I mean there are plenty of productions where running a camera tethered is reasonable, and it certainly isnt that complicated to build a relatively portable computer that could be shoulder mounted. I did this with the old sumix M73 usb camera. I unfortunately never got around to shooting handheld or in a production environment (only shot stuff like motion and resolution tests while developing) with it because unfortunately the motherboard i was using stopped working. any pictures of your camera platform, daniel? do you have a thread about it? only thing is, if the requirements are anything like SI's camera, you might not be able to run the sumix on the same computer as the elphel. From the sound of it, sumix's compression isnt on-camera like elphel, so youll be dealing with 10x as much data (7MBps max on elphel vs 70+ MBps on sumix). This means more CPU and HDD speed (although one can be traded for the other). Also I know SI has particular requirements in terms of gigE chipsets because of the need for especially large jumbo packets when pushing that much data over gigE, this might be the case for the sumix as well for capturing any video formats requiring much more than 70MP/s.

Daniel, I saw some of the footage you posted from the stuff you shot on the 333. How did things go in terms of rolling shutter and accurate framerates/audio sync? I mean I can imagine shooting things that have little movement and where audio can be VO'd where none of that would be much of an issue, but that could be quite limiting in many cases.

Any future plans of offering this package with the altasens bitsdream sensor?

Hmm I must have missed it before but it does mention

"Hardware image processing (gamma, brightness, contrast, median filter, lossless image compression)"

as one of the features. But Jose mentioned earlier that they do not have the ability to apply compression before the data reaches the computer. This seems conflicting, unless there is some other definition of hardware image processing I am missing. I know the M73 had gamma, brightness, and contrast (as well as LUT if you use their API) hardware controls but also similar software controls (plus saturation). The software controls took a lot of cpu power and the hardware controls took none. Big difference. If there really is lossless compression in camera, thatd be something SI doesnt have and could really make a big difference in terms of getting the most out of the camera. I certainly wouldnt mind being able to shoot 1080p60 even if it had to be 8bit log instead of 12bit raw.

Noah, if you read my post again, you'll notice I said "SI can't extract 12bit at 60p because they don't compress the signal at all before reaching the computer". I was talking about Silicon Imaging, not Sumix. Sumix DOES include realtime hardware lossless compression in this camera.

i wonder if anyone is taking advantage of anything like bitsdream yet. It has always amazed me there wasnt more push for HDR video. RED, SI2k etc are great but a significant increase in exposure latitude of video could have a greater effect on the popularity of video than higher resolutions, color samplings, or frame rates ever did.

Then again, now we have to worry about rolling shutter artifacts, with hdr im sure we will add in all kinds of hdr motion artifacting.

I agree... I've been waiting to see who will use the bitsdream... Very interesed in where this is sensor is going. I'm producing real world 32-bit video right now with a DSLR but to get nine stops I'm limited to 15-20 seconds per frame and thus it's only timelapse.

Since this camera is API based would it be possible to vary the eV frame by frame via custom software?

ah jose, sorry about that, i misread. so sumix does confirm that they compress in hardware and can do 1080p60 at 12bit? any answer regarding the type of compression and how it handles complex scenes that cannot remain lossless at 1.7x compression?

I have not made a thread yet, I will once its 100% complete. Pictures should come in a few days. Here are some details for now:

18" long x 10" high
black plexiglass body on aluminum rails
wide 7" touch screen lcd
single hand input device

quad core 2 duo q6600
asus p5k deluxe w/ 2x 1Gbit lan
2gb DDR2 1066mhz ram soon @ 4gb
400gb sataII hdd. plans for raid 0
geforce 7900

Im fairly confident it can handle anything I throw at it, especially after I get 4gb ram and raid 0.



I have done a lot of filming with the 333. You can see some footage I edited last Sunday here:
http://www.buysmartpc.com/temp2/phon...12K_Stream.wmv

From another post.. "I was just the camera operator. This is the first time I used the 333 in an actual production environment, and I really was not ready. Its got its problems. It still needs some sound work, compression especially. And there is no CC. This is unmodified video, so it has a bit of green tint to it."

Its not the best demonstration for rolling shutter because the shot is locked off. This is before my platform. The camera was connected to a desktop pc. For nearly every setup i had to power down, move pc, move camera, setup mouse/keyboard, boot up, set settings, and 10-15 min later be ready to record again. I know all about the limitations of shooting with the network cameras all too well. Thats why im trying to integrate everything. The new platform only has 1 cable leading to it, power.

If plans go well, this Saturday im shooting a film with the new camera platform. It will be all shot hand held and im sure I will run into wobble and distortion problems. But it will give me a good idea of what to expect and learn to deal with it.

18"x10"? thats pretty big, is that for the whole system with rails and lens etc? i guess probably not since that is a full atx motherboard... so its like a smallish atx case on rails? i built a cheap battery powered mini-itx* computer for my sumix M73 way back when and it was 8"x10" which still seemed quite large to mount on one's shoulder. You dont run yours on battery power do you?

Nowadays there are certainly ITX 6.7"x6.7" options you could put a q6600 into (actually the 2.1Ghz quad xeon socket 775 is cheaper and probably better suited since quadcore for a portable pc is sort of overkill especially on battery power, even undervolted). I've been looking at them in case i ever get around to building a battery-powered portable mini hdmi capture mini-pc for my hv20.

*technically wasnt itx spec, if it was it couldve been smaller than 8x10.

I was looking at mini itx for a long time but I really wanted the best performance I could get. So I looked up the fastest motherboard available. A quad core chip was very important to me. When you preview and record at the same time it puts quite a strain on a single core pc, I was worried that even a dual core would hiccup. I can't afford a hiccup, it could possibly ruin an entire shot. Finally, the quad core chip allows me to do other things such as do a real time preview key on blue/green screen, capture audio, and more.

I really don't think 18x10 is that big for a camera.
The PWD-530 for example is 10 5/8" x 13 1/8" and im pretty sure thats without a lens. With a lens I bet it would be around 18"+. The Canon XL-H1 is almost 20" long, so is the XL2.

Mine is only less then 1 inch taller, and even shorter then some.

Honestly size was not much of a concern to me when I designed everything. Its comfortable on my shoulder, and a decent tripod wont have any trouble with it.

If it is comfortable on your shoulder that is what counts.

Your thoughts about other ENG-style cameras were sort of what i thought when i built mine, shoulder mounted cameras are huge, so a big computer on a shoulder shouldnt be so bad. I guess when it comes down to it build and balance probably matter more than actual dimensions. A poorly balanced small camera is probably less comfortable than a big one that is well balanced. Mine was not well balanced and I didnt get around to reorganizing, but that is often the case with computers since everything is usually mounted against a wall rather than situated toward the center/bottom for best balance. An internal skeleton to mount things onto would just add more weight though. Also, most ENG cameras have an in-set shoulder mount built in, so they are 1-2 inches less tall at the top of the shoulder than in front and behind the shoulder.

Worrying about size and power consumption make things very complicated very quickly so i can appreciate not wanting to worry about those things. But I would think anything ready for a real production environment would probably have to take those into account somewhat since you wont have much luck getting a lot of types of shots without a camera that can run outdoors and for extended periods of time, not to mention isnt just comfortable but safe and reliable.

So what do you do for power? ac cable out the back?

Daniel,

Did you develop the capture software, expand on elphel's code, or was it bundled with the camera device?

I'm really curious to see your rig! Very interesting indeed.

Sorry. I know you asked earlier but I forgot to cover that.

Yes in the back of the camera leads an AC power cable, the greatest shortcoming. There really is no chance of using a battery with this hungry system. I have been considering a car battery with an inverter but I doubt it would last very long at all.

A final thing is noise. This is a pc, which has to cool the CPU and will have 3 extra fans on the ram. The case will have a 140mm fan on the side, and a 80mm in the front cooling the PSU components. There may be another fan on the side with a duct to the cpu. Two hard drives on Raid 0 will only make things worse with spinning and grinding. This will all add up, even with very quiet fans of ~30 dBA sound on location will be a problem.

The capture software is mplayer for recording / preview. I have been expanding it to make it easier to work with the cameras by using SDL to get input and other libraries to set settings ect... I have not had time lately to work on it. I have to get ready for Saturday so im setting everything up to work on windows shortcuts and macros. If i have any issues I can use the touch screen to resolve any problems, but the touch screen is only for emergencies. Its not the ideal way to operate a camera.

I should probably just start a thread later and get this one back on topic :)

We're heading a bit away from the Sumix cam but, Daniel, did you consider a MiniITX board? They support up to 2Gb of ram, Core2Duo processors... And they fit in the palm of your hand. Some are even smaller and come fanless. In fact I'm thinking of getting one for the Sumix and build a standalone cam.

Yeah I did consider them, I would be interested to see how well they will do. But as I mentioned earlier size was not a deciding factor. At the time I was most interested in the peace of mind of having a quad core chip. Im probably just crazy and its overkill but this sure did turn out to be a great HD editing system.

Im guessing this is the ones you were talking about:
http://www.mini-itx.com/store/?c=32

I was talking about these in terms of ITX boards supporting socket 775 Core 2 Quad:

http://www.american-portwell.com/pro...roductid=16133
http://www.icpamerica.com/products/s...no-9654G4.html (might not be good ethernet chipset for this application)
http://www.commell.com.tw/Product/SBC/LV-676.HTM (no PCI-e)
http://www.ipoxtech.com/ADE-6040.php (may not support quad)

Booting from flash, recording to a 2.5" HDD, and an undervolting the CPU and no dedicated graphics this could make very powerful compact system that could be powered by a small m3-atx psu. quad core with 4GB of ram you could take this on the road easily and probably fit it all in a box as small as 7"x9". might even be able to rig it to run on standard camera batteries. or pretty much any battery you throw at it that can handle the power draw (more likely NiMH/SLA than LIon, but then there are quadcore laptops running on LIon so it would probably be fine with the right battery). So basically like the Silicon Imaging DVR body that comes with the SI2K only twice as fast and probably waaay less expensive (but then again time is money).

If you dont need quad core and want to go with mobile processor (higher price, lower CPU and FSB clock, more efficient, more resistant to heat) then there is no shortage of ITX boards for merom processors...

http://www.logicsupply.com/categories/mainboards/intel

... Might be some santa rosa boards around if you look hard.

Oh yeah, we should probably get this thread back on track though :)

Well, since everyone planning to use a Sumix camera will need a computer I think this would be a legitimate topic...

Im pretty impressed with the ITX motherboards you brought up. Too bad I didn't see them before. I'm still a little skeptical if they have the same power as an ATX but things are looking promising. I wish I could see a benchmark, I can't find much data on any of them. In fact, I can't even find a price for any of the 4.

Sorry if I missed it but were are the links to some footage. Thanks.

They have not released the camera yet...

They say they'll post some footage within the next days.

I'm not sure footage is as important as more information about software and workflow. I mean we all know what this altasens is capable of, and with cameras like these, footage doesnt mean much unless you are using the right LUTs and frame decimation settings etc. now if sumix were to post some video with synced audio (more than a minute worth ideally) to prove that they have a solution for making sure video will always sync to audio and for dealing accurately with recorded vs encoded framerates without extra hardware or software, then that would be something worth looking at closely.

I guess you are right about that its totally appropriate for this to partly be a system building forum. I just dont want to get too caught up in it since this is primarily about the sumix camera and there are plenty of other forums discussing hardware that can be used to build a portable dvr box. (plus people have a tendancy to link all kinds of new technology that isnt really relevant and never actually becomes available). I guess i'll just try to be as practical as possible when talking about ways to build a system to run the sumix camera.

Sumix Sample Image
 

I just noticed that Sumix has a sample image from the 12a2c up on their website... http://www.sumix.com/img/screens/smx-12a2c.png

Hopefully they will post footage. Do they have footage posted from their other cameras? I could not find any.

They posted something captured with their M73 model but it was small and didn't show the actual potential of the camera. I hope they post a 1080p60 clip.

By the way, the image looks really good.

Does it? I mean it kinda looks like the bayer algorithm could use quite a bit of work. I wonder what debayer mode that was taken in. The green channel has a pattern to it, and the other channels arent well interpolated so they seem quite steppy and aliased. Also there is an odd ghosting which is offset about 6 pixels to the right. Also the color channels dont seem to quite line up. All of those specular highlights on the water droplets especially on the red rose are noticeably offset in the blue channel, and if you look closely it looks like there is alternating red/blue banding, particularly noticeable on the white rose.

Other than that, noise level is great, although possibly masked by the patterning from the debayer. And the image could use a saturation boost, but that is trivial to do i suppose, and wouldnt be representative of the raw image. If this is an uncorrected raw image then im impressed, although it looks like it is at least gamma corrected. Seems possible this image is just using a bilinear debayer, although i cant imagine why they wouldnt use only lapacian debayer if they want to show off the camera. if it is their lapacian debayer, it may need some work...

Obviously there is a lot of potential here, but we shall see if sumix is able to unlock that potential enough to make this camera a worthwhile investment for those of us interested in inexpensive digital cinema.

I think if the price is right, what I'm seeing will work for me. If I can sit through a movie made with this thing and not be drawn to the flaws in the aethetics of the image itself, I'll buy it. I just had a conversation with somebody about 92khz 32-bit audio capture and how it was wasted space capturing all that extra data when people don't hear much difference past 48khz 24-bit. I think the same thing might apply here.

It won't cost nearly as much as the SI 2K system, so I don't expect it to look nearly as good--yet it almost does already (to my eyes).

Your right....but I think in this scenario, just like in video, the idea is that it's better to oversample, getting as much info as you can, and then downconvert. 92khz 32-bit might be overkill though...I myself just stick with 48khz 24-bit.

Wow Noah!! All that from just an image?? Calm down man!

The only thing I don't like about that image is that the whole scene is a bit dark and yet all highlights are overexposed. I'm looking forward to seeing more images or footage.

And again... What else do you want?? You're getting almost the quality of a SI2K for 2 grand!

:P

Sorry if I sound like a downer, but I'm trying to be realistic. I mean there is a reason we dont just all go out and buy a bunch of altasens sensors from altasens. It is useless to us without having a worthwhile system around it.

I wouldnt worry too much about the poor highlight handling yet, if the gamma isnt corrected correctly and image exposed accordingly, things end up linear. remember raw sensors react linearly to light. in the case of 12bit as this camera is, there are 4096 possible luminance levels, and the whole upper stop of light (top ~10% of the brightness of the scene) is represented by all of the values 2048-4096 (50%-100%). most people arent use to seen raw sensor images uncorrected, so this will look off.

lemme know if ive gotten any of this wrong. But I sure know working with the M73 if you leave the gamma at the uncorrected default value, things look way too high contrast. Youve gotta be able to monitor with the gamma correction or LUT in effect or it gets pretty tough to judge where middle grey is supposed to be.

Im pretty impressed, thats great.

There is a pattern or something to it. I hope its not more obvious in a video. If there is a constant fluctuating pattern it would be very noticeable.

Also there is some kind of dark line going across the image just below the flower heads.

I may have already mentioned this, but keep in mind that silicon imaging came out with a similar industrial camera head almost 3 years ago, granted it was $5k (wonder how much it is now). They took that and made the SI2k eventually, but ive never heard of more than one person trying to use the SI-1920HD-RGB for digital cinema even though it is less than 1/3 as expensive as the si2k mini.

The thing about HD on cheap industrial cameras is that $10k on a proven camera is an investment, whereas $2k on an industrial camera that is missing even one essential feature is likely $2k down the drain.

Dont get me wrong though, I'm still hoping sumix will come to this forum and tell us about all the amazing features they are including to make this camera head perfect for digital cinema and completely make all of my concerns irrelevant. I'm even thinking about cancelling my plans to build a new (my 3rd) DIY 35mm adapter since i sure wont need one if my next camera is a sumix altasens. Only time will tell, im just suggesting we not hold our breaths till we get real details.

are you looking at it on a trinitron?

Looks quite good to me... I'm also curious if this is raw or not??

Noah - If they allow access to fine tune the settings you could help us all get the most out of the sensor... right?

No, im on a 37" lcd

Im not crazy, the line is there :P

http://www.buysmartpc.com/temp2/smx-12a2c-line.jpg

I tried to bring it out a bit so its easier to see.. but its defiantly there.

Ah. I see. good eye...

On my b/w version, what is that grain on the areas out of focus? Is that sensor noise?

Thank you all for the feedback you are providing in this forum.
This camera is new and we are just getting use to tuning the sensor's settings for improving images. The debayaring algorithm is really not a limitation. The key is to produce low noise 12 bit raw video and provide accessibility to all features of the sensor. Depending on optics, illumination, etc. the optimal debayering will be different. Although We will keep improving a few default debayaring algorithms, eventually it will be up to you to decide what suits your needs and share what you will find among yourselves. As we will upgrade to newer and better sensors you will also need different algorithms for everything.
This camera has really impressive possibilities built in it that which will be utilized as new firmware software upgrade will become available.

Any plans to move toward the altasens bitsdream sensor eventually?

Thank you for joining the discussion!

that graininess in the out of focus areas i believe is that green-channel pattern i was talking about you can see it if you display only the green channel

actually im not totally sure what it is, it does appear in the other channels it seems

Noah, can some of those anomalies be avoided using a better debayering algorithm?

I don't mean to sound like im nitpicking. Im just so excited that im probably over examining it.

The image really does look great, much better then what I get with the 333 in almost every way. I hope they post more pictures and a video soon.