I just rememberd this:
(openware direct to disk RAW HD software) Though, unfortunately, the software is not free, but it gives a nice system like some want, but at a huge price. It's taken me hours to track this down, but I don't know if it was the one I am after. Last year I remembered going to a website that had this software on it, and the Starship Troopers 2 production ref (that uses standard PC components for HD capture and edit, and I remember some cheap direct to disk raw HD recorder. I was looking for a cheap HD raw capture to disk recorder unit. If anybody knows of any let me know.

Thanks

Wayne.


http://www.spectsoft.com/products/ravehd/

http://www.spectsoft.com/projects/

http://www.spectsoft.com/products/sfb/

http://www.creativecow.net/articles/...iew/index.html

http://kino.schirmacher.de/article/view/85/1/7/

http://www.pluginz.com/news/1628

http://www.digitalproducer.com/artic...e.jsp?id=24825

Prices of sensor chips
 

Wayne, you mentioned an $800 chip vs. $200 or so. I haven't seen too many prices yet -- do you know the price ranges of the various chips we've been discussing?

I've been working on the wiki a bit -- check out what I have so far at

http://www.obscuracam.com/wiki/wiki/

Thanks!

from what Steve tells me you don't want that 4mp chip..quality is not high enough...they will have the 1080P chip ready in a few weeks in a camera it will do 1080P at 60fps..that will be a winner....it's the Rockwell chip that JVC may also use

Obin,
I hope you are progressing well with your camera. Beware of the CMOS chips as they are dust hungry. Find a way of protecting the chip with a filter or possible with the prism. From my experience with DSLR stills cameras using CMOS chips, they are a nightmare to keep clean especially when changing lenses.
Remember the "hair in the gate"!!!

hah - thanks for the point! I have a canon 10D and I guess your right about the dirty cmos...I have never checked the 10D - I guess I should!

Re: Prices of sensor chips
 

<<<-- Originally posted by Rob Scott : Wayne, you mentioned an $800 chip vs. $200 or so. I haven't seen too many prices yet -- do you know the price ranges of the various chips we've been discussing?

I've been working on the wiki a bit -- check out what I have so far at

http://www.obscuracam.com/wiki/wiki/

Thanks! -->>>

Yes a number of prices have been mentioned, Steve mentioned a $1000 bulk for the MOS chip, the Russian camera had a $200 cmos on the site, a silicon imaging pricing was mentioned, and somebody mentioned the price of the Panavision chip on another thread, But basically I am guessing as I said.

<<<-- Originally posted by Obin Olson : from what Steve tells me you don't want that 4mp chip..quality is not high enough...they will have the 1080P chip ready in a few weeks in a camera it will do 1080P at 60fps..that will be a winner....it's the Rockwell chip that JVC may also use -->>>

If your refering to me, I don't know but we have to be carefull, we don't want to buy the thing and then decide the sensor is not up to scratch, but we nee a professional analysis of all the options (there was somebody in one of these threads that knew how to do this) basically we have been leaving it upto Sumix to do this. Maybe we should get the datasheets of th best camera we are interested in and compare figures and curves (Cinaltar, Arriflex??). All we really need is the best quality sensor for the price range w are interested in.

I think with single chip you are not going to get the best sampling quality until you go 4* res, so the Micron chip might be good for 720p, and acceptable for 1080, but I don't know whether it can be really great at 1080 and be resoluion upscalable to post 1080 rsolutions. Any opinions?

In a single chip I would be happy with anything that gave accurate 720p or 1080 pictures (a 8mp senors ;).

We still have to address how we are going to get uncompressed (no compression available) 1080 raw 4:4:4 image out of this camera to a cheap capture computer (assuming you don't want to lug a full desktop around on moving shoots). I mean free 3*USB2/3.0, or a couple of hundred doller capture board is great but 1000's of dollers is overkill for somethng that is only a handfull of $! (sepculative figure) USB2.0 ports. We still wait for the gurus at Sumix to trell us what they can do in these areas.


The options I can see:

Some multiple stannard interface link:
1-6 Gigabit Ethernet links (a 10 Gigabit Ethernet might be good). 1=720-1080 4:2:2, 6=8mp 4:4:4 (Sorry couldn't resist ;)

3*USB2.0 (if the seperate port gives another 480Mb's, in either Firewaire or USB2.0 I've been told that doesn't work).

Camera Link to cheap interface board $$ unknown). PCI is like one Gigabit ethernet, PCI-Express is as much as you want (but no cheap portable PC boards with PCI-express, but maybe with AGP).

Camera Link capture board direct to disk, even better if it is based on VIA mini/nano itx reference baord so it can be reconfigured and used as an editor. But nobody has made this tes??

Would not mind an wireless multi gigabit per second interface aswell.

Are there anymore chioces? Dual HD-SDI (for 1080) is nice but don't the interface boards cost thousands each?

Well let's have fun, any more suggestions?

Wayne, from the pictures I have seen the camera I am getting is good but could be better...it's a bayer filter thing...you get CHEAP one chip and low datarate but you loose overall quality a bit...BUT it's soo much better then DV or dvcam or dvcpro that to me it's worth it... after all it's 4:4:4 AND can shoot slomotion...this is enough for me! also you may want to think about this: 1280x720 scaled down to SD 720x480 looks pretty dang good even from a 1ccd Bayer cam

I am going to try and get a demo pic from Steve showing the quality of the 3mp chip...also he says that the capture card needed to capture 30fps at 3mp is VERY high-dollar and you need all sorts of RAID etc and a DUAL Xeon to capture that high datarate

Obin, two different cameras are being discussed. Our 3.2Mpix camera (SI-3170) that runs at 30fps puts out approximately 100Mpix per second. Even in 8 bit mode, that is the full bus bandwidth for PCI-32. The numbers I have for real-time recording from Norpix (our favorite recording software vendor) is about 50MB/sec on a serial-ATA drive, something like 80MB/sec for a 2 drive RAID. These are tested numbers using their software. They can stack up lots of drives in 64 bit systems for fast recording.

This camera has substantially higher noise and lower sensitivity compared to the SI-1300. It is only useful if you can provide lots of light. You will need gain and offset correction to use this for cinematography. There are a couple of people doing that and it is a pretty low cost method to getting 1920x1080x30fps.

http://www.siliconimaging.com/Sample...th%20Linda.jpg
http://www.siliconimaging.com/Sample...%208%20bit.tif

These are corrected images.
This camera does not compare at all to the Altasens (Rockwell) based cameras for image quality, senitivity or speed.

<<<-- Originally posted by Obin Olson : Wayne, from the pictures I have seen the camera I am getting is good but could be better...it's a bayer filter thing...you get CHEAP one chip and low datarate but you loose overall quality a bit...BUT it's soo much better then DV or dvcam or dvcpro that to me it's worth it... after all it's 4:4:4 AND can shoot slomotion...this is enough for me! also you may want to think about this: 1280x720 scaled down to SD 720x480 looks pretty dang good even from a 1ccd Bayer cam -->>>

This is sort of the opposite of what Laurence wants, and as for me it has to have real 4:4:4 720p pixel information. Bayer produces estimates of 4:4:4, so that is why I would like the 720p to be down converted from higher res on chip. What we really have to compare is that we are getting better images then the HD10, or the new Sony/Canon HD (better than the JVC ENG would be better too), then combined with the RAW 4:4:4 we are really cranking. Until then I imagine that your camera will be really cranking compared to the HD10 or Sharp cameras, and I look forward to seeing the results. But going back to what I said before, a more flexible capture interface could allow each of us to use whatever camera head suits our desires. I could admire your slow motion technique (Matrix style, which I like), you could admire Laurences artistic quality, and I could be roaming the country side with something inbetween.

So I think 3chip 720 to 3chip 1080, or 1080 to 2*1080 (in a 1080 16:9 frame) single chip (so we can extract a true 4*720p image from it).

I would really like to see what www.sumix.com has planned for us, by the look of it we might have to accept excellent 720p, or maybe even 1080 (people were aiming for 3chip) or just acceptable 1080 single chip. The capture problems, if the cheaper interface options are taken with upto 4 drives, we should be fine. I suspect Canon might have direct to disk for their camera too at 50Mbs/+. Let the HD format wars begin.

Yes Steve, I can see what you mean. I think movie cameras get away with bayer because they are using such high resolutions it doesn't matter and doesn't need to be upscaled. If you look at a movie there is so much grain (producing chroma error, while the grainless footage I've seen looks better) that any problems from a bayer will still be an improvement.

<<<-- ... as for me it has to have real 4:4:4 720p pixel information. Bayer produces estimates of 4:4:4, so that is why I would like the 720p to be down converted from higher res on chip. -->>>

If we're building an affordable camera (i.e., 1-chip :-) from scratch, then, we'll want a high-quality sensor such as the Rockwell/AltaSens 1920x1080 chip which will yield an effective horizontal 1440 pixels after Bayer filtering. This should produce an awesome picture after downsampling to 1280x720.

Ya,

Like I said, I won't sneeze at 720, but it sure would be nice to make it 1080p for all of the trouble and hope we're gonna put into it. I'm always a "starting big you can get little, but starting little you can't get big" type of guy.

By the way wayne, thanks for answering the questions I had there. Also, do you know whether FCP sees the input of "DVCPro HD" as a particular codec, or can it take in a 720p signal from a box camera from summix or the like as well? Maybe 1080 via pci?

Just an idea:

I know we don't want to lug around big computers, but maybe somehow with a laptop or something with firewire:

FCP HD offers this at 4:2:2 with 90-160 mbs in 720p

Offers 1080 "uncompressed" via PCI interface, so if we're going that way . . . well.

Does this stink for you guys? Not bad? Good? Probably expensive, but also an edit machine?

web address:

http://www.apple.com/finalcutpro/

Check out the specs, give me advice please. I was thinking on getting a mac editor for stability anyway.

Looking at the Canon HD product:

http://www.camcorderinfo.com/bbs/showthread.php?s=&threadid=98264

Same as I've seen here:
http://www.geocities.com/mammacow3/nab2005.htm

I don't think C likes us talking about unverified rumours here, so probably best to talk about i there.

Ron, excellent piont.

movie cameras are using 6mp and up that is why bayer does not matter...my canon 10d is 6mp and it sure is plenty of resolution

Keep in mind that there are many different algorithms for Bayer filter de-mosaicing. Here is one article sifting though them:
http://www4.ncsu.edu:8030/~rramana/Research/demosaicking-JEI-02.pdf

I would think anyone in this industry should be watching the Bayer algorithm used. Since this is a post processing step, speed is not a big issue. I personally think that a good algorithm on a single chip camera might be close enough to be a good compromise versus a 3 chip camera (3x bus bandwidth, 3x recording speed, more complex capture). Is resolution better?

1280x720 is .92MB/frame
3 chip 1280x720 is 2.76MB/frame

1920x1080 is 2.1MB/frame

Of course if you convert the 3 chip to YUV in real time, the data size is reduced - but you are tossing data away. But any real-time processing is costly.

Wayne,

It would best for discussions of Prospect HD to happen here. I much prefer this forum, after all I'm a moderator here (HDV Editing.)

CineForm is very much interested in very high resolution, frame rate and quality image gathering. Our current codec is can compress in real-time (software only) 1920x1080 4:2:2 at 10bit per channel in a visually lossless manner at 30p/60i (using a Dual Opteron.) Increasing compression performance and image depth is planned.

I can see the fit.

<<<-- Originally posted by Wayne Morellini : What I'm suggesting would be a fraction the size of a laptop, more battery life, and cheaper (though more processing power, I don't know). -->>>

Problem is, you really need an array of drives to handle the bandwidth of this much data. If you're using affordable 7200 RPM drives, you'll need 3 or 4 in the array. If you're using VERY expensive 10,000 or 15,000 RPM drives, you might get away with 2 ... but at 3x or 4x the price.

Just as an example, the Kinetta (http://www.kinetta.com) camera's "magazine" uses a custom enclosure with an array of iPod drives -- 12, I think (!) -- to handle the bandwidth.

Thanks David, I just thought to keep everything tight.

As you can tell there is much camera and computer hardware out there, and everybody has their personal likes and dislikes for editing aswell. I have suggested a general capture board on the hardware side (but nobodies biting on that idea) and on the software side plugins for capture and editing which you maybe able to help. What can your software offer in this respect, or will we have to buy a whole editing/capture package (I have not read the information on your site, I have been snowed under recently).

How much comrpession can you get with vissually near loosless, and how much true lossless?

The processing requirements you quoted, how much more improvement can you expect (I guess they are twin 2.8Ghz chips)? Are you using highly optimised C, or have you gone the final speed step to optimised Machine code, as these can give big gains?

I have not really told people too much about this, but there is a potential cheap technology out there that I want to research in the future that could reduce the pocessig requirement greatly.

As you can tell if people take to what we are expecting (and I might aswell go on the record as saying I will only take to a custom camera myself with specific price and visual performance advantages) then there will be a new market using a variety of datarates, resolutions and bit depths. Could this sort of flexibility be offered in your product for that market?

If people like your package what are the options and purchase options, and are there any attractive bulk purchase options that we could get into in private? Some people here would spend thousands, others would spend much much less.

I have allready located a Linux editing system that captures in HD, but it will be too much trouble for most, and a lot of power users probably would prefer something like your system.

Also there have been a few people wanting to find out more on your product here, maybe they can ask questions.

I would like to say I'm a bit of a novice to the issues in videography, but good on the technical side, so I might not understand all the issues.


Well I have to go to bed, so I hope I can pick up your reply tommorrow.

Thanks for turning up.

Wayne.

I am talking with Norpix about a good quality bayer plugin for the norpix software..they are saying that if I buy the software they will get me a good quality plugin...I said if they show me a test image of the filter and it looks good enough I will buy ;) wait and see I guess...I got the 1300 camera today from Silicon Imaging...time to start testing i guess yaaaappeee!!

Using a number of DSLR stills cameras in the last few years, I noticed that the RAW file format generated by them are approximative the same size in Mb as the size of the chip in megapixels. A 6 megapixels bayer pattern chip gives a ~<6 MB RAW file, that converted to RGB tiff will end up as a ~17MB.
A CMOS 1280x720 color bayer chip will give less than 1 MB/frame RAW file. If this data rate is recorded to disk as uncompressed, it needs ~24MB/sec transfer speed, which I can see easy to achieve. Of course, post processing is required to convert the RAW file to a format acceptable for HD with appropriate look-up tables. I think we need to look in creating an algorithm for converting the RAW file to an RGB color space and format, like a PlugIn in AfterEffects or a similar program.
Both Viper and Dalsa require a similar process and these cameras are NOT camcorders. There is a whole travelling circus of equipment and crew around them. The 4x2k Dalsa needs 1TB/15mins!!! That is not a joke and not cheap.

Obin,
If you want to use your 35mm adaptor, I think you should mount the camera upside down and the images should appear in their correct position. I also saw at EdmundOptics some relay/macro lenses with C mount.

big question, can I get a C-mount lens that has very few lens elements that's MACRO so I could use it to focus on a mini35 type adaptor for this rig I am building? if I could get mini35 style images outa this HD camera as far as I care this thing would be as good as film for many productions...4:4:4 with 10bit widescreen and any framerate you want!! so can this be done cheaply and with off the shelf lenses at a low f1.8-f2.x??

Obin,
A bit pricey:
http://www.edmundoptics.com/onlineca...=2352&search=1

...A 35mm adaptor, though I would preffer lenses optimised for 2/3 or 16mm format:
http://www.edmundoptics.com/onlineca...=1459&search=1

...or, Rodenstock macros:
http://www.edmundoptics.com/onlineca...=1416&search=1

... and something cheaper, but I don't know about the macro performance:
http://www.edmundoptics.com/onlineca...=2411&search=1

Recently an old Kilffit macro for Bolex 16mm sold in Australia for about 600.00.

Look at the XL1 adaptors, they use a reay lense to do away with the normal lense, you probably could do the same.

<<<-- Originally posted by Wayne
Now I have another idea, something like a lenticular array could be designed to split the individual direction the image primaries are projected to be read by three chips or three areas of one ;) A bit of single direction image compression would do the trick. This is based on an idea I have had a long time ago (as well as a projection idea): a lenticular array laid over a single sensor could take all the light per pixel area, mix it and split the primaries to 3 ajioning pixels (acting like little prisms). What you get is a completely acurate (less any abreviations) colour, each primary is sent 100% to it's own pixel (no major filter loses), all on a single chip, at very cheap price. The other advantages is that you get near 100% pixel area coverage, not 70% max, like in cmos, so you reduce the fly screen and bayer motion induced luma/chroma artifacts, and increase the used light (if you design it to miss the interpixel spacing. The other benefits of these screens is that they could be used as projection screens for the adaptors. I think I gave up on the idea after the foveon came out. So would this reduce the costs? When done right (with a couple of other adjustments) you could deliver all the transmittable light from a MF lesne right down to 1/2in chip. I have other ideas I am wanting to work on commercially aswell.

thanks

Wayne. -->>>


I remember where I saw something that gave me tis lenticular idea. I seem to remember in the information on Sony's HAD/hyperhad?? that they used a small microlense screen over the sensor to concentrate light on the pixels pads. Now if we could use something like this with a single chip (does Bayer allow this) filter we could get competely accuate colour (less some fidelity). Actaully if they could be an array of splitting prisms then we could get almost 3chip like findelity and light gathering power from a single chip (and the mass produced price of such an array would be a very small fraction of a proper prism), 90% of te benefits for 10% of the cost. What do you think Steve I?

On the macro question, for film scanning you might want to try extension tubes or a bellows with a good lens. You are not concerned with DOF since the film plane if flat. I use a bellows and T mount lens all the time for experimenting with c mount cameras.

Valeriu is correct about image sizes. RAW data is one value per pixel - 8 bit is one byte, more than that occupies two bytes unless the capture device can pack data.

Data rates are a little different. There is horizontal and vertical blanking time so that 24MB/sec number is an *average* data rate. 24fps will take about a 30MHz pixel clock. Drives with 8MB buffers will take care of that at the storage, but you still have to watch the bus bandwidth.
Steve

new camera?
 

Hi Steve, nice to see you've joined this forum. I'm sure you're contribution will be invaluble. Please email me with any further developments.

I came across yet another camera the other day.

SPECS: model IPC2M30HC
2 megapixel 8/10 bit HD camera
progressive scan 16:9
1920*1080 resolution
camera link interface
Programmable: resolution, framerate (will do 24p), electronic shuttter, long intergration, external trigger, pre exposure, strobe output, gain and offset!
(seems versatile!)
frame rate is programmable from 15-60 fps although it can only manage a max of 33fps at 1920*1080.

Uses a 1 inch progressive scan interline transfer ccd
can utilise C of F mount lenses

check it out at www.imperx.com

Please post you're opinions.

There ussually are sites that have links to all the manufacturers in a industry, which would save us a lot of looking around, has anybody come accross any for cameras of chips?

Thanks

Wayne.

Hey guys. . . .

Isn't this IMPERX IPC2M30HC the camera we've all been screaming about making here pretty much?

Somebody tell me why it's not.

P.S.

What color separation? 4:2:2? What specific interface does it use to send info to the computer? (Just said DIGITAL) Is it SDI, PCI? By the way, what is this CAMERA LINK? What kind of speed does the camera allow in terms of capture . . . how many Mbps?

Signed,

Laurence the Layman

<<<-- Originally posted by Laurence Maher :
Isn't this IMPERX IPC2M30HC the camera we've all been screaming about making here pretty much?
-->>>

It looks pretty darn good to me, but I haven't tried to compare signal-to-noise ratios and so forth. I'm still getting up to speed on all that.

The thing is, though, that we still need good capture and conversion software, and if you don't want to lug around a full-sized PC with you everywhere, it would be nice to house it in a nice box with a CPU and some hard drives.

<<<-- What color separation? 4:2:2? What specific interface does it use to send info to the computer? (Just said DIGITAL) Is it SDI, PCI? By the way, what is this CAMERA LINK? What kind of speed does the camera allow in terms of capture . . . how many Mbps?
-->>>

It appears to output raw (pre-Bayer) data, so it would be 4:4:4.

It uses CameraLink, which is a standard for transferring large amounts of image data at high speed. The speed that you get appears to be determined by the type of capture card (typically PCI) that you buy. It appears to be able to support up to 2 Gigabits/second (and possibly more).

I agree with Rob Lohman about the pacing issue. I am also prepared to start at a smaller scale having in mind a bigger picture. My main goal is the direct/normal capture at 24/25fps (maybe a little bit higher for some effects) with a max resolution of 1920x1080.
Another little beauty which would be on my list for Mark II:
http://www.redlake.com/high_res/mega2_ES2093.html.
Worth having a look. Very interesting with this package is the controller, that can program 15 presets into the camera and a DVI output for monitoring.

that does look like a good camera...I think it is also very expensive...Silicon Imaging is a good deal on a great camera that's why I plunked down my 2 grand with them...AND they want to work with us for a low cost HD system...most of the companies out don't want to talk video production at all, they are all machine vision and GOV vendors...I know of one such company that had by far the best camera going and they would not even talk less then 50 unit sales at a time! and did not give a rats a** what I wanted to do with it!

BTW guys I don't know how many times it needs to be said but stay away from any camera that uses teh IBIS5 chip, it's junk ---looks like a lowcost spycamera image, LOTS of people are using it and sometime in the future they may update the chip but not yet

The Red lake kit is sold for about $6600. This is camera and controller. Yes, I think it is a bit expensive, but I like the output options, direct monitoring, and the larger chip: it exceeds 2/3, the capture area is about 14mm wide (bigger than super16 frame). But for stage one (and current budget), I am happy with the 1280x720 and it fits quite well in the current HDTV format (with a down-conversion). I believe it will deliver better results than 720p for blowups and you can work with it with off the shelf hardware combos.

I am not willing to spend 6 grand for a test project I know of a 4,000 dollar camera that beats the socks off the 1300 but it s 4 grand....gota start small and build up

Ya, but at least we know it's available at no more that 4 to 7 k now.!!!!! YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!! A day to be remembered in my opinion. Soon their will be others to compete, and the more there are, the less expensive they will be. Honestly guys, by the time everyone here builds their own software and everything for capture, we may find the costs end up being close to the same as what the current companies sell as a package. Which sucks, but it's also a great thing . . . true liberation of indie filmmakers. Of course, the hard drive space is going to be a bitch. Let's see what Summix does for us now!

Hi

Some itneresting news:

http://www.camcorderinfo.com/bbs/showthread.php?s=&postid=75642#post75642

quote:---
Concept HD
Guys,

Go to the HD Forum of Cinematography.com. You will find many arguments there by professional DP's against the use of industrial HD cameras in HD productions. I would urge everyone to wait for our camera announcements. Our cameras will not have these shortcomings.
----

Haven't had time to read the threads mentioned (haven't even read this thread yet) but well and truely worth looking at. I still say that any machine vision company should be able to pull through the goods, if they want.

Also while Silicon Imaging may want to offer us HD, Summix was the first and probably also will be offering.