Michael wrote:
The datarate you're talking about is only 21 MB/sec, which a 7200rpm laptop drive should be able to handle.

However, I'd urge you against both 720p and 8bit. There are no good 720p cams out there that I'm aware of -- at least not on the level of the Altasens. If you do go with the Altasens, you'd probably want to see the whole FOV, which I guess necessitates 1080p. *

8bit is a nightmare I cannot wait to give up. I hate being locked into one "look" with only superficial image controls. The color tools available in your capture software are probably not as nice as the ones in your compositing app, so why not wait to do the color correction? With 10bit, you can shoot clean and finesse later...

That puts you at 59.3MB/sec (1080p @ 24fps, 10bit). I'm looking into RAID'ing a few mini hard drives together to acheive that datarate with minimal battery usage. That's what the Kinetta does -- they use the same hard drive line as the iPod.

- ben

* STEVE: Do we know why the FOV-protecting 720p mode on the Altasens is mono-only? There doesn't seem to be any good reason for it -- as you mentioned, as long as the software knew it was getting a strange bayer pattern, it should work fine...

<<<There are no good 720p cams out there that I'm aware of>>>>

So what i am hearing is there are no good 720P 8-bit - 24fps @ 1/48th options on Altasens 2560 - 3560 or anyone else's cameras.

I have worked with HD at 8bit on the Sony-Varicam and other flavors. I agree not the top, but the audience never noticed a thing. My specs are not pushing the threshold and I can have a very small potable PC system built into a small battery driven package. Like others I feel for some if you put to much money into a system for filming narrative productions for HDTV etc it's not worth it. I have seen PD170 material look very good on the big screen considering the source is a very low res-horrible compression system anchored by a defective out dated 50 year old NTSC specs.

My D60-10D and Rebel images all look great at 8bit for what i need, and that is using jpeg compression. I have been privileged to work around the best imagery for may years here in LA and I have learned that the best is not always needed. So my 720p at 8bit spec will work for me ( also understanding others need better ), but now it sounds like this option does not exists. :-(

Michael Pappas

I definitly don't want to claim 8 bit the ultimate goal. But I believe you judge it too hard calling it a nighmare.
We tried new sets of paramters and found one setting that is "pushable" best in post. I uploaded a few clips, some recorded with high contrast gamma, others with the new soft setting that preserves most contrasts. Those settings look really stable in post, the new white balance feature removed the "stripes" further. They didn't show up in color corection at all. But our viewing posibilities are limited. So if anybody viewing the clips on decent screens or beamers could tell us, if there are any visible problems still left, I would be greatfull.

Now I also would like to do a test with comparable setups to really see how much more detail the big HD resolution has compared to our 720p. I uploaded a closeup of a face and I think this is the best in terms of detail that our setup can bring. How much better is a 10bit 1080p picture? Any ideas how a setup can look like to find comparisons. Just calculating numbers seems not enough.

Anyway, here are some samples of todays new clips. One has some nice motion blur. Hope that still shows in divX

www.drachenfeder.com/int/cool_soft_gamma.avi
www.drachenfeder.com/int/nah_soft_gamma.avi
www.drachenfeder.com/int/nah_hard_gamma.avi
www.drachenfeder.com/int/bow_hard_gamma.avi

Bravo Markus! just got your Clips- Going over to the HD system shortly. On the mac they look awesome. What is your Mbs with your camera setup?

Why is it that no one else has any clips to share?

Again great work Markus and your production team...............


Michael Pappas

Michael, just one more word of warning: let me reiterate that the color controls available in capture applications are not comparable to the controls available in a Panasonic Varicam or your compositing software.

8bit is only acceptable if you can get 90% of the way to your image during capture. That's simply not the case with the caputre software. Markus has some great looking images, but keep in mind that the color issues are not by choice -- that chip will simply not output bright, full color images.

Anyway, whatever you do, I'm sure you'll have fun figuring this stuff out (I know I have). I wish I had some sample clips up, but my server was hacked recently, and I haven't gotten around to uploading new stuff...

Hey Marcus,

Your footage looks great. Thought i was watching Lord of the Rings for a moment :)

I want to know more about your setup.

1. What camera are you using. (link to retailer)

2. What are you capturing on and with what connection.

thanks

Hello Ben, do you mean like a, for example this Viper raw output with out all the bits.

I am sure you have seen this. But here is a 8bit version of a raw Viper file: http://pixelmonger.com/vip1

Color timed version: http://pixelmonger.com/vip2

well. This is not a lady with green eyes and red hair in bright sunlight but a blond lady with grey eyes in diffuse light, but whoever has access to this viper sample picture - could you mess around with this one here and give a hint on how close or far away that is in terms of detail and "post beahviour" to the viper pic?

www.drachenfeder.com/int/kopf2_16bit_1080p.tif


Greets
Markus

Markus, are you desaturating your images?

When we say that the Viper is green, (and you may already know this), but the reason it's green is because the Green CCD is more sensitive than the blue or red CCD's. But please notice how saturated the green is in the viper. That means that there's a lot of color information to extract. As of right now there is practially no color information to extract from that pic you just posted, so I'm not quite sure how to add accurate fleshtones, etc. I'll try and see what I get, but I'm not sure if you're desaturating your images first.

it was really almost sunset, lowlight. And low colors is one of the flaws of the full frame shutter. Anyway, it's a raw image, I'm curious how far you can go in post until problems show up.

Okay, here's a color-corrected image.

Not too great in that increasing the saturation brought out a lot of artifacting, banding, and color-abberations in the highlights.

From my limited experience with Micron, Altasens, and FillFactory, it seems that "low" color is a problem with the Fillfactory IBIS chip, not full-frame shutter modes.

This was done with Color Finesse from Synthetic Aperture, so it's running at 32-bits-per-channel floating point color space for very high-quality results. Nice thing is it comes with After Effects 6.5 now :)

http://home.mindspring.com/~jrod/kopf2_16bit_1080p.jpg

BTW though, your blow-up to 1080p looks really good, IIRC, the IBIS is only 1280x720.

Markus, I noticed the tif you linked to is actually 8 bit, not 16 as the filename would suggest.

thanks Jason. That's quite a big pot of color. "shutter" was propably to unpresize. It's more readout speed that influences the outcome. And I'm still refering to the IBIS 5, can't tell how the Altasens compares too it right now.
I will do a perfectly lit sunshine shot with lots of color in the scene for comparison. And some greenscreen shots should also be interesting.

I'd love to see a greenscreen shot!

How close is everyone to having a beta model?

Also, a question concerning bayer patterns:

How exactly is this implemented? It seems from the discussion here that it can be done with software but I honestly don't understand how that would work. Wouldn't it require a physical filter for each pixel to work? If you can do it all via software shouldn't there be a way to reconstruct a full RGB channel instead?

Important moderator notice
 

This thread originally was part of a much larger thread to build
our own HD camera's. For various reasons it has been split off
into its own thread. Please keep in mind that some of the earlier
conversations (up to this point) may read a bit strange due to
this split (some parts may exist in the old thread, etc.). You can
find the old thread in the following place:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...threadid=25808

Thank you for your consideration, back to our regular broadcast!

Let me just say, i have money sitting right here if a varient of this camera ever comes up for sale, i would love to help support you guys and also have access to such a wonderful looking machine.

If i can help in anyway, well if i can, don't hesitate to ask.

Zac

I see you guys are playing with the IBIS5...I guess that chip would work well for a "look" as the color is so low ...still stuff looks great guys! got any pics of the "camera"??

Wow, this is really amazing stuffm BUT....

I'm starting to wonder, this is beyond most peoples grasp, i mean it took experts(s) and month(s) and lots of money and god only knows how much dedication to get to where you got.

So i give congrats to you guys, great work.

However I was just wondering for the rest of us (no-so techincal experts) if the proposed 24P 1080P 3CCD JVC HDV 2/3" $20k may just be THE indie HD cam?
It may turn out to be less than $20K, and may even have 50Mb/s i.e. double current HDV rates recording onto full size DV tapes.

I know it wont be uncompressed, but heck if people can watch miniDV blown up then this options gotter be a great deal better?

Ooops, maybe i shouldnt have spoken out aloud...................................... now i gonna get grilled :)

You make a very good point Anhar. Very good indeed.

I honestly don't think that very many people are going to need 4:4:4 footage. I can see using it for chroma-keying but beyond that it seems like a waste of storage space and bandwidth. Now, I'm not sure that I like the idea of HDV even at 50mbs.... Is 50mb/s 4:2:2 footage then?


As we continue producing our own cams why not have an option to shoot 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 switchable? No one will be able to tell that you shot 4:2:2 as compared with 4:4:4 save for special effects and you will plenty of money in storage space and processing power.

well I think a lot of the camera projects look like they will be under
$7,000. that looks like the real indie camera . all the work done on mini dv ,the challange has been to get people to take your project seriously, hi def with viper raw footage. I think will do that.

I am hoping some varying configs may be available.

I have no need for a 17" viewfinder... i think 7" would be fine for me.

Certain things, as long as the image quality is the same... i wouldn't mind something of trimmed down.

And anyways, i dunno if i can afford something that is 7k USD.

Even though that is cheap, that is not so cheap for private ownership!!!

I am hoping that eventually a sensor can be found that is the full 35mm plane... that would be fantastic... could utilise all my slr lenses and the like.

We will see what is available and so on, i would much rather support people out there like me, than marketing departments for big companies.

Zac

It sounds absurd. But compressing is acutally a tougher task than recording uncompressed. Something must be in place to do the compression. That means computing power...
We started with a HDV camera (the small JVC one) and the format is just not good enough for professional tasks. MPEG 2 at this dararate gives you a hard time in post. Alter the contrasts just a little bit and the compression artefacts show up. To edit this means to reencode. You have all sorts of cascading effects with compression. MPEG really is a special thing. It's a new information to me that the new JVC 3chip HDV camera will record at double data rate. That could be usable...

And shure the first question you need to ask yourself before you spent money and time and dedication to seomething is: what do you want. Scince this thread was split of to collect posts regarding our camera project I can tell, that what we want is a digital camera, that does pictures that can be screened at regular theaters after being put to regular 35mm film and look as close as possible like 35mm film.

Or in other words: make high budget production value possible with indie / low budget resources.

It's not only possibilities in post. It's also the film camera like shutter speed with the motion blur effects you have , especially in action sequences. DOF issues and the possibiliy to treat the picture in a way that it doesn't look like video at all.
I'm not impressed by the viper picture. The data richness is incredible, chroma levels and so on. But just looking at still images... The picture details and the feeling of it does not remind me of cinema but of video.

I don't know. But from an artistic point of view that's not sattisfying.

@Zac
To work with a 17" viewfinder is something you have to get used to. But once you find the workflow, you don't want to miss it. I'll shoot a video soon, showing the features of the camera. Having such a big screen helps a lot to compose your pictures. By the way much smaller displays that can do the full HD res are much more expensive. I saw HD viewfinders for more than 15.000 ...

Markus i sure can understand how cool that would be, but is it actually needed for a full rez output while shooting, wouldn't even at half rez, on a screen that is 7", show enough detail.

Well i dunno, i would love this rig in shape and form.

I have a friend who works doing canon pro camera repairs, gonna see if he can source me out some of their full size sensors and see if you guys can have a play with it :)


Drop me an email if u wanna talk about it further.

Zac

<<<-- Originally posted by Anhar Miah : Wow, this is really amazing stuffm BUT....

I'm starting to wonder, this is beyond most peoples grasp, i mean it took experts(s) and month(s) and lots of money and god only knows how much dedication to get to where you got.

So i give congrats to you guys, great work.

However I was just wondering for the rest of us (no-so techincal experts) if the proposed 24P 1080P 3CCD JVC HDV 2/3" $20k may just be THE indie HD cam?
It may turn out to be less than $20K, and may even have 50Mb/s i.e. double current HDV rates recording onto full size DV tapes.

I know it wont be uncompressed, but heck if people can watch miniDV blown up then this options gotter be a great deal better?

Ooops, maybe i shouldnt have spoken out aloud...................................... now i gonna get grilled :) -->>>

Where did you get that information from? 24p, 1080p, 50mb... All of that is not HDV standard and I can't find any info anywhere on this?

@Zac

A view words about the "viewfinder" thing. I've used the small LCD screens with DV cameras scince they are available and find them usefull. I shot with the Sony DSR 200 for a while. That's the only "pro" camera I had in my hands both utilizing a good viewfinder (b&w tube) and a color LCD screen.
I used it a lot, even though it fooled me often and showed me a much better picture than I actually got.

Now with HD resolution viewfinders are a different issue. HD resolution tubes in viewfinder size as well as LCD screens are possible and available - but the price is out of discussion.

So we did it the russian way, sat down and looked around what is available for reasonable prices, that can show us the HD image in full res and can be mounted to the camera.

We did this thinking while we experimented with a box camera / laptop setup and the laptop display, even though really weak in daylight proofed usefull.
When we came across this 17" LCD monitor, tripple as bright as "normal" screens and pretty light too (about 3 kilogram) we tried it out.

First we put the preview window in full resolution on it. On a 17" monitor, that's really big. You see everything. Every detail, every small shadow or clipped white spot. We made it turnable, so when working with the actors I could turn the screen around and discuss positions and found that it's much easier to discuss "why should we do that in this way for the camera issues". Otherwise it's better not to show the actors the camera picture but for those situations it helped in comunication a lot.

LCD screens have a problem that with a changing viewing angle the picture looks different. Hard for defining the aperture or light issues. Especialy when you do crane moves or pans and you can not exactly stay in the best viewing angle. So we added a histogram display. That shows you (like in photoshop) the picture information in curves. It has a white one for the luminance, you see if there are too many shadows, if the entire picture is too low lit and so on and it has curves for each color. So you can see how much color information is seen for real by the chip. Together thats a really usefull feature.
Then we put other status displays and the entire GUI on that screen. You can change to playback mode, look at or search for recorded shots, get and manipulate all kinds of setups - in a size you can operate it with 2 or 3 people in front of it easily. You can't do it with a small display or you need a external screen. So cameraman and assistant can use it and the director can stand behind and also watch what he gets. Much, much better than this small watchman thingies. Sony already hates us, so what. Vaio is great though, got a Vaio laptop.

Anyway. We tried a smaller screen afterwards. And it was not the same. I got so used to the workflow, to see all details when shooting that I find it hard to get back to something like a viewfinder... Try it out. Start a DVD on your laptop and ask yourself - why not this quality for a viewfinder.

please, please, please, oh please markus... post i picture of your camera!

Anhar, most camera systems here are developed from ready made parts, it is the cinema specific capture software that takes the most amount of time. With the Drake, I'm not sure whst they did in the end in respect of this formular, I expect we shall see soon on the new website.

The continuing saga of the JVC HD ENG camera. One reason I am here is that JVC went upmarket (actually middle market) with their HDV camera. Originally it was something like $27K, way above the $7K of the 5000, just toomuch of a jump so I jumped. $10-15K was the limit for a JVC.

The issues of data rate has been discussed before.

But with minidv what they do for cinema, is film it right, do lots of processing to get rid of codec/interlacing artifacts, estimate missing detail, and make it look right, and do resolution upscaling. If you just use a projector or HD TV (or some large SD TV's like what Philips does), it may have a simplified version of this correcting/upscalling that is why they look better sometimes. There is one film transfer company I saw that would do this and colourisation for around $30K an hour (maybe it was cheaper). Once you go above 50MB/s in SD, the results start getting visually indistinguishable. Actually I don't like the look of the Minidv upscaled I've seen, I would rather upsacle 1080p to SHD resolution and screen that.

Donal, the 50Mb/s Mpeg2 is from the figurative HDV2 spec (but I think it has something to do with the Blue ray disk). As predicted this is the minium for good Eng work.

Raw is good for special effects and if you got the budget for it (but that's what we are stuck with, as Markus said we need extra processing for anythign else at the moment. Lossless saves a bit of space (around half to one third for a good codec).

For everything else we could use visually Lossless as used in cineform codec (David Newman has been here from them they even have introduced a suitable codec for bayer that does 4:1). Their normal codec does vissually lossless from 6:1 to 10:1 3chip footage. It is able to maintain integrity over many editing generations.

Now apart from this there is an open Avid HD codec that goes upto 220MB/s??, and who ever else.

So between all these we have a good selection to support for different work. In the other projects we were looking at slotting in any software codec the user wanted (given the eventual computing power).

Markus:

On Displays. Sometime ago I sent Rai information about a laptop that did 720p, the screen was high contrast, sharp, crystal clear and wide angle, simply much better than the others I saw around it, and more like modern LCD TV's. So shortly many more laptops and even tablet PC's (ideal for your application) should have this technology. On the other thread they have looked at the emagin OEL veiwfinder, it is HD and $1600, small inbuilt VGA type circuit, that is a bit cheaper. The truth is that eventual production costs of these LCD on silicon is extremely low in bulk, but they want to make big money. I have done much reserach before and had many links, there are too mmany competing companies. So realistically a mass produced HD item might be available for $200 and less eventually (but this could take between 1 and 5 years of competition).

Wayne.

Markus & Rai: are you guys gonna reveal how your camera works?
Like are you using PC components, if so with what operating
system and things like that?

Rai & Markus, can you give us any more information about the 35mm cmos project (even some tiny snippet?)

All of these stuff is making my head spin, soo much going on!!

I know this is long away, but if say (hopefully) you complete this 35mm cmos project would you consider selling as a complete product? if so any idea how much? (even a wild guess).

thanks!

Anhar take a look at my thread 4:4:4 10bit ..I have made a breakthrough with capture at 1080P 4:4:4 10/8bit 24fps

I need to be brief, tight schedule.
@Rob
Inside the camera are many components we bought after a long experimental and hand selecting process. But we can't offer a step by step do it yourself tutorial. So, yeah, there are PC components and circuit boards of this and that brand. Thing is, the camera has a button. When you hit it, the camera needs five seconds and is turned on, when you hit it again, you turn it off. It doesn't make noise and when there is a new software update you put a USB stick in and the camera updates itself. Just describing this little two mechanisms in detail: single button for turning on/off and software update I could fill 25 pages with. And this is the case for any feature, any solved problem.
All I can ask for is patience, until we have time to organize the "possible" informations on a webpage and do some video clips.

Despite the limits of the chip we incorporated we managed it to define a "look". Drake as a system has a different look to cinealta, varicam or viper. That's the important thing to us. We will build Drakes for fellow filmmakers and also rent them for fair money. We will use it, get more experience, make it better. Who can tell what sensors are available in 2 years.

@Anhar
even though we are experimenting and getting experiences with big sensors that won't lead to a Mama Drake cam right away. I consider a camera something you can mount on a tripod and shoot a long film with. The piles of data you get with higher resolution and higher bit depth are just a little too much for todays processors and hard drives... if limited money is of some importance to you. It is to us, so we expect, that within 2 years that will come to indie budget reach. By then we will have a working camera, incoporating what is possible in a usable sense, by then. I'll post clips when we are done :) until then, lets start to use what we have and I can't wait to see what people shoot with the little sister drakes in a short while...

@Obin
cool, post some clips

When will the little sister drakes be available and roughly how much money?

I am seriously interested in one.

I'm also interested.

Markus: I understand all of what you are saying and I can assure
you know one is looking for tutorials, more like:

- the camera runs windows or linux or a custom OS for example
- it runs on a standard mainboard with pentium 4 or a custom FPGA chip for example

Things like that. Since you obviously have a camera that works
it would be interesting to see which base components you guys
used to get it off the ground.

Anyway, I'm also quite interested especially in renting in due time.
Heck, I ain't that far away from you guys!

Rob, you talk about inside parts. We talk about DRAKE. And DRAKE is a SYSTEM, not only a camera.

This SYSTEM is a powerful tool to shoot movies. Its not only a sensor with some hard- and software to write RAW files to HDD.
DRAKE have a differnt and more flexibly design compared with all existing cameras. So the system cames with spezial software, spezial case design, spezial mount supports, spezial lenses, spezial focus drives, spezial accessories, etc. You must see the whole system.

Therefore we decided that we will presentation the whole DRAKE SYSTEM, not only parts (not yet). Those presentation cost some days, but compared with other announcements (like the JVC Altasens) it will come very fast.

Thanks, the spezial's say a lot about cinema features and design commitment. I think what people are after is a brief Features/Specifications summary page, like many product marketing brochures do (and Rob says "No, no, more, more! ;).

@Markus:
The piles of data you get with higher resolution and higher bit depth are just a little too much for todays processors and hard drives...

Not really I will be recording 12bit 1920x1080 images at 24fps

markus I would not make a product that is 8bit. It's not good enough for post work

I agree, unless you want a small low power or one drive camera 1080p is totally possible.

Rai: I know it is. Okay, if that's the way you guys want to do this
then we'll have to wait I guess. Good luck.

@Obin:
by sure, Markus team do enough tests with post work.
Drake have some spezial things, started with white balance (why we need 2 Bits more, if we kill this for white balace in the post?)over look up table for convert down to 8Bit to some others, so at the end, DRAKEs 8Bit writing to only one HDD is optimal.
A engeneer may see first the datas. Artists see also the result.

What Markus said about todays (PC) processors is this: You can´t find a system without noise (from coolers) and also only low power need. And they don´t like swaping HDDs every few minutes.

BTW: If you like start a game: Lets do this: Who can record first, 1920x1080, 24fps, 36Bit. All parts, in a portable camera case, low power, no noise, battery.
... and scameramans fan: swaping HDDs each 4 minutes