Rai & Markus' "Drake" HD camera

[Eric Gorski]

Hey Marcus,

Your footage looks great. Thought i was watching Lord of the Rings for a moment :)

I want to know more about your setup.

1. What camera are you using. (link to retailer)

2. What are you capturing on and with what connection.

thanks

[Michael Pappas]

Hello Ben, do you mean like a, for example this Viper raw output with out all the bits.

I am sure you have seen this. But here is a 8bit version of a raw Viper file: http://pixelmonger.com/vip1

Color timed version: http://pixelmonger.com/vip2

[Markus Rupprecht]

well. This is not a lady with green eyes and red hair in bright sunlight but a blond lady with grey eyes in diffuse light, but whoever has access to this viper sample picture - could you mess around with this one here and give a hint on how close or far away that is in terms of detail and "post beahviour" to the viper pic?

www.drachenfeder.com/int/kopf2_16bit_1080p.tif


Greets
Markus

[Jason Rodriguez]

Markus, are you desaturating your images?

When we say that the Viper is green, (and you may already know this), but the reason it's green is because the Green CCD is more sensitive than the blue or red CCD's. But please notice how saturated the green is in the viper. That means that there's a lot of color information to extract. As of right now there is practially no color information to extract from that pic you just posted, so I'm not quite sure how to add accurate fleshtones, etc. I'll try and see what I get, but I'm not sure if you're desaturating your images first.

[Markus Rupprecht]

it was really almost sunset, lowlight. And low colors is one of the flaws of the full frame shutter. Anyway, it's a raw image, I'm curious how far you can go in post until problems show up.

[Jason Rodriguez]

Okay, here's a color-corrected image.

Not too great in that increasing the saturation brought out a lot of artifacting, banding, and color-abberations in the highlights.

From my limited experience with Micron, Altasens, and FillFactory, it seems that "low" color is a problem with the Fillfactory IBIS chip, not full-frame shutter modes.

This was done with Color Finesse from Synthetic Aperture, so it's running at 32-bits-per-channel floating point color space for very high-quality results. Nice thing is it comes with After Effects 6.5 now :)

http://home.mindspring.com/~jrod/kopf2_16bit_1080p.jpg

BTW though, your blow-up to 1080p looks really good, IIRC, the IBIS is only 1280x720.

[Brad Abrahams]

Markus, I noticed the tif you linked to is actually 8 bit, not 16 as the filename would suggest.

[Markus Rupprecht]

thanks Jason. That's quite a big pot of color. "shutter" was propably to unpresize. It's more readout speed that influences the outcome. And I'm still refering to the IBIS 5, can't tell how the Altasens compares too it right now.
I will do a perfectly lit sunshine shot with lots of color in the scene for comparison. And some greenscreen shots should also be interesting.

[Aaron Shaw]

I'd love to see a greenscreen shot!

How close is everyone to having a beta model?

Also, a question concerning bayer patterns:

How exactly is this implemented? It seems from the discussion here that it can be done with software but I honestly don't understand how that would work. Wouldn't it require a physical filter for each pixel to work? If you can do it all via software shouldn't there be a way to reconstruct a full RGB channel instead?

[Rob Lohman]

This thread originally was part of a much larger thread to build
our own HD camera's. For various reasons it has been split off
into its own thread. Please keep in mind that some of the earlier
conversations (up to this point) may read a bit strange due to
this split (some parts may exist in the old thread, etc.). You can
find the old thread in the following place:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...threadid=25808

Thank you for your consideration, back to our regular broadcast!

[Zac Stein]

Let me just say, i have money sitting right here if a varient of this camera ever comes up for sale, i would love to help support you guys and also have access to such a wonderful looking machine.

If i can help in anyway, well if i can, don't hesitate to ask.

Zac

[Obin Olson]

I see you guys are playing with the IBIS5...I guess that chip would work well for a "look" as the color is so low ...still stuff looks great guys! got any pics of the "camera"??

[Anhar Miah]

Wow, this is really amazing stuffm BUT....

I'm starting to wonder, this is beyond most peoples grasp, i mean it took experts(s) and month(s) and lots of money and god only knows how much dedication to get to where you got.

So i give congrats to you guys, great work.

However I was just wondering for the rest of us (no-so techincal experts) if the proposed 24P 1080P 3CCD JVC HDV 2/3" $20k may just be THE indie HD cam?
It may turn out to be less than $20K, and may even have 50Mb/s i.e. double current HDV rates recording onto full size DV tapes.

I know it wont be uncompressed, but heck if people can watch miniDV blown up then this options gotter be a great deal better?

Ooops, maybe i shouldnt have spoken out aloud...................................... now i gonna get grilled :)

[Aaron Shaw]

You make a very good point Anhar. Very good indeed.

I honestly don't think that very many people are going to need 4:4:4 footage. I can see using it for chroma-keying but beyond that it seems like a waste of storage space and bandwidth. Now, I'm not sure that I like the idea of HDV even at 50mbs.... Is 50mb/s 4:2:2 footage then?


As we continue producing our own cams why not have an option to shoot 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 switchable? No one will be able to tell that you shot 4:2:2 as compared with 4:4:4 save for special effects and you will plenty of money in storage space and processing power.

[Richard Mellor]

well I think a lot of the camera projects look like they will be under
$7,000. that looks like the real indie camera . all the work done on mini dv ,the challange has been to get people to take your project seriously, hi def with viper raw footage. I think will do that.