true 1080 resolution requires fast drives.

Some people claim that the Sony cameras (for example) are not outputting true 4:2:0 1080HDV format, but that the resolution reflects the unprocessed pixel shifted resolution, with a circuit that synchronises to odd formats than it would line up with more 720p data rates.

If lossless or visually lossless compression could be used than the data rate would drop by 1/2 to 1/6th.

I have contemplated in the past, that maybe Sony could have possibly included a servicing mode on the HC1 to examine every pixel through the component port If such a mode exists then it might give a true RAW 8-14bit bayer output 1080 (50-87.5MB/s).

Still, I am interested in a platform to record uncompressed 4:4:4 pixel shifted Standard definition through component, I have a camera in mind. Will you be offering a box to do something like this Juan, or do you know of a cheap box?

February 11th, 2006, 02:23 PM	#47
Aaron Koolen Trustee Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: Auckland, New Zealand Posts: 1,727	Juan, am I right in thinking that you don't do PAL cameras? Cheers Aaron __________________ My Website Meat Free Media

February 13th, 2006, 07:26 PM	#49
John Jay Major Player Join Date: Sep 2002 Location: US & THEM Posts: 827	Juan; would you like to pass comment on why the Andromeda EIA1956 resolution chart referred to earlier shows the black lines as significantly thinner than the white spaces between them? my copy of the EIA1956 resolution chart shows the black lines as equal thickness to the white spaces; which is as it should be. __________________ John Jay Beware *PLUGGER-BYTES*

February 13th, 2006, 07:41 PM	#50
Juan P. Pertierra Major Player Join Date: Jul 2003 Posts: 479	Hello John, Can you be more specific? I looked at the trumpets in Photoshop just now, and I don't see what you are saying. I do see edges that lie within a single sensor element/pixel, so there are gray pixels between the black and the white. If you count the gray pixels as black, then the lines are thicker. If you count them as white, then they are thinner. Cheers, Juan __________________ Juan P. Pertierra www.reel-stream.com

February 14th, 2006, 11:00 AM	#52
John Jay Major Player Join Date: Sep 2002 Location: US & THEM Posts: 827	Hey Juan; Not much to add really; but if you look at the black vertical lines in the center square , the black concentric lines in the bullseye and the black horizontal lines on the 200 blind as typical examples and compare them with the chart for the HD100 it shows your chart black lines to be much thinner. The HD100 chart looks about right. For want of an explanation, it looks as if your chart has had the maximum photoshop plugin applied to it, although I'm not saying it has; but it looks like something of that nature. __________________ John Jay Beware *PLUGGER-BYTES*

February 14th, 2006, 11:45 AM	#53
Juan P. Pertierra Major Player Join Date: Jul 2003 Posts: 479	Wayne: It looks like there will be other solutions to doing what you are talking about...however, It really doesn't seem like any of them will be in the $500-$1000 range, that would barely cover the actual cost of the drive array! John: I dropped the image into photoshop, and I still don't see what you are saying. The vertical lines in the center are 6 pixels wide with 6 pixel spacing. However I think I know why the lines may appear thinner when seeing the image at full resolution. Remember that this image is logarithmically encoded. This means that there is literally no black, but the white/bright areas are still there. Thus, the 'gray' pixels that sit in between the black and white are pushed brighter by the logarithmic curve, and the black itself is pushed to gray. This makes the dark area look thinner, but if you look at it closely in photoshop you'll see what I mean. This is the same encoding used for scanning film because it uses more bits for the darks, where most of the the detail is. I'm not sure what you mean by 'the maximum photoshop plugin' but we didn't apply any plug-ins, this is standard output. Cheers, Juan __________________ Juan P. Pertierra www.reel-stream.com

February 11th, 2006, 02:16 PM	#46
John Benton Major Player Join Date: Oct 2005 Location: NYC Posts: 658	Aaarg. If I already owned a DVX - the Andromeda would be mine by now !!! I agree, if you already own one & a mac it is the best solution. Keep up the good work Juan ! This is just the beginning. I read your post that Sculptor might, in the future, do up-rezzing, targetting 2K formats for film composition. Wow. I hope that Andromeda will be around as a solution to many cameras, in many ways, for quite awhile. Cheers, Benton

February 14th, 2006, 12:56 PM	#54
Chris Hurd Obstreperous Rex Join Date: Jan 2001 Location: San Marcos, TX Posts: 27,368 Images: 513	Thread moved to our DVX forum... finally. __________________ CH Search DV Info Net \| 20 years of DVi \| ...Tuesday is Soylent Green Day!

February 14th, 2006, 02:03 PM	#55
Ken Hodson Trustee Join Date: Aug 2003 Location: Vancouver BC Canada Posts: 1,315	Thats too bad, General HD is where it deserves to be. It is in the same price ballpark as the P2 HDV solutions, and provides many of the solutions that people in the HD/HDV forums are seeking. __________________ Damnit Jim, I'm a film maker not a sysytems tech.

February 14th, 2006, 08:57 PM	#56
John Benton Major Player Join Date: Oct 2005 Location: NYC Posts: 658	I agree with Ken, I think this should be in the High Def forums - this is where it will get play and raise the general discussion levels. But, whoever wants to find it, no doubt will... personally I feel Andromeda should be more widely known

February 14th, 2006, 09:05 PM	#57
Peter Jefferson Inner Circle Join Date: Apr 2003 Location: Aus Posts: 3,884	"Is Panasonic DVX Glass just flat out better then Canon XL2 Glass? " I believe so... but thats jsut my opinion... of teh years ive worked with this range of cameras, i am yet find a better piece of glass. with virtually no Lens abherations, barrel distortion is only SLIGHTY visible depending on your lighting and only in full wide, flare is NICE... most people hate lens flares, but wth this camera, i actually USE flares to accentuate certain scenes and enviornments, static pickup (ie dust) is easy to manage... i found the that the DVX has the cleanest glass of the lot..

February 15th, 2006, 12:03 AM	#58
Wayne Morellini Inner Circle Join Date: May 2003 Location: Australia Posts: 2,762	I think this is really a question about what to do with the normal Pana, so it belongs in two forums. We have a similar problem with the DIY Cinema Camera threads over at Alternative imaging, the 35mmSLR adaptors simply swamp everything. I have to go through every now and then to locate the odd thread on DIY cameras and subscribe to them (though I don't post to all of them). I haven't really advocated a separate forum for them, because there wasn't an active enough community. But this gives me an idea that ties in with Andromeda. The SLR lens adaptor technology can be move to their own sub forum, all other alternative imaging products, including DIY camera and original Andromeda threads can be kept in the general Alternative imaging methods forum. Another idea would be to have an Alternative Camera (Alternative and DIY)forum under HD forums (very few alternative cameras nowadays are SD) or at least all the commercially released ones "Commercial Alternative Camera (Alternative and DIY)" forum and we can shove all those flash cameras into there too. Many times a thread might belong in more than one forum at once because of the subject matter, like this one. When we start a thread we could get to nominate which forums it is posted to, where a link to the thread goes in each forum. So you could post a thread like this in a Panasonic forum and a Andromeda/HD/Alternative Camera forum at the same time. Single thread so conversation never gets split up over different forums. What do you think Chris?