so...

I have just reviewed things and we are withing a few ms of doing it
properly. If your machine was behaving the same as mine on the wait event we
would be there now. I will try a bunch of things and see how I can get
things to work properly. We are almost there. I'll keep you posted.


hmm..this is good...

whoooaaa

we have gone from 47% cpu overhead for preview alone - down to 2%!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

yes 2% not 20%!!!!

;)))))))))))))))))))

we have finally found out why the system was using so much CPU. The
problem was because of the tight internal loop that triggers the display and
capture. Without any processing I was gettting around 50% CPU use with it. I
am testing different ways of implementing this.


things are looking bright again....

Steve N. what MHZ does the Altasense chip run at to get nice rolling shutter free images? i forgot...is it 150mhz? can the Epix CL2 card deal with that?

THe weekend commercial shoot went well ( shot from 9pm till 4:30am ;) ) but the budget called for MINIDV ..arrgghhhhhh I HATE mini!!! compression is SOOO bad on that codec...and the DOF is like - um - well lets jsut say the whole frame has a very good focus on it...mostly shot locked off I guess we will add some fake DOF in post ;(

I will upload the spot when it's done...you guys may like it - kinda funny

Yes, that is 100% percent what I expected, tell us what technique you are now using fro preview. What was the inner loop (what technique was it using)? There are a few things that will cause 50% load on an empty loop like this. Does it look like we can use 1W IGhz VIA Mini-Itx now? Will there be enough power left over on your high end system to do lossless compression?

Very exciting news.

Bye the way, sorry for mentioning you above, have been sick, meant to say "(we had better be nice to Rai and Ronald now" (German Pope ;).

I would like to see some lossless compression, I am not sure yet if that will work..I think a color display would be a better choice of CPU time then compression though...

1ghz Via? I don't think so as we need the pci-x slot for the data from the camera is very very high...unless you know of a via board with pci-x

The Altasens can run up to 150Mpix/sec. Every other frame can be dropped at the camera so you don't clobber the bus with excess frames. Since it is dual tap - two pixels per clock - the camera link clock rate is only 75MHz, well below the CL2 max.

The other thing to watch is the data rate on the bus. During readout, you will be moving 150Mpix * 2 bytes/pix on the PCI-64/66 bus. Then you will have some quiet time for disk accesses.
Steve

Update:
internally we are recording and saving well within the the 24FPS limits. We
should be recording with no problem. There is something going on with the
framebuffer that prevents us from doing so. I will prepare some standartized
tests and try to find out why. It seems now that the limiting factor is with
the PCI bus, but I do not know where. Once I have done that series of tests
I will be able to find out more.

as promised:

www.dv3productions.com/bob.wmv

still has a very TEMP VO on the end and the LOGO work has not been done on it yet....

anyone have some feedback ?

That looks really great Obin! I do some local ad work as well and I must say that it blows away my stuff. You really got alot out of it for being shot on DV, great work man!

here is my latest project http://www.thefacebite.com

Thanks Rob! I kinda like this spot - we had a good crew hair/makeup/wardrobe/gaffer/pa's/I Directed and DP'ed...

DV is so BAD in post ;)

Actually, I would not be surprised if PCI-X and PCI-E turned up this year on their server platform line, but what I was thinking of is the next generation of GigE capture. Actually Steve even offered to implement Lossless if we gave him an FPGA design for it, and Sumix is also "supposed" to be doing it, that's 200MB/s packed data transfer. Still we are very flexible here, 2% preview (and x% capture) on your system should fit on the VIA, and would be a mean little machine. Compression utilising customised (to MB model) GPU code (the original intention for GPU), I can only hope, but even if we have to resort to a 720p version, it still would be a mean little camera.

Thanks

Wayne.

Ohh yes, a question, in the States do you have DVD players that can play foreign DVD's from different regions. I have some locally filmed region 4 DVD's I want to send.

New Altasens senor
 

I have just heard on the grape vine that there will be a new 1/3rd inch Altasens sensor released latter this month. If true, this would be great for an low end cheap option.

Steve, is there any news that you can tell us?

And here is a side thread on the next ProHD EX standard:
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=43386

Yes,
They are doing a 720p sensor to prove out the 3570 architecture. I'm not sure of the value of this for us compared to the Micron used in the SI-3300 that Obin has. You can do about 60fps @720pwith the Micron, it is low cost, low noise and can do 1080p @24fps. OK, you will get true 12 bits instead of 10. We will certainly be doing the 3570.

Higher speeds...?
 

Hi guys,

I am new in this thread and just tried to read fastly over it, but at some point started skipping to the end.

I want to know what do you think of a camera that does smoothly 720/10..250p? Or more?

Would that be cool to anybody around?

Axel