ok weirdness crops up again...we have a stable software now..thing is some strange things are going on inside with the epix card..it holds things up when we try and record...CPU overhead is VERY low now 1-5% ...not sure what it is yet..still working on it...

We have stable 21fps recording now! this is GOOD! with a low CPU overhead and a smooth DISPLAY!/....in the coming days we will be going for the full 24fps record..should not be an issue!

Great news Obin! Can't wait to see your results.

I was not thinking against Micron 1080p chip, but against the cheap 720 capable cameras.

Hi Wayne,

well, cheap enough always depends on your budgets :)

I am currently working on an approach that would be significantly cheaper than many other products. And it could be more capable. It might do things in low frame rates yet unseen on any camera (I am currently doing tests), and it might give you variable speeds in the mentioned range. The second issue is it eats memory like hell.

If I want cheap HD I can run and order an JVC HD100, a really nice gear.

My approach is to sort out if there is interest for such kind of gear, and budget wise what it should cost at max to have any interest.

I am sure it'll be significantly more than 10,000 US$, thats all I can say at now.

Its not aiming at the home user market.

Regards,
Axel

I would also search through all the threads for the other high speed cameras mentioned (I think there was another relatively cheap one).

The obvious thing with these slow motion images, is little variation between images, this leads to great custom compression possibilities through shifting/transforms in the image. That might be a good way to save on disk storage (might be a good idea for the cineform people). What might be able to process such a large amount of information, CELL, other things mentioned in the technical thread, a $299 XBOX2.

While we're here, here's an idea:

Toshiba 3D screen (much better than stereo vision):

http://www.physorg.com/news3773.html

There might be an opportunity to make a camera that can film this sort of thing when these screens go mass market. This thing needs capture that takes lots of images simultaneously (or high speed).

Thanks


Obin, forgot to mention:
VIA has released full source of it's drivers for the Linux community to use. Such a thing should allow significant speed improvements (particularly GPU programming) on supported motherboards.

Something I am sure you are already planning:

Don't worry about getting the software perfect before going to market. As long as it is working correctly you can make money and upgrade latter.

Thanks

See you latter.

I, hopefully, God willing, will pop in every now and again. I am needing to rationalise my time into more constructive areas at the moment. I joined to save myself some money on a good camera and to help in the effort to improve the situation for others. Well it's taken a lot and I can't keep up the effort or even afford one of these cameras without a loan. So I got to clean up, get well, and do something to make money.

it's been a tough week sofar..lots of ups and downs...bottom line is we have things working but the onboard SATA controller is getting in the way of things when we save data..I have placed an overnight order for a really nice SATA pci controller card with 64MB of ram on-board..we think this will fix the issues...

I guess I will know in a few hours..:)

Maybe you could speak with Juan about his Reel Stream Andromeda and get some ideas or pointers.

http://www.reel-stream.com/andromeda

well the $200 "fast" Promise SATA RAID card is about 1/2 the speed of the onboard SATA controller..this makes for a total waste of money spent on the card...would anyone know why this thing is SLOWER then the onboard? I have looked at the IRQ, it's not shared I have looked at all the hardware raid settings, they are all good...it just does not make sense...help anyone?

Obin, will your camera record 4:4:4? To an onboard HDD or to a external PC?

Check the chip set architecture - the on-board controller might be right off the south bridge chip where the Promise is on the PCI bus.

Hi Obin,

I have no idea how many disks you are going to use. We had many different types of SATA controllers tested for editing systems, and the most outstanding to us was the Broadcom RAIDcore series with 4 & 8 drive connections. They do up to 350 MB/s writing with 8 disk in RAID5.

I guess the 4 port version is comparable in price as the Promise you tried.

Axel

Steve do you know of a CL card that has onboard disk controllers?

To have a fast RAID card it needs to be PCI 64 or PCI X.
Also it needs to be placed on a PCI 64 or X slot.

Hi Obin

About Promise SATA RAID slowness - Same case here - the motherboard is "Asus p4p800 E Deluxe" which have 2 SATA RAID controllers
onboard - the first one is intel chipset ICH5R (2 connectors) and the other one is the "famous" Promise SATA RAID (2 connectors too).
All The 4 HDDs are identical Maxtors 200Gb each (I've tested them one by one).

These attached to ICH5R are up to 112-118 MB/s Linear Read/Write
while these on Promise controller are not higher than 50-55 Mb/s !!! LOL

Note- every one single disk of these Maxtors is able to transfer 63-65 Mb/s at his begining !!!

For tests I've used Aida32 (there is a HDD benchmark plugin) and beside the Linear Read/Write tests,there is a Buffered Read test,
which is actually a chip to chip transfer (between HDDs chache memory and SATA controller).
For drives attached to ICH5R the Buffered Read speed was ~120 Mb/s
and for these on Promise ... ta-da-dammm ... can you believe? ... Pure 2000 Mb/s !!!
... I've never liked Promise controllers ... now I hate them!

And these tests (except for Buffered Read) was confirmed by the Blackmagic DeckLink Disk Speed Test.

One more thing- I did some PCI buss overclock and the Buffered Read maximum for ICH5R was 144Mb/s ... at ~42 MHz PCI.
I wonder - is'nt it supposed that speed to be 150 Mb/s for each SATA channel and 300 Mb/s for both at 33MHz PCI ?
Is'nt the Asus(the motherboard maker) the guilty one here ...or these declared SATA speeds are just an another marketing trick ?

P.S. Long time ago :) ...in one of my posts I've say something like "...don't overclock PCI buss if you use SATA HDDs or you'll lose your data...".
indeed I was wrong - in fact at certain PCI frequency (43-44 MHz in my case) the SATA drive is just losing connection to the controller and the computer freezes.
All you needed in that case is to swich off or push the reset button and everything will be OK then.
Need to mention - the overclock must be performed from Windows ( me use SETFSB :) ) -
otherwise if you overclock from BIOS -the SATA drives will fail initialization at boot.

Regards