The delay was allways sensors (and capture software). The tested sensors had problems, so Sumix and SI decided to go for quality Altasens, then Altasens had trouble manufacturing that will add around six motnhs. Given the Christmas periode, we probably will see something selling Februray, or so. We may see anouncements in December or January, but I expect the Christmass break (followed by a holiday in some companies) will make it hard to crankup production to Februray).

As far as price goes, I think Sumix is the only company I have heard of releasing a Altasens camera below $3000. I think that after Sumix decided to go for Altasens they put back their schedule to end of the year anyway.

Unfortunately these things do take time, and if you got all the right parts (including capture software) it can be done in a month (plus another 6 weeks+ for production preperation). If you look at what Rai recently said about the Drake system, is that they are still deciding on bits and peices, I forget where ever this was for marketability or technical changes for production, but I think it would be both. This is fairly normal.

Of the new commercial cameras, truth is there has been huge delays there too. I understand that there was new Sharp single chip HDV cameras at the beginning of this year (I think even a new HDV camera last year). The Sony is finally out and may have very good optical quality compared to Fillfactor Ibis and the Micron Sensor used in the 1.3Mp SI. But the truth is that they record HDV1 and you loose a lot. The minium that you need to "compete" with us is the HDV2/Blueray disc format (still not as good, but good enough for many things). So yes, we may get a 3 chip Altasens JVC Eng camera with HDV2 (don't know for sure) for around $20K. But being an Akltasens we might only see it a few months before we get ours.

Well, what you will get saving up for a year or two, will probably not be Raw from Sony/Pana etc, or as good, or as cheap. But look at it this way, it hasn't really cost you (only a few of us) much yet. So you can use the development time on a mean job to saveup and buy the best camera and production equipment. Actually I can say in a couple of years time it might be possible to do a camera system like ours for $500-1000, where as many of the HDV2 "competitors" might be still more than $10K (maybe somebody will come to $5K).

And yesa, I am very very very dissapionted that it is taking so long. Actually how good was the older 1.3MP Altasens, anybody? Is it suitable for a cheap 720p camera instead of the existing sensors?

My actual worry is that in the end it might prove as good, and maybe cheaper, to convert an existing camera to raw. I have heard of cameras that can do that, and while I discount that because the only ones I know are SD, the footage from Juan's DVX100 looks great.

Ohh yes, I think we started around 8-10 months ago.

Hang in there Laurence.

Thanks for the post, Mark, it is probably better to repost it to my technical thread (or Obins 10-bit thread) as much of the discussion has moved from here.

Yes, 800, 1600, or 3200 Firewire would make great difference, everything is still on the table though only Gige is talked about at a moment.

About transcoding to high quality codec, they are planning on adding this functionality in future. The cineform codec people have also got a suitable high quality codec too.

HDSDI is more complex (and limited) and was rejected as a FPGA design some time ago.

Thanks Wayne,

Makes more sense now. Hey, can you remember what website/company it was that makes the c-mount to 35mm lens adapters?

Thanks!

Angenuix or something like that. I think I posted a link in the technical thread a month or so ago (otherwise maybe the ten bit thread). Pretty expensive I believe.

Wayne.

If you are talking about physical adapters (no optics), B&H photo/video carries some, such as a C-mount body to F-mount (Nikon) lens.

What do you guys think of this box camera that supposedly "was designed for digital cinema/tv"?

Maybe expensive? Maybe not?

Input, please.

http://www.isgchips.com/Templates/t_quadhdtv.htm

very expensive
and well known
and you need
ton\s of disc\s to hold the data

PHOOOOEYYYYY!!!!!!!!
 

Sure the Spielbergs can buy anything they want to get results. At the other end are the people still messing with analog camcorders trying film making for the first time. We are doing an elegant dance here trying to reach for lofty goals with limited resources - a fiscal ballet.

At least that is the crap I try to believe when my pockets a full of lint and I am coveting a new tool.

Steve,

“A Fiscal ballet” that is the best nutshell description I have heard to describe the endeavour.

Also, how is the SI1920HD coming along?

John, the technical school I went to said I would have no use for the high verbal SAT score that I had. Now you know its real value in engineering.
New batch of sensors due early January. We will turn cameras around within 1 week of receiving them. We have cameras scattered with a bunch of software developers, interface integrators.

Dear Steve
does it read with Altasens ?
and if which one?
and if what output?
and if which price about

so many if's so sorry
but if

Ronald, take a deep breathe, relax.
Yes, the 3560. camera link and gigabit ethernet. Email me privately for purchase information.

Steve, I understand there are older Alatsens sensors allready out, are they cheaper and are they suitable for a cheap camera?

Wayne.

Wayne,
There are two sensors shipping that are interesting to 1080 people. First is an older 30Hz part. We aren't messing with that because it will be stuck in the rolling shutter artifact problems - if you want to save money go to our SI-3300 for less than half the price. Next is the currently shipping 3560. They have gone through a number of mask iterations and the current one is almost there. We have built a number of cameras with them and they are nice. We just don't want to release a bunch of "orphans" - cameras that may not handle firmware upgrades, may not perform the same - so we are not shipping the current sensor in volume.

The next version of the 3560 is due "soon".
Steve

So they don't have a 720p part, and they aren't going to keep the older part as a very cheap cousin for the low end of the market. Thats all I needed to hear. Thanks Steve.

Wayne.

hey hey
 

Does anyone have a link to some basic technical info on building a camera from scratch? Just the general info on how to get the picture onto the ccd properly (what types of condensor lenses are needed before the ccd element) as well as how the information from ccd is sent? All of the "how digital camera's work" tutorials have been slightly informative but far from detailed enough. I have some experience programming microprocessors so other than those two aspects, I have a good idea of how to do the rest.

More or less what I want to do is dump raw images individually onto a hard disk, and then put them together in post. So info on how to build a still camera would be just as useful.

Thanks,
Matt

Hi Matt

I don't know of one, but it is good to check sensor and camera manufacturers sites for information on sensor terms. I've listed the best information I have seen in some of the threads (try the Technical thread first and http://www.siliconimaging.com ).

Everybody has moved onto variouse camera projects, and some want to do the same as you want. Go to here for a list of threads:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...threadid=28781

The only other new thread is for the Drake camera:
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...threadid=34339

What you want to do is very difficult, so we have decided to use pre-made camera heads (the bits with the sensor and interface) existing mini computers boards, and our own capture programs.

Now there are three mobs: Drake, the Rob's (one our moderator), and the Obin. Both Drake and Obin are close, Rob's are busy for the moment. We are looking at using cameras based on the Rockwell Altasens sensor, close enough to an A grade HD CMOS sensor. I think the only cmos sensors, that I know of, that offer anything extra are those that do hispeed video for slow motion effects (and there was somebody on here with one of those too). There is SHD sensors, and maybe better cmos HD (though I don't know of any) out there, but they may cost far more.


Camera makers: Sumix was the first to announce support for us, but they are going to be like March or April, Silicon Imaging are supplying now and soon with the Altasens.

The micron 1.3MP camera has problems and is not recommended for professional video without sensor affects, the fillfactory IBIS5 does not have these problems but is still debated about it's usefullness (though Drake uses a refined version), the Micron sensor for 1080 is much better, the Altasens alledgedly much better again.

Wayne.

thanks
 

Thanks for the info,

Actually what I want to do is quite different I think. More or less I want to split an image among several still SLR ccd's either using prisms, or by a timed synchronization of a moving mirror (or even by physically moving the ccd's into postion). Those sorts of ccd's would create super high defintion images...but unfortunatly can't take them at fast frame rates. To compensate for this I want to use many of them and have them shoot sequentially, then have software order the individual pictures from each. I'd hope to be able to use full frame ccd's for the dof as well. Unfortunatly, I really don't know where to start as far as aquiring and setting up the ccd's is concerned.

Thanks,
Matt

Another question
 

On the topic of video cameras as opposed to my crazy still idea...could cameras such as this be put to good cinema use?

http://www.rmassa.com/manu/pulnix.htm

Particularly, the TMC-1400...or the TMC 4000 if my alternating frame grab idea is possible. (It might be even easier using something like the TMC 4000...simply use a beam-splitting prism and cause the second camera to begin frame caputure 33ms (1/30 of a second) later.

Re: Another question
 

Matt

Looked at those cameras and they appear to be quiet expensive compared to some of the prices we have been looking at around here. Best to check out the links to cameras on the web. I think Ronald has posted links to lists of hundreds of cameras on the technical thread, and I have posted links to the products database of the cameralink standards organisation, and supported cameras of the pixellink capture card company.

I also think Ronald might be interested in something like what your talking about, so it is probably best to post over at the technical thread.

Now on your idea, looks interesting, probably expensive. Every time you split you divide the amount of light, and I don't know what image faults that sort of prism introduces, as well as path length. Note, a lot of chip have rolling shutter, that causes moving object/images to tilt at normal shutters. If you speed up the shutter, to make it more like global shutter, mking the tilt almost unoticable, you loose the extra light gathering ability of a slow shutter. Other things to watch out for are that some cameras readout times are so slow they interfere too much with the next frame round and shorten integration time etc. Now you have all these different feeds coming in simultanously from different sensors, and you have to manage and buiffer them to record them in the right sequence. So you have a lag of a full frame readout before the disk can start recording. Instead, if each drive has enough bandwidth, you can use one file per sensor on each disk, as recording accross multiple files per disk will kill disk perforamance like a dodo because of seeking. The only other option is to interleave them in one file accross the raid, and I don't think you want to go there because of the timing accross multiple sensors. So the slow readout will cost more than normal. But having not thought about it maybe somebody else has a better idea to contribute.

I have recently suggested, on the main thread, that pixel shift on a 1080 3 chip camera would deliver between pseudo 4 and 9 times the resolution. But objectively we shouldn't expect much difference from a 6MP sensor (but a lot more light).

Wayne.

Dear wayne
well only 2!!! days to New year
had a good red wine 2000
but not drunken at all
moving CCD|s and or prism|s Im not
on this path, well sometimes dreaming,.
but the shifting idea, and second Steve that are the ways that can be real....maybe
dreming is another idea, as waiting, waiting for next five years, allways waiting and time passes by

Yes. I thought I heard you mention some simular dream, but it's often hard to tell what your point is your piont is, if it's a dream. Most of these things canbe done, just really difficult or expensive.

How to go about this, and cost?
 

Hey Everyone,
I'm an indie film marker from Philadelphia. I've been following your posts now for some time, but didn't really have too much input add to the mix. I was wondering if anyone could tell me if an Idea I had is do-able...

I want to shoot my next project in 24p HD with a Home Grown camera on a budget of $2,500 to spend on parts. Is that possible, and what exactly would I need to make to workable (to a hard drive of course)?

I would prefer something that was capable of doing Higher speed shooting....maybe as high as 100fps at full res, and run off of battery power.
720p would be fine, but I'd love to make 1080p work.

Thanks,
Frank

*If not for 2,500...what would something like that cost?

Hi Frank,
I had in mind for a while something to deliver 90 to 180 fps full rez, but I did not want to start another.......
I do not think for the budget you have I could do it though. For something like 7-10K I see it possible (with a "film look")
I think I have a good theoretical/practical solution to accomplish it! .....I might get to it ...some day......

Thanks Dan
 

Hey Dan,
Thanks for the info. I'm only hoping there is a solution for 100fps, but as long as I can get 1080p at 24fps (max) that'd be fine to start. I mean...Kreiner has seemed to find a way to deliver this res on his Kinetta camera, but who knows what it will cost, or if it will ever be out.

This is the basic idea I'd like:
-1080p 24fps (hopefully capable of being faster)
-Large Internal Hard Disk Capable of dumbing captured image sequences off to a firewire drive after the fact.
-Simple Eye Piece to see what is being captured (review/playback not needed)
-Easy capture starting
-Maybe a secondard capture res eventually so you can start an offline edit without having to deal with the bigger pictures.
-Priced to build at around $2,500.

Anyone with ideas on how to make this would be awesome; however, I have no budget for experimentation.

Thanks Dan, and everyone else on the blog.

You are welcome and
If this is of any more help....

http://www.compumodules.com/image-processing/hitachi-hv-d30.shtml

http://www.chori-america.com/Chori_10/body_color.HTM#3CCDcolor
.......... go for it.
Those cameras could be looking at this GG:
http://dandiaconu.com/gallery/FIRST-PICTURES/IMGA0144
to give you this:

http://dandiaconu.com/gallery/ALL-CLIP-TESTS/IMGA0287

good luck achieving what you want.

That's not exaclty what i mean
 

There has to be a way to get a good CMOS chip to liked up with a hard drive. I mean Kinetta managed to do it. Are there any good camera heads like those that shoot HD images, and have a USB or firewire interface? I mean in theory could I just link that up to a MiniMac or something and house it inside of a camera body?

Sorry Frank, not my field.

Frank: this is exactly what this thread and the other thread
(4:4:4 uncompressed camera) are for. Please read through those
first.

To give you a short version: yes this is possible (at least part of
your list). It will cost more probably. It is not something you can
easily build yourself unless you have massive knowledge of
computers and programming (which it looks like you don't). Two
(and half) teams are currently working on this very thing and at
least one has plans to sell units (which I think will cost much more
than $2500).

In the end it isn't a simple thing. If it was simple everybody would
be building and selling this things, no wouldn't they?

If you can build such things yourself read through the threads and
familiarize yourself with what has been done and is being done.

If not you'll have to wait till someone starts selling (which I doubt
will be before the summer, or perhaps even 2006) and hope you
can afford one of these systems.

Do keep in mind that this is cutting edge technology and requires
time, patience and money.

Re: That's not exaclty what i mean
 

<<<-- Originally posted by Frank Monroe : There has to be a way to get a good CMOS chip to liked up with a hard drive. I mean Kinetta managed to do it. Are there any good camera heads like those that shoot HD images, and have a USB or firewire interface? I mean in theory could I just link that up to a MiniMac or something and house it inside of a camera body? -->>>

Mmmm.. I had the same idea about the Mini Mac. Now the problem, it has very slow network (need Gigbe) and the firewire is only 400. So it is speed restricted and may present problems on any camera that is not frame buffered on the camera (and pixel packed). If it is not frame buffered many cameras will try to feed data out faster than the shutter speed, which easily maxes out FW400, and even 800, and Gige. So if you want to do any higher I suggest you contact Sumix about there buffered, lossless comrpessed (and I think pixel packed) Altasens camera (and whatever else they have). that shoudl get the max speed at a cheap price.

There was somebody in the "Drake" camera thread saying they had a hi-speed cheap.

Most of he stuff is in those threads, but the Digital Cinema Technical thread is the only general thread for different designs here. Some of the more knowledgeable members roam there.

I forgot to mention, the xbox next is rumoured to be comming out with a multi cored Power PC (either 21Ghz combined power or 10.5Ghz, I don't know which). So you can probably expect a simular chip to turn up in the Mac line. I would not be surprised if at least a single cored 3.5Mhz turned up in a improved Mini-mac type computer this year, but I also wouldn't be too surpised if Applle didn't do it.

I have just go more details, and it is all over the place, but I think the 3 core chip is probably likely:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/02..._powerpc_chip/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/02...o_sport_three/
http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=231928
http://news.spong.com/detail/news.asp?prid=6994

I have yet to read these all (too late).

There might be a low powered G5 noebook next quater, I beleive that this sort of tech will form the basis of the xbox2 processor. So we might see improvements after that.

Thanks

Wayne.

SI-3170-CL
 

Does anyone have a price for a SI-3170-CL from Silicon Images? Any ideas for that it might cost?

Thanks

Frank: just contact SI, they will be happy to send you a quote on
the camera and other stuff you may need (cameralink board etc.)

Anamorphic Versus Cropping
 

Ok say I am shooting with a board camera that captures 1280 x 1024, and I want my final image to be widescreen....which is the better solution. Getting an anamorphic lens (which I'm sure it'd have to be pretty compressed to turn that res into a widescreen shot) or simply cropping the images to 1280 x 720?

Thanks.

Oh...and what exactly is the problem with the bayer color pattern... there is a lot of talk on here about how "crappy" it is, but nobody ever seems to say why.

One other thing...is it better to use a global shutter at 24p, or use a rolling shutter at 48fps then drop off every other frame to avoid the artifact? What is the artifact? I only ask cause to seems to cost so much more to work in 48fps with the drop off then it is to work in 24p global.

Thanks again.

The jury is still out on the rolling/global shutter issues and higher
capture rates etc.

Bayer isn't crappy at all, it is just lower resolution since you are
using one chip, and not three. A single chip (unless you have a
foveon chip) is monochrome and has a color filter placed on the
chip to let just one filter through for a pixel. This produces a
bayer pattern where:

- the first line contains green and red pixels
- the second line contains blue and green pixels

This gives the famous bayer pattern:

GR
BG

So of the full resolution 50% of the pixels contain the green
channel, 25% for red and 25% for blue. In a 3 chip camera (of
the same resolution chips) there are twice as much green pixels
and four times as much red and blue pixels.

However, with good algorithms the resolution loss (compared to
three chips) isn't that much. So you can argue whether the
resulting signal is truly HD or not.

Another benefit is 10 or 12 bit processing, which is in my opinion
a far nicer thinger to have, but that may be just me....

In regards to an anamorphic attachtment, that might be possible,
but it also gives you 304 lines of more data to work and process
with. This results in 389.120 extra bytes per frame or 9.338.880
(roughly 9 MB) bytes at 24 frames per second. I'd rather don't
have it to have a better chance of getting it to the harddisk in the
first place.

Can always add an anamorphic attachment option later....

BTW, Obin is working on a 1920 x 1080 system at this moment

Every bodies going to have a different opinion on this one, but the reason you do anamorphic is to increase the resolution (maybe collect more light, but I don't know if there is an adaptor that can actually achieve that) because the resolution is inadequate (such as on normal DV going to cinema).

Anamorphic is going to be a hassle, the extra bandwidth of using the whole frame will take down your frame rate used to eliminate rolling shutter, and shutter.

The bayer has the problem that it samples red and blue once, and green twice, every block of four pixels, and it guesses these colours in the other pixels it doesn't sample. To smooth this out (estimate the missing colour) they use processing routines, the better ones use more processing power. This stuffs things around a bit, requiring a better processor to do this, and maybe using the 3D GPU to compensate (in particular for preview). At the same time, it reduces the amount of data compared to three chip by three (less disks) and the higher resolution will hide some of the bayerness of the image. You can also use a wider aperture with a single chip (though a microlense can also restricts this). I think this is why Cinema cameras from the major companies (not video ones like Sony) are using single chip bayers. In the end a chip like the Foveon will eventually (hopefully) solve this. But at the same time the image of a camera is defined by sensitivity and range (how little it can accurately detect, and how many photons a pixel can take before it saturates) and I don't know if there is limits on these things in the Foveon design compared to normal designs, but I am yet to see Foveon produce a high speed design, and I have noticed less performance in comparison in a review. I'm just saying don't expect it to be better than a 3CCD, but better than bayer.

Another advantage of three chip is manufacturers can easily use pixel shift. With this we can get 4 to 9 times max resolution increase. In single chip you have to use a very complicated full spectrum filter pattern (then I don't know how good it is going to be). It would just be hard enough to do a complimentary filter pattern (I haven't seen anybody even offer one on a box camera yet). I have been working on ideas to do single chip pixel shift here, and might consider it if I get around to the commercial lens adaptor. One of the problems in this insidious industry, is that 150MB's links off a chip pushes the price way up compared to two mainboard GIGE ports (200MB's) and other higher speed standard off chip busses :( It is complicated and you can only get what you can get, sort of thing.

The rolling shutter artifact is where the image moves while the image is being scanned out, what happens is that the image now slants away from the direction of movement. Going 48th of a second alleviates the problems, but it is not the best, faster will be better. Dropping every second frame is a no brainier in software, and emulates a 48th a second shutter at 24fps (used in the movie industry). Global shutter at 24fps, 24th's shutter. The Global shutter of the IBIS sacrifices some of the light gathering power (presumably reducing the shutter time, by how much, I don't know). But unless that time is reduced to something like 48th of a second, you are going to get a lot of blur.

Now what people don't consider is what happens when you want to use high shutter speed, most of he chips do not have buffering to read out at high speeds and then send accross the slow interface at 24fps. There are, and will be cameras with memory buffering on camera to do this. Otherwise you need a mechanical shutter (with it's own problems, maybe even rolling shutter again) or high speed interface and chip (more money). There are cameras with on

These cameras will not be a perfect solutions, so it will be interesting to see how they compare to commercial cameras. In cmos the only near ideal, cheap enough, solution is the Altasens in three chip using a memory buffer and cinema quality compression, I don't think any has been planned for us yet.

There is a Altasens single chip (I think buffered and comrpessed) and a pixel shifted (4x I think) three chip IBIS5a (much better than the bayer one) from Sumix, so we will see (wait for specs).


Wayne.

Linux Software
 

Does anyone know of a "frame grabber" capturing software that is compatible with Linux for the Sumix USB cameras?

Cinerella, is the only free Linux capture/editor I am familiar with for normal video format, but what do you mean "with Linux for the Sumix USB cameras" do they have some special Linux system ?.

Strange wording i suppose
 

I apologize, I think my wording was a little confusing. We wanted to get a Sumix camera to use on our green screen, but we have all mac systems. Sumix has told us that they are not supported on OS X. So my idea was to run a Linux partition on one of our systems instead of wasting the money on a PC. If there is anyway to get it to run on OSX, that'd be awesome. I was thinking of emulating a windows machine, but it just runs too slow to meet there specs.

Thanks

Sumix has one or two new cameras coming out shortly, did they mean those as well?

So you are saying they have a Linux version, or Windows version, that could work on the Mac OSX? There is a Linux for the Mac, I think if you goto Mac Insider or Spy Mac, you will find a news article on the latest Linux version, and an alternative PC emulator to the MS one, within the last few months.

If you go to the technical thread (or the 4:4:4 thread) and ask the same question, there is are persons called Jason, and Juan, who own Macs, and might know more.


I wonder what has happened to the new Sumix cameras, it is taking too long.

Thanks

Wayne.

Linux for Mac is the Yellow Dog distro.