There is a new cheap Viper, there maybe upto 5 different sub $20K and $10K camera projects I have heard of. Quality, I expect most will FF, Micron ,or Altasens quality, which many will like. Incomplete or complete, to a certain extent it doesn't matter if you know what you are doing. Some high speed ones also dropped by in the threads. The problem is we don't see much of them, but they are out there attempting to break through.

Micron have released new models with increased quality and reduced costs, even there new mobile phone versions are probably good enough. They maybe worth a look at, particularly for the low end.

wayne,
I'll go into more detail if have some success. Most people dont seem that interested in the cheaper options like I am, and people havent been very interested in my project when i posted in the past. So I will wait to give details when/if I have more to show. I'm still only in the dump-money-i-dont-have-into-camera-parts and try-to-start-coding-an-interface-without-all-the-equipment-yet phases. You know how it goes.

It's kind of sad how much the DIY HD talk has died down in these forums. I could sure go for some more.

I think part of the reason for that, is the new affordable HD cameras coming to market.

I got some new infos about DRAKE and also the russian camera.

The russian camera ist not was Levan said. The sensor is not a 35mm size sensor and not a 1" size, it is just a 2/3". In fact it is the same sensor size like DRAKE use. Yes, it is possible to use cine lenses, but then there is only a "zoom effect" and not the same dof or fov. High speed works only in very low resolution. 14bit in the future is only when the manufactor will produced those sensor. All together, it seems they use the altasens sensor.

I had also a long call with the DRAKE team. They have 3 working cameras. A 720p 8Bit, a 720p 12Bit booth with 2/3" IBIS and, thats new, a 1080p 12Bit with 2/3" altasens. There is one big movie finish, shoot with the 8Bit drake and works on a second big movie, shoot with the 720p 12Bit, gos on. They can also mount all cine lenses (with adapters), but they said there is no reason, because they got mutch more dof and fov with high speed cmount lenses.

But they will sell this cameras only after received all patend rights.

But yes, it also looks like the team split off.

Actually the DOF will be the same, but, as you say, not the FOV due to the zoom effect. The zoom just means you are taking the image and cropping out portion from the center of it. Same image, same DOF, just cropped as if it were zoomed in. It is not a real zoom.

Well I'm interested. The reason I think people are uninterested is because things have gone on for so long without product (except for the separate commercial Drake product that, unfortunately, people can't buy yet, and patents can take so long to finalise, what are they doing, the US allows production with patent pending). Also certain people have taken the initative but been unable to deliver, unfortunately, and they have been commercial initiatives and the focus then concentrated on them, leaving people like you with no interest or support.

I asked some time ago about the cheapest camera for IBIS, Micron (I mean there must be something out there this side of $500) but nobody seemed interested, and the cheapest project option just seems to go up.

I have seen security cameras for a cheap price (with less than 0.1 lux) that might be an option pixel shifted on a 3 chip prism to make 720p (look at the Imperex thread, Nick Hockings is looking at making his own HD three chip and has found a source for prisms). I actually saw a camera and monitor for sale at around $76 US, and I was surprised at the quality of the monitor, but I am sure the camera was doing pretty good to, it makes me wonder, exactly how expensive do you have to go when cheap SD product that can be pixel shifted for HD, is this good. Quiet frankly, all Panasonic has to do is make a 4:4:4 gs-120 with a new pixel-shifted Mini-DV HD mode (I've done the calculations, quiet reasonable compression). I have thought of making a prism in times pass using liquid optical grade oil or water in the prism. I have also considered firewire cameras (the normal ones you use on your PC),programming digital cameras to do it, and lately a guy started up a new thread claiming to have discovered Mini DV cameras with still modes that output the current image displayed between snaps. But realistically I have more stuff than most people could shake a stick at mounting up here, and am unlikely to get to do it. If you want to communicate with me directly about it your welcome to, just let me know.

If you want cheap there was an article I posted on the home made cinema camera technical thread that mentions cheap cmos images with complete DSP circuits and USB output (and Micron has just released advanced version of theirs).

I am sorry for the separate reply Frank, but who split off, I have been unable to raise Rai for quiet a while?

Thanks

Wayne.

@FRANK

Where is that info about russian camera from? It is definetely no 2/3, it is 1inch, and I never said it was 35mm. And it uses cine lenses, actually I myself saw Arri lense on the camera, and pictures that I posted linkes to are taken with the ARRI lense. It has great DOF, and yes it does crop, because the sensor is not enough, actually what it does is that you have to recount the lense size, like for example when you what 50mm lense, you need to use 40mm lense and it will be like 50mm on 35mm film. High speed version, is not standard option, and they make one for me, I pay additional 40K for high speed option, but the standard HD camera cost 18K.

Now about DRAKE, it is great if drake is still alive, but I don't know why they don't respond. It is for sure that they split off. Whom did you contact? I really want to contact them.

@Levan, what do you mean? 1inch ? Is this the optical sensor area size? I have a russian friend, he have more details, so i am shure it is the chip size. And there are no information on the web size regarding the exact optical area size in mm x mm. But this is a very importend detail. Also the exact bayer pixels size and resolution. And what will be the real resolution at what high speed ? All in progressiv mode. If you have details, please let us know.
But the pictures i saw shows no great dof and i can see debayer colors errors. All this show me, it must be a sensor like the altasens 356x.

In two weeks i will meet the Drake team. Than i hope, i see Drake and i will know more details.

wayne

I'm not totally sure think 3chip is the direction to go in for homemade cameras, but for those trying it, im impressed. I mean pixel shifting low res sensors leaves you at about the same color information as bayer only now you have it split into 3 channels that have to be reconstructed (granted bayer is no walk in the park either but i think most camera APIs or software packages will handle it without you having to do too much work) and you're limited to lenses f1.6 or more (occasionally f1.4) intended for prisms. f1.0 and faster lenses help out when it comes to low light and shallow dof, the drake guys had a good point with that. I tend avoid having to work on the sensor/optics level, positioning prisms/sensors and building precision housings and building camera interfaces from scratch are things i wouldnt try on my own. the gs series 3chip cameras tend to have quite a bit of chromatic abberation in high-res pixel shifted still photo mode, so imagine how hard it must be to avoid such abberations when pixel shifting on your own.

I'm glad there are still some people working on projects, although i admit im a little amazed anyone who has the money for $20,000 cameras would go with a "homemade" product, but then i dont necessarily think i have a great understanding of the high-end camcorder market. Not that Drake looked that homemade... the new russian camera though...


michael

yeah that may be true, but im not sure id call them affordable. maybe "more affordable than previous way-overpriced HD camcorders" is a better term. how affordable is $6000+ if you can make a more flexible version for half the price? There is still hope for DIY HD. Who wants to shoot on $250/gb media when there is $0.50/gb media? and i cant imagine aquisition with 20x GOP compression on an old codec is for everyone either.

Noah, I think one of the Pana GS models uses 1/3 rd pixel shift to get it's highest native resolution, which is extreme (upscaled modes above this would be worse and the 4:1:1, 4:2:0 colour not so good) but I see with the right software routine you should be able to nearly completely correct chroma/resolution much better than Bayer per file size, due to the predictability of images. But trying to correct chroma abbreviations from cheap prisms might be tougher. I think pixel shift is great for really cheap cameras, for when Foveon X3 ever becomes available in the segment (no prism, F1.0). Most of the work in doing the 3 chip prism is figuring out a cheap procedure to do it in the first place after wards it should be much easier for others to copy. I have my own ideas for a cheap alternative to prisms to. With a security feed I would look at collecting 3 video feeds into a security capture card and recording uncompressed or low compression (this is the hard part, I imagine there isn't a card that can do this and an expensive card would need to be sued instead).

@Frank

camera is CMOS 21mm diagonal sensor, 4/5" (technology limitations...)
So, it have some 20% zoom effect with 35 mm lens, and about 30% on HD1920x1080 picture. next chip will be real 35mm. I don't know what sensor it is, they told me it is the same sensor as in D20, but smaller one.

Please let me know when you meet with DRAKE team.

Shot with russian cam
 

Here is the link you can download a shot with russian camera. It is in fast mode, in SD ucompressed raw image, no color correction. Tomorrow I will do some color correction to it and upload one with color correction and in normal speed also.

Waiting for your comment.

www.ctt.ru/files/demo/fast_dog.rar

Thanks for the upload Levan. It looks good. Did you get a chance to do any color correction yet? What is the frame rate on this shot? Can't wait to see what hd looks like on this. Any chance that you can post a 720p image? Is it the altsens chip in this camera?

@Omar
 

I think it is 250fps. I don't know what chip it uses, but I don't thinks it is altasens, since this camera has 1' chip and I don't know if altasens has 1' sensor at all. on 24th of this month I will have this camera (I purchased one) and I will shoot 3 TV ads. Untill now I am shooting usually on 35mm and I hope to get results very close to 35mm. I will post finished TV commercials in HD format 1080p when I am finished, I will also post some shots I will make with it.

Unfotunatelly I couldn't do any color correction, since I am sitting with high fever at home :*(, but tomorrow I will go to studio and do some grading on Final Touch, and hope to achieve some nice results.

sorry but could this kill cameralink ?
 

normally I never do this,
posting a link in different threats
but I guess it could kill cameralink
Imaging a camerahead some FGPA with embedded Linux
up to 4 firewire voila
http://heroinewarrior.com/firehose.php3

reading and reading
 

Well Kinetta is mostly working on His camera for his need, it is Altasens and a fine piece of art. Drake there are no news, they are in a price league where they need real marketing forces , chanels and skills, wondering if they have them, being technically top is another cup of tea, sadly.

The russian camera is in a price range... same story.
Sumix no news ever sadly.
Realstream not bad and with a mini 35 look a like even better, I do guess.

A lot off HD consumer cams are arriving, all with shortcommings, recording media, imager size, compression only to name few plus low light short commings, optics etc.

What do we need.

All we know worked with 35 mm and S16 we do not need all the menues, and buttons to be found today, a variable speedrange like Kinetta is not bad and has been on 35mm and 16 as well. Standart Optics and for the dammed Film look, either some mini 35 or to accept that a total different technique has it's own look.

How can we make Sumix speak ??
And it has to be to disk, as disk-array, like kineta is doing, is cheap
and can be a mechanical take away cartridge, no download time with a laptop running some editing package, instant picture!!

Could be the digital S16 for a lot of people and if it does 1080i ok!!

Levan, I can't wait to see the HD clips. You are editing on a dual g5 right? Have you found a way to optimize it to handle 1080p raw footage? How good does it handle editing HD? Hope your comercial shoots go well. Get well.

Ronald, firehose sounds interesting....is this a software solution that allows you to tie together multiple connections to transfer the different parts of the same information? Would one set it up with multiple firewire conections coming off the same camera say? Sorry for the ignorance, I am still learning the intracasies of the type of specialized computer knowledge we need to make projects like these happen.

thanks,
Omar

Omar,

Yes I am on dual G5 2,7, with XT800 and deckling HD pro, and HUGE system raid capable of speed 210+. And you know what? Final Cut is not good at all with uncompressed 10 bit 4:2:2 1080p. Not at all. It need render all the time, and I am so unhappy with that. Well, Final Cut itself is a great tool, but they advertise everywhere that it is capable of Real Time uncompressed HD, but it is NOT. So I am working with it anyways, because all my jobs are on film and most of them are finally trasfered back to film, so I have no other option, I have to wait to render, it doesn't take a long time to render either, but it is that why the hell they advertise like that. And when I call them they tell me it should. That is funny.

Since you asked, do you have similar problem?

@Levan
Actually I do not have my set up yet. I have been doing a lot of reading and was on the verge of buying a dual g5 2.7ghz system, however after some research it seem that the amd dual opteron pc is maybe the better way to go. You can drop twice the ram (16gb) and in a head to head test with the dual g5 2.7 running aftereffects for various types or rendering it came out ahead or equal in almost every task. I am bummed out. I have been a long time pc user and have always run into problems over the years with them. My cousin is an audio engineer and has sold me on the idea of using a mac for my next project, as they are never seem to have the same problems and errors, viruses, etc. that pc does....but now with what I have read and with you have said I am not so sure about mac. I wonder what others have experienced with them on this board? Anyhow good luck with the commercial shoots and I cant wait to see some of the 1080p footage!

@ Frank
have you met with the Drake team yet? How did it go, do they have a working 1080p camera yet....ready to sell?

Computations
 

I would beg you to wait until Wednesday 19 October. I'm not saying you should buy mac, but when quad G5 is released, perhaps the math changes.

I'm not saying they will be released, I just read the news and know there's a big press conference "to unveil Apple's latest pro innovations" coming wednesday at the PhotoPlus Expo in NYC.

Ok. I admit! I am still very happy with my dual 2.5... There. Now you now it.

Does anybody have their direct number to the group inside Sumix (Hungary I think) to ring. I don't normally don't do this, I prefer to leave them alone to get on with the work, but I think this is just too ridiculous. Something is wrong, it doesn't normally take that long to get a basic system out. Even if they are waiting for the Altasens to reach full production they could have used the system with the IBIS/Micron cameras in the meantime.

That Opteron motherboard looks nice, Multiple Gige, PCI-E and Express card (for future DX10 GPU processing cards). Now all it needs is, MacOSX, and firewire B or C.

Finally!
 

Finally, cheap progressive HD alternative to HD1!

I have just found this link to the next hard drive based JVC Everio HD camera in the news section. The quick and the dead, how do these sort of releases effect peoples decisions on the cameras here, presuming it comes with uncompressed component out? Maybe we can expect more cameras from other manufacturers soon.

http://translate.google.com/translat...language_tools

posted a zillion times but
 

http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT3888835064.html

and 1280 x 1024 @ 30fps
could be cheap pumps out on Ethernet

Yes, sure.Problem is Filippov doesn't want to give support to this kind of project.
I asked him many times, but his replies were short.He even says it is not possible to shoot using his cameras...

I'll pay that Ronald.

Good price. Originally I was skeptical about the camera, but I mistook which codec it had. I'd still prefer Gige for obvious reasons.

So what can you tell us about video editing, capture, quality (culling detail etc) any bayer mode, or 4:2:2, 4:4:4? Any IBIS/Altasens planned. He was planning on doing something suitable here.


Juan,

I'm interest in what you said. Why did Filippov say that it wasn't suitable, does the low bit rate codec cull too much detail, or is capture software a problem?


Have another observation, sometime ago I posted and article about an new integrated Mpixel camera chip with DSP, compression and USB output on the technical thread. Something like this would be a cheap option to build a camera around.

i am really really looking forward to the Russian camera, I have been shooting with the CineSpeedCAM the last few days, it shoots 1000fps, and it's inch format cmos has GREAT DOF!

Another Russian Camera SHOT (Obin )
 

Now, this is 1080p, it is shot thru widnow, I asked them to do so, because I wanted to evaluate how the motion in real speed (not high speed) looked like. See for yourself.

www.ctt.ru/files/demo/monorels.rar

and please your opions :*)

For last two days I was busy shooting with Photron high speed camera, I shot the commercial, it also had 1' sensor, and it did such a great job, when I finalize the post production and the camera is I will post a link to it. Some shots I was shooting with 4000fps, it is amazing what you get, I would love to have camera like that, but I had to hire it from London and it was expensive to rent.

But, after all this I can say for sure now, that CMOS technology is much film like than CCD, I have no idea why, I don't know the logics behind, and I am not a technicaian to know how it works, but I am judging from the end result. CMOS with the cine lenses are so artistic looking, and it carries all the emotion and feeling, and it is the same with all the CMOS cameras I know.

thanks for the info, I am downloading now your file. What is the status of the RUssian camera?

The status of the camera is that I have tickets for Moscow on 27th of October. As I was told the camera is ready, they just had some problems with Decklink card either because they mesed up the operating system in the computer they use or their own drivers screwed up. Camera is recording without problems to any uncompressed HD video recorder thou.

But the last file I posted a link to, was not impressive at all, actually it was shot from the window (maybe tinted), or something, but the picture seems to be so unclear. What do you think? It could be the window, and they worned me, that the picture is thru window, I just asked them to send me anything in normal speed so that I could evaluate the motion of the picture. Well in terms of the motion I am happy but the picture is kind of colorless.

Today or tomorrow I am expecting some more clips from them and I will post right away. But please comment, I want your opinions.

Bayer cameras all have low color to start with, I think that the camera needs processing to look good, I have never seen a raw camera that looked good till you pos it. as long as your getting true raw 10bit out you should not worry, unless they are using a crappy chip.

But then, how can I know if I am getting true raw 10bit and is the chip crappy? The only thing I can evaluate is the picture I get. What you think about what you have downloaded, does it look ok? I am not worried about the filmic look as overall in terms of DOF and motion blur, and 24p and so on, the only thing was that the colors were so low, but more than that is that it was kind of unclear picture, but maybe I am wrong.

?

what is the model and brand of CMOS? is it Kodak? Micron? etc?? FIllFactory?

Levan, it should be a Fillfactory chip, right? You said that they told you it was the same manufacturer as the one for the D-20 (only a smaller chip) and I believe that Fillfactory makes that one if I am not mistaken.

"True raw 10-bit" sounds limited. As sensors are linear use need at least 12-bits of linear data to get reasonable (low noise) log or gamma corrected 10-bit output.

David Newman
CTO, CineForm

right you are David, my bad ;)

maybe it's the LUPA4000 chip by fillfactory?

Levan please ask for a 50mm lens shot of a person with a light on them...I want to see DOF and also skin from that chip ASAP

thanks!

Hi ALL,
Obin, You may ask me Yourself-))),
about camera status: this week we’ll have new body case,
and start testing new demosaic soft, with linear we have a lot of artifacts and focusing problems.
(as You may see on our pictures-))))
I think in two days we’ll be ready with new pictures,
Levan, sorry for delay, first- we need to test Blackmagic for receiving Bayer from camera for offline demosaic and color correction. (our one -dead, we waiting new one)
we started new project with photo lenses, any ideas? first I want to discuss- do You need optic converter or it’s ok without, what resolution is enough?


Best Regards,
Alexander Kitaev
www.ctt.ru
info@ctt.ru
kit@1tv.ru