4:4:4 10bit single CMOS HD project

Steve Nordhauser · February 23rd, 2005, 11:59 AM

Kyle,
Glad to see you here. Don't you have SI-3300 cameras? Same features, just a different pixel pitch and resolution.

Florin,
I bought a gigabit cardbus card for my laptop...Netgear GA511 I think, for about $45. Kyle is working with our gigabit cameras. Our USB cameras will move raw 1.3Mpix 8 bit images at about 20-24fps. Greater than 8 bit will be at half that for USB since we only pack data on the gigabit cameras. Non-Intel host controllers will be slower so the second camera won't have a fast controller.

If you want to record on a laptop, you will almost undoubtably want to consider a fast processor and real-time compression. I was told that the Huffy algorithm was pretty quick. Laptop disks are slow - you have to consider your disk bandwidth carefully.

Kyle Granger · February 23rd, 2005, 12:01 PM

Florian, I am using the CameraLink version of the cameras, over GigeLink, so I can't really to speak about the USB version.

I meant only to make a comment on the SI-1300 clock. I would still go with a single camera solution for what you are trying to do. I did consider a dual-laptop for stereo, but only briefly.

Also what is difficult enough with dual-camera stereo, is getting focus and aperture to match perfectly. I would think the tolerances would be even smaller with your application.

One thing to beware of when doing bandwith calculations, is that the 10-bit data (at least with GigeLink) is packed as 12 bits: 2 pixels in three bytes. Same as with the SI-3300.

Wayne Morellini · February 23rd, 2005, 12:18 PM

The latest laptop and 1.8 inch drives have improved in speed. I would go to Tomshardware and check their news for the last 3-4 months, maybe look in my technical thread, I might have posted some links to some of them there. Still, none of these drives will be able to record more than one single 720p stream, so you need dual drive in a laptop (or external that works fast).

Unless you want to do 3D, I would suggest going for a single camera at 1080p (i.e. 2xcams= around $2K+ + dual laptop or expensive laptop, or + external, plus a lot of hassle, + alignment (prism best, but probably $) etc. USB has the problem in that, unlike Gige/Firewire, it really ties up the processor, meaning more expensive laptop, and drivers aren't necessarily brilliant (even Gige needs special chipset with special custom driver to work fast). So, it starts adding up

Good luck with it.

Thanks

Wayne.

Kyle Granger · February 23rd, 2005, 12:21 PM

Greetings Steve, and Greetings Jason!

Yes Steve, I still have the 3300. I was wading into the thread gradually, and you blew my cover. ;-)

Everything I said about the 1300 applies to the 3300. And the 1920.

The clock lets me get 1280x692 at 48.0000fps (dropping very other picture to reduce rolling shutter). Or something strange like 1792x747 at 48.0000 on the 1920.

Jason has been helping me solve some bandwidth problems of my own, successfully I might add.

My setup, for anyone who is interested:
Dell Precision 530 (529 euros in Ebay, not state of the art, don't try this at home kids)
1.7 Xeon
32 MB Nvida Quadro2, AGP 4x
3xPCI, 2xPCI-X, 64-bit/66MHz
1 GB RIMM
Intel Dualport Server Pro Adaptor 1000 MT (PCI-X card))
3ware RAID 8006-2, two Maxtor SATA drives (110MB/sec) (also PCI-X)
2 x Pleora GigeLink

The graphics performance is suprisingly steller for me, at least under OpenGL.

The Intel card is now in a PCI slot. Why? Because I can capture more data and write it to the hard disk, than when it is sharing the PCI-X bus with the RAID card (Jason's brilliant suggestion!)

Why is that so? I have no idea. ;-)

Jason Rodriguez · February 23rd, 2005, 12:37 PM

Wow, the big guns are showing up!

Just when Obin thought the thread was dead . . . ;)

Jason Rodriguez · February 23rd, 2005, 12:46 PM

BTW Obin,

At least from what I've seen on your images, and the Altasens, yes, noise is much lower on the 1920 than the 3300.

The other thing you have to realize is that you're getting 12-bit precision out of the Altasens instead of 10-bit, which allows you to extract more scene information before hitting the noise floor of the sensor. Basically what this means is that you can set the white-point lower, gaining another 2-3 stops of performance in the highlights without banding and other problematic artifacts ruining the scene. Those extra stops can go a long way towards giving you that high-dynamic range "film" look and soft clipped highlights (i.e., not harsh clipped video highlights, etc.).

Film, through it's logarithmic response curve to light, compresses the hightlights beautifully, and this really helps to give film that perception of more naturalistic, higher quality imagery. Highlights blow out the way the eye sees. In order to reproduce that effect in the digital world, you have to give yourself a lot of headroom, the same way that audio technicians in digital like to record with tone at -20db instead of 0db as one would do in the analog world. Once you clip in digital, all the information is gone, so to give the illusion of the massive headroom that film allows, you have to give yourself enough space to do a soft-clip that rolls off the highlights smoothly to the point where either the display device or the eye can't really tell the differneces in detail anymore, and therefore there would be no difference between film and digital at that point-it would simply look like digitized film in it's highlight response.

So that's the goal, and the Altasens seems to get one much closer to that goal than anything else I've seen out there so far.

Juan M. M. Fiebelkorn · February 23rd, 2005, 04:01 PM

WOW.I see this thing is warming up guys!!!!
Keep an eye on Kyle :)

Valeriu Campan · February 23rd, 2005, 06:12 PM

Where can we see any samples from the altasens chip?

Valeriu Campan · February 23rd, 2005, 06:27 PM

Steve,
Is it possible to integrate the Altasens sensor in camera having firewire interface or an integration similar to the one used by Pixelink 741-2 series. The camera can be programed with the supplied OEM software, doesn't need any frame grabbers and "can be controlled by third-party IIDC 1.3 (DCAM) compliant applications running on Mac OS X".
From their poll, FireWire is preffered by 63% of respondents.
This way, the RAW, AVI, TIFF, JPEG files can transfered to any computer/laptop (Wintel or Mac) for storage with apropiate drive setup.

Juan M. M. Fiebelkorn · February 23rd, 2005, 10:17 PM

Valeriu:
What is the difference between having GigE and Firewire?
GigE isn't more complicated than Firewire, just need to plug a cable.
Also what is the advantge of a slower interface (Firewire 400&800 Mbit) to GigE (1000 Mbit) ?

Wayne Morellini · February 24th, 2005, 04:18 AM

Mac Mini

Will Griffith · February 24th, 2005, 09:36 AM

>>Mac Mini

As a potential buyer, the option to capture via firewire 400
(like macs do with DVCProHD) would make me very happy.

I guess that would rule out RAW capture, but it would be
oh so convienient.

The Mini could stick on the back like a brick battery
and monitor HD on a Cinema Display via DVI.

of course I guess that means scrapping everything so
far...probibly not something you want to even think about.

Obin Olson · February 24th, 2005, 09:42 AM

Ok the test code is in and we get a SOLID 30% cpu overhead with it..this is GOOD news as it tells us that our code in CineLInk is slow..I have tried the test code in 2 machines and with BOTH 32BIT AND 64bit cards...same figures for all ...around 30-40% cpu..I will have an updated CineLInk today that has been cleaned up and stripped down for SPEED..I have a feeling of good things today!

stick around!

Obin Olson · February 24th, 2005, 09:52 AM

I just can't get over how GOOD the CMOS chip looks...this shot with nothing but overhead office lights...look how soft and NON video it looks.and it's not even been color graded

oh and I have the worst soft lens on the camera..some old cheapo 16mm film 25mm lens

www.dv3productions.com/pub/16bit.tif

down and dirty photoshop CS CC and downscale

www.dv3productions.com/pub/8bit.jpg

the image was shot with TONS of gain 25db? and you can see dea pixels and pixel noise because of that..but still..not bad for a "snapshot"

see the cheap smear on the watch highlight? yep...cheapo lens ;)

Obin Olson · February 24th, 2005, 09:59 AM

Oh ya..SEteve N. can you map out dead pixels in the SI Cameras?

February 23rd, 2005, 11:59 AM	#2521
Steve Nordhauser Silicon Imaging, Inc. Join Date: May 2004 Location: Troy, NY USA Posts: 325	Kyle, Glad to see you here. Don't you have SI-3300 cameras? Same features, just a different pixel pitch and resolution. Florin, I bought a gigabit cardbus card for my laptop...Netgear GA511 I think, for about $45. Kyle is working with our gigabit cameras. Our USB cameras will move raw 1.3Mpix 8 bit images at about 20-24fps. Greater than 8 bit will be at half that for USB since we only pack data on the gigabit cameras. Non-Intel host controllers will be slower so the second camera won't have a fast controller. If you want to record on a laptop, you will almost undoubtably want to consider a fast processor and real-time compression. I was told that the Huffy algorithm was pretty quick. Laptop disks are slow - you have to consider your disk bandwidth carefully. __________________ Silicon Imaging, Inc. We see the Light! http://www.siliconimaging.com

February 24th, 2005, 09:36 AM	#2532
Will Griffith Regular Crew Join Date: Apr 2003 Location: Tennessee Posts: 164	>>Mac Mini As a potential buyer, the option to capture via firewire 400 (like macs do with DVCProHD) would make me very happy. I guess that would rule out RAW capture, but it would be oh so convienient. The Mini could stick on the back like a brick battery and monitor HD on a Cinema Display via DVI. of course I guess that means scrapping everything so far...probibly not something you want to even think about. __________________ will griffith producer/editor

February 23rd, 2005, 12:01 PM	#2522
Kyle Granger Regular Crew Join Date: Feb 2005 Location: . Posts: 52	Florian, I am using the CameraLink version of the cameras, over GigeLink, so I can't really to speak about the USB version. I meant only to make a comment on the SI-1300 clock. I would still go with a single camera solution for what you are trying to do. I did consider a dual-laptop for stereo, but only briefly. Also what is difficult enough with dual-camera stereo, is getting focus and aperture to match perfectly. I would think the tolerances would be even smaller with your application. One thing to beware of when doing bandwith calculations, is that the 10-bit data (at least with GigeLink) is packed as 12 bits: 2 pixels in three bytes. Same as with the SI-3300.

February 23rd, 2005, 12:18 PM	#2523
Wayne Morellini Inner Circle Join Date: May 2003 Location: Australia Posts: 2,762	The latest laptop and 1.8 inch drives have improved in speed. I would go to Tomshardware and check their news for the last 3-4 months, maybe look in my technical thread, I might have posted some links to some of them there. Still, none of these drives will be able to record more than one single 720p stream, so you need dual drive in a laptop (or external that works fast). Unless you want to do 3D, I would suggest going for a single camera at 1080p (i.e. 2xcams= around $2K+ + dual laptop or expensive laptop, or + external, plus a lot of hassle, + alignment (prism best, but probably $) etc. USB has the problem in that, unlike Gige/Firewire, it really ties up the processor, meaning more expensive laptop, and drivers aren't necessarily brilliant (even Gige needs special chipset with special custom driver to work fast). So, it starts adding up Good luck with it. Thanks Wayne.

February 23rd, 2005, 12:21 PM	#2524
Kyle Granger Regular Crew Join Date: Feb 2005 Location: . Posts: 52	Greetings Steve, and Greetings Jason! Yes Steve, I still have the 3300. I was wading into the thread gradually, and you blew my cover. ;-) Everything I said about the 1300 applies to the 3300. And the 1920. The clock lets me get 1280x692 at 48.0000fps (dropping very other picture to reduce rolling shutter). Or something strange like 1792x747 at 48.0000 on the 1920. Jason has been helping me solve some bandwidth problems of my own, successfully I might add. My setup, for anyone who is interested: Dell Precision 530 (529 euros in Ebay, not state of the art, don't try this at home kids) 1.7 Xeon 32 MB Nvida Quadro2, AGP 4x 3xPCI, 2xPCI-X, 64-bit/66MHz 1 GB RIMM Intel Dualport Server Pro Adaptor 1000 MT (PCI-X card)) 3ware RAID 8006-2, two Maxtor SATA drives (110MB/sec) (also PCI-X) 2 x Pleora GigeLink The graphics performance is suprisingly steller for me, at least under OpenGL. The Intel card is now in a PCI slot. Why? Because I can capture more data and write it to the hard disk, than when it is sharing the PCI-X bus with the RAID card (Jason's brilliant suggestion!) Why is that so? I have no idea. ;-)

February 23rd, 2005, 12:37 PM	#2525
Jason Rodriguez Trustee Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: Virginia Beach, VA Posts: 1,095	Wow, the big guns are showing up! Just when Obin thought the thread was dead . . . ;)

February 23rd, 2005, 12:46 PM	#2526
Jason Rodriguez Trustee Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: Virginia Beach, VA Posts: 1,095	BTW Obin, At least from what I've seen on your images, and the Altasens, yes, noise is much lower on the 1920 than the 3300. The other thing you have to realize is that you're getting 12-bit precision out of the Altasens instead of 10-bit, which allows you to extract more scene information before hitting the noise floor of the sensor. Basically what this means is that you can set the white-point lower, gaining another 2-3 stops of performance in the highlights without banding and other problematic artifacts ruining the scene. Those extra stops can go a long way towards giving you that high-dynamic range "film" look and soft clipped highlights (i.e., not harsh clipped video highlights, etc.). Film, through it's logarithmic response curve to light, compresses the hightlights beautifully, and this really helps to give film that perception of more naturalistic, higher quality imagery. Highlights blow out the way the eye sees. In order to reproduce that effect in the digital world, you have to give yourself a lot of headroom, the same way that audio technicians in digital like to record with tone at -20db instead of 0db as one would do in the analog world. Once you clip in digital, all the information is gone, so to give the illusion of the massive headroom that film allows, you have to give yourself enough space to do a soft-clip that rolls off the highlights smoothly to the point where either the display device or the eye can't really tell the differneces in detail anymore, and therefore there would be no difference between film and digital at that point-it would simply look like digitized film in it's highlight response. So that's the goal, and the Altasens seems to get one much closer to that goal than anything else I've seen out there so far.

February 23rd, 2005, 04:01 PM	#2527
Juan M. M. Fiebelkorn Major Player Join Date: Jun 2004 Location: Buenos Aires , Argentina Posts: 444	WOW.I see this thing is warming up guys!!!! Keep an eye on Kyle :)

February 23rd, 2005, 06:12 PM	#2528
Valeriu Campan Major Player Join Date: Mar 2004 Location: Melbourne, Australia Posts: 223	Where can we see any samples from the altasens chip?

February 23rd, 2005, 06:27 PM	#2529
Valeriu Campan Major Player Join Date: Mar 2004 Location: Melbourne, Australia Posts: 223	Steve, Is it possible to integrate the Altasens sensor in camera having firewire interface or an integration similar to the one used by Pixelink 741-2 series. The camera can be programed with the supplied OEM software, doesn't need any frame grabbers and "can be controlled by third-party IIDC 1.3 (DCAM) compliant applications running on Mac OS X". From their poll, FireWire is preffered by 63% of respondents. This way, the RAW, AVI, TIFF, JPEG files can transfered to any computer/laptop (Wintel or Mac) for storage with apropiate drive setup.

February 23rd, 2005, 10:17 PM	#2530
Juan M. M. Fiebelkorn Major Player Join Date: Jun 2004 Location: Buenos Aires , Argentina Posts: 444	Valeriu: What is the difference between having GigE and Firewire? GigE isn't more complicated than Firewire, just need to plug a cable. Also what is the advantge of a slower interface (Firewire 400&800 Mbit) to GigE (1000 Mbit) ?

February 24th, 2005, 04:18 AM	#2531
Wayne Morellini Inner Circle Join Date: May 2003 Location: Australia Posts: 2,762	Mac Mini

February 24th, 2005, 09:42 AM	#2533
Obin Olson Trustee Join Date: Jan 2003 Location: Wilmington NC Posts: 1,414	Ok the test code is in and we get a SOLID 30% cpu overhead with it..this is GOOD news as it tells us that our code in CineLInk is slow..I have tried the test code in 2 machines and with BOTH 32BIT AND 64bit cards...same figures for all ...around 30-40% cpu..I will have an updated CineLInk today that has been cleaned up and stripped down for SPEED..I have a feeling of good things today! stick around!

February 24th, 2005, 09:52 AM	#2534
Obin Olson Trustee Join Date: Jan 2003 Location: Wilmington NC Posts: 1,414	I just can't get over how GOOD the CMOS chip looks...this shot with nothing but overhead office lights...look how soft and NON video it looks.and it's not even been color graded oh and I have the worst soft lens on the camera..some old cheapo 16mm film 25mm lens www.dv3productions.com/pub/16bit.tif down and dirty photoshop CS CC and downscale www.dv3productions.com/pub/8bit.jpg the image was shot with TONS of gain 25db? and you can see dea pixels and pixel noise because of that..but still..not bad for a "snapshot" see the cheap smear on the watch highlight? yep...cheapo lens ;)

February 24th, 2005, 09:59 AM	#2535
Obin Olson Trustee Join Date: Jan 2003 Location: Wilmington NC Posts: 1,414	Oh ya..SEteve N. can you map out dead pixels in the SI Cameras?