I think this is just a Premiere problem Obin. I've heard such
things about Premiere before. Have you tried another NLE
(demo for example)? Try Vegas. Or perhaps an NLE that can
actually work with 10 bits?

Obin,
You've probably already thought to make sure that your project settings in Premiere Pro match the settings of your source. There is a chance that Premiere is trying to transcode your clips into some slightly different format for editing. This would explain why they play back smoothly in the source window. Are you at least able to advance frame-by-frame through the timeline without playing it back?

The leadtools web site seems to suggest that the MCMP codec puts a slightly higher priority on speed and compression than the MJPEG codec. The MJPEG codec seems to put more emphasis on video editing interoperability. I haven't tried either codec yet, but I have Premiere Pro 1.5

hmm...on the timeline it does NOT have a red render bar and when I apply an effect it turns red till I render so I don't think it is transcoding...it's more like some type of playback issue...one thing I notice is that when I play from the timeline it seems to be in RAM as the disk does not read like it does when play is from source window...maybe this is a clue??

guys what NLE software is 10bit?

BTW I am using MCMP

Some versions of AVID support 10 bit I think. Try looking around
their website. I think that is the only PC NLE out there with
support for high bit depths. FCP on Mac supports it as well?

Isn't 10 bit video a codec issue?
I mean presumably if you have a 10bit codec it should work with whatever?

Although having said that Avid DV Express only works with DV and premiere is weird and fussy about codecs generally, but surely Vegas would work?

love

Freya

Yes that should work, Freya, if a 10 bit codec can downsample
to 8 bits the NLE would be requesting. The only problem is that
you will most likely loose 2 bits of information when outputting
your cut and you will definitely not have it when doing fades or
other effects inside the NLE.

Both Vegas and Premiere are 8 bit only, just so everyone knows.

hoorayyy..Vegas 5 works!!! I can edit 24p 1280x720 LeadTools lossless jpeg in realtime AND get some amazing REALTIME preview of FX !!
I sure like the UI of Premiere more then Vegas but hey this WORKS!! awesome!

creative freedom!

http://www.dv3productions.com/test_i...ng%20PROOF.jpg

I am going NUTS over how well Vegas works with this camera footage! EVEN 8 bit in Vegas is not bad at all for color work..I have no idea why but it looks really clean!

oh and renders are like 5-10frames a sec!! using the LEadTools Codec! BLAZING FAST!

No high-$$ HD Camera
No high-$$ deck
No High-$$ HD monitor
No High-$$ edit box....

just simple VEGAS VIDEO..I am impressed. VERY impressed.

The last thing is 10-12bit editing...but for now why not use 8bit Panasonic Varicam at $100,000 is 8 bit Sony HDCAM is 8bit..I can live with 8bit for a while I think...if I really NEED 10-12bit I can save with tiff files for special shots and edit colors in Combustion or After Effects...

OMG Vegas will playback 4 filters IN REALTIME on HD video! no it's not FINAL QUALITY but it's a REALTIME PREVIEW at 24fps! amazing

Now I think I am starting to see what the "Vegas Cult" is all about.

;0

now what I need is a way to take the OVERLAY that is the Vegas Monitor and pipe it out FULLSCREEN to a DVI LCD monitor...hmm anyone have any ideas?

<<<-- Now I think I am starting to see what the "Vegas Cult" is all about.
-->>>

:) Nah not yet! You only think you do! ;)

I've been really impressed with Vegas myself but like you have been trained on premiere which just gets in the way. :(

love

Freya

<<<--
now what I need is a way to take the OVERLAY that is the Vegas Monitor and pipe it out FULLSCREEN to a DVI LCD monitor...hmm anyone have any ideas? -->>>

Doesn't decklink do this?

love

Freya

I am going around all hardware and keeping the workflow software ONLY untill the last final output for a MASTER

<<<-- Originally posted by Obin Olson : I am going around all hardware and keeping the workflow software ONLY untill the last final output for a MASTER -->>>

I don't understand? You said you wanted to connect it to a DVI monitor which is hardware? Maybe I misunderstood but I was just trying to say that the decklink cards can preview on dvi monitors and one of them can even use high resolution flat panel computer monitors as a cheap HiDef preview?

What are you actually up to now anyway, I lost track of this thread eons ago and now theres 35 pages!

Do you have any hardware connected to the computer or are you just doing software tests for now?

love

Freya

Like I said I am bypassing all hardware using a standard PC with Vegas Video and I want to use a 2nd computer monitor fullscreen with overlay for 1280x720 playback while editing..camera is working well now and I am about to shoot aproject with it!

You can 'tear off' the preview screen and just drag it onto the 2nd monitor, whatever it maybe.
Vegas is nice. I use it for my HDV, too bad it's front end is not replaceable for 16 bit, like premiere is.
-Les

I'm totally confused by it all. I've just spent a couple of hours trying to work out this whole thread but it's just too long at this point.

What exactly is your camera Obin? I know you were going to put some kind of ccd in a K3 camera but I don't really understand much more than that!

What kind of ccd did you settle on and what kind of interfacing do you have between it and the computer, some sort of eithernet? What are you doing for capture software? The low end H.D. cameras I have seen so far have had scary software that I couldn't get much out of.

Really curious to know exactly where you are with it all now!

love

Freya

YEEESSSSS!!!!!!
 

That is good news obin. Couple of questions. What file format did you save in from streampix, jpeg?

Is Leadtools software necessary? Was this compression software?

How much raw footage do you think could be stored on 300gb external drives?

This is the beginning of something really good.

6megs a sec flat out...so you get 1/2 what you would from minidv with MUCH better compression

going out of streampix to avi with LEadTools codec

hey obin,
when you get a chance, could you please post something cut together in vegas.

thanks ;)

Eric, I could but what would the point be? it's going to be windows media 9 for your because of size... it's just editing HD like you would edit DV ...same thing way bigger frame size ;)

i'm just anxious to see more footage.. any footage of from the camera.

Obin,
I second what Eric said. I'm anxious to see some footage too. WM9HD is beautiful stuff man. My projector is 1280x720 and I run DVI straight to it from a PC. I don't have the sheervideo codec, so I haven't been able to watch that quicktime clip. As far as I can tell, sheervideo is still Mac only. But I'd love to see what kind of images that sensor of yours gets blown up 84 inches wide.
Please! Pretty Please! Just even 8 seconds of something. Hell! I'll take 6 seconds.
I'll even take hundreds of individual 1280x720 images and compile them into a WM9 file for you. ( Matt begins whimpering like a child who wants its mother... it's 1280x720 mother)

Freya: it's quite easy

1. camera: SiliconImaging 1300 (Micron CCD chip)

2. interface: CameraLink => requires special CameraLink board in PC

3. software: streampix (comes with the camera). VERY lowlevel!

Rob S. and myself are figuring out how to our own camera
"firmware" or software. We both are quite busy at the moment though.

I've been looking at these cameras!

The main streampix interface doesn't look so bad to me! I don't much fancy scripting tho! ;)

Presumably it is easy to grab frames but harder to grab actual video? Or maybe it all has to be done thru scripts and the windows interface is just a media player? What is easy and or difficult about the software?

So you are re-writing the actual camera firmware! Is that because it cannot continuously stream video at the moment, only a given duration at a time?

love

Freya

Ok Matt! hear the call..I will try and edit some shots for you :)

guys streampix is not bad but it does not support the camera all you can do is capture, Xcap controls the camera and that thing is a bear even Rob hates it! and he writes software!

just wait around a bit and I think we will have a good capture program on the market before you know it!

Well, you've got to seperate things. SiliconImaging has built a
camera head that includes some chip and thus firmware. We are
not going to change that (at least as it looks now).

We are developing other software that runs on a PC that is more
geared towards how movie makers use such camera's. In essence
it allows us/you/whoever to turn a "PC" into a "camera".

The idea is to make it small enough so it is portable and allows
you to attach 1 or 2 harddisks (depending on shooting options)
and it will record straight to harddisk with things like viewfinder/
monitor out.

We are still a while away from that, though. I'm also gonna go on
vacation, shortly. I know Rob S. is currently very busy with other
things as well.

Matt Promise you will give me a full on report of how this stuff looks on a 80inch screen? I have been dying to see this footage on a REAL HD monitor!

<<<-- Originally posted by Rob Lohman : Well, you've got to seperate things. SiliconImaging has built a
camera head that includes some chip and thus firmware. We are
not going to change that (at least as it looks now).
-->>>

Oh! That's what I thought you meant when you said firmware earlier! Phew! Glad to hear you are not having to mess with that!

So it's easy to capture individual frames at the moment but not motion?

Is the software proving very hard to write?

Thanks for all the help and info! :)

love

Freya

Software and system development for such things is always
hard. Even the big manufacturers find that hard.

You can easily capture motion as well. It is just written out as
single frames which must convert to a movie. Remember that
a movie is nothing more than a sequence of individual frames.

Even a photo camera can make movies, albeit usually at a lower
framerate. ANY camera (sometimes with changes) could be used
for making movies in the technical sense of the word.

Capturing the frames is not terribly difficult. Given their size, however, the challenge is writing them out to disk in a timely fashion.
I wouldn't say especially hard, but then again that's a relative thing. The biggest challenge for me so far is squeezing in the time to work on it! It's also time-consuming because I'm working with stuff I've never done before -- DirectDraw for example.

Freya:
Here is the rundown as I see it. We (Silicon Imaging) and others make cameras that are basically the sensor with some intelligence to control it (where the camera firmware resides) - small, low cost (relatively) and some basic interface. For speed, we have been a proponent of camera link, an industrial high speed interface because we can also supply low cost frame grabbers (capture cards). For the record, we also support USB 2.0 (not applicable to the speeds required here) and gigabit ethernet.

A software developer's kit (SDK) can get video (single or continuous) into PC memory if you are doing your own application. There are some off-the-shelf packages that can display and record. The two bandied about here are XCAP and Streampix. XCAP is more of a researchers' tool. Although the interface is not great for cinematography, it is actually easy to use and very powerful for other purposes like machine vision. Streampix is a recording package - very good at moving continous video to disk. Post processing is pretty weak - they are improving their Bayer algorithm on Obin's request and can save in a bunch of formats. Both of these packages can either save single frames or large binary files of continuous video. This is done to speed the recording time - no preprocessing at all.

The good thing about these packages and hardware is that they are 8/10/12 bit aware. The gang here is developing a replacement for recording and file formatting so that standard NLE applications can then be used. They are also working on the hardware packaging to be as usable as possible - that involves cameras, computers, power, etc. I'm doing my best to help support these efforts since there is a lot of work being done to help a community of people by what seems about 6 people or so. I think the results have the possibility to bring incredible changes to a lot of indies.

I think that the challenges here are not in doing it, but in doing things at least as good as a professional result requires. This is in the understanding and implementation of: integration of the camera head into a suitable camera body (lens and DOF issues abound), a good viewfinder, disk recording without dropping frames using a minimum of disks and $$, a simple but complete user interface, a small but powerful enough computer, Bayer and color processing that provides the best quality image, possible compression to reduce cost and size but not compromise image quality, and the smooth movement of the capture video to NLEs.

There are people with varying needs here, from 1280x720@8bits/24fps to 1920x1080@12 bits/30fps - very different solutions are required.

I'm sure that I left things out, but I think that is the charter of what is going on in Alternative Image Methods in about 3 or 4 threads.

Wow thanks Steve and everyone else who tried to bring me up to speed.

It doesn't sound as bad as I expected at all! It seems like it's mostly just a case of interfacing with the windows multimedia API's to shove the data into a codec as it comes in!

It seems like one solution might be to adapt the code of virtual dub which would not only allow you to insert frames into codecs but also allow primitive editing!

Unless you are actually writing genuine windows drivers for the thing! Now that would be really nice! :)

It all sounds quite optimistic!

love

Freya

I love VirtualDub and looked into adapting it. The main problem is that it's hard-wired to 8-bit video only. We need to support 10/12/16-bit depths.
Yikes! :-) That's definitely outside the scope of the current project, and I don't think it is necessary for our purposes either.

Down the road, I think it would be cool to see if we can use the Dirac open-source codec to provide low-cost cross-platform visuall-lossless compression. It would also be cool to investigate if a high-quality Bayer filter and the Dirac codec could be implemented in a FPGA solution and embedded into the camera head itself. In theory, this could allow high-resolution, high-quality, high-frame-rate capture. Hard drive bandwidth space would be less of an issue; we might be able to get by with one drive. Plus, we could capture to a standard format in one step; no need for offline processing. Okay, I'm dreaming now ...

<<<-- Originally posted by Rob Scott : I love VirtualDub and looked into adapting it. The main problem is that it's hard-wired to 8-bit video only. We need to support 10/12/16-bit depths.
Yikes! :-) That's definitely outside the scope of the current project, and I don't think it is necessary for our purposes either.
... -->>>

Would virtual dub have been hard to adapt in 8 bit tho? Even 8 bit hi-def would be nice!

Sorry about scaring you with the though of windows drivers. I didn't mean any harm. I once looked at the windows DDK but then I decided I had better things to do with my life such as eating a big pot of ice cream under the shade of a tree! :)

love

Freya

That's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure how much it would buy us. While I'd love to have VirtualDub's filtering and preview engine(s), I'd also like to support Cineon, OpenEXR and QuickTime output, things that VirtualDub doesn't do.
I'm better now :-)

<<<-- Originally posted by Obin Olson : Matt Promise you will give me a full on report of how this stuff looks on a 80inch screen? I have been dying to see this footage on a REAL HD monitor! -->>>

I Promise.
I'll take pictures of the thing if you want. (not that it would make much sense to do so.)

LOL I don't think that will do much good UNLESS you grab a pic with you in the forground and the image in the background so I can see how BiG that screen is!! LOL

I wana get the MOVIE THEATER feel from your 80inch screen!

;)

man i am using an HD camera with nothing to display it on..weird huh?

FTP upload failed the first go around...doing it again..this WM9 file is huge 180megs...I don't nkow why

Obin,
You could get a 1280x1024 projector for a reasonable price and hook it to your computer monitor output. I watch all my movies at home on a low end (800x600) projector connected to my DVD player on a 8' screen. Once you get used to that, 35" TVs seem like portables.

There is a Sanyo with a 1280x720 native resolution PLV-Z2 with a street price under $2K. Ebay has Dialite screens (8ft) for around $250 delivered. So, get a couple of theatre seats and start screening your work the way it was meant to be seen.

I am drooling at the mouth ;) this footage must look so much better then standard HDTV mpeg2 streams - I think I will take a PC with some footage over to the home theater store and take alook at it!

Commercial opportunity there for the whole group - do a private in-store infomercial for a high end audio/video store in HD format and playable on a PC on their high end video systems - something that shows off the resolution, their knowledge, quality of the image.

All you need is a PC with a DVI monitor output....

That reminds me of the TV commercials in the 60s and 70s that would try to make you want a new color set by showing you an image of the new set with an oversaturated image - shown on your old set. Somehow it did look better than what you thought you were seeing.....

Final Cut Pro.

BTW, Obin I'm having problems working with your 10-bit Sheer video stuff because I don't have a 10-bit Sheer codec to work with in Quicktime! I think that codec is in beta right now, so I can't download it. Unless the Sheer team will give me the codec to work with, I can't do any 10-bit stuff in SheerVideo. When I do get a 10-bit codec, you'll be able to edit Sheer stuff no problem, although effects won't be real-time.