Andrey,

I have some good news, that I will be posting sometime over in my digital cinema technical thread.

I have reviewed the sensor information and things have changed quiet a bit. Kodak is supposed to have some 100K -ev well sensor chip, so I am interested in those Kodak options you mentioned.

Micron has got superwideVGA chip with multislope, so I am interested if any of their chips that you use in future have this excellent feature.

But the biggie, apart from some behinds the scenes doc I have on a new sensor people have been eagerly waiting for for years that is quiet an excellent choice for you (though not in price). Is that I have found a cheap Russian, alternative to the x3 Foveon. I will email you privately as I want some space to negotiate with them first, without non business/electronics professional people rushing them for information.


Thanks

Wayne.

Wayne,

sorry for late reply - I'm just back from the linuxtag.org. I really appreciate information on the new sensors but I can not work with them myself (at least in near future) - there are so many current projects. So right now I can just provide some help to somebody who can work on them.

Andrey

Funny you dismissed me like more than a year ago when I asked you about using your camera for High Definition stuff.
Now I see you here....

It is not my speciality :-) , and this application of our cameras is community-driven.

That's OK, but I know that you work with micron and mentioned Kodaks. Do any of the Microns that you are using, are planing to, use the dual/multislope. You were talking about the Kodak, are you planning on using the 100K -ev ones, or the 65K -ev ones?

Thanks

Wayne.

333
 

Oscar,
Any luck using this camera???

I'm sorry it took so long.... I had a lot of trouble finding a way to capture the footage. I now have figured out a stupid work around, so that's OK for now.

I had luck finding a very (as far as I can tell from my first tests) good C - mount lens on an 'antique' 16mm film camera. here are some tests shots I made with the camera and the lens:
http://bosshogg.logjam.com/oscar/Elphel/rez.jpeg
http://bosshogg.logjam.com/oscar/Elphel/rose.jpg
http://bosshogg.logjam.com/oscar/Elphel/rose1.jpg
http://bosshogg.logjam.com/oscar/Elp...-artifact).jpg

Two of the shots with the rose (shot through a dirty window) are toughed up in AE. One of them 'rose(de-artifact) ' has some enhancements (de-artifact and 0,5 box-blur) to reduce the compression distortions of the Elphel camera.

One of the big problems I still have is the rolling shutter effect on quick moves.

I'm also working on the wax adapter.

do a green screen test to see how the color compression is

Oscar, those rose grabs where at about 1700 by 800. what fps where you able to capture that at? or where they more for still test purposes.

No, it's a real frame-grab from a clip I shot at 24 fps (1728 x 896)
I'm very glad and surprised that my 1.5 GHZ Intel celeron (!) laptop can capture at that resolution. When I make a battery pack of some sort for the camera I'm very mobile already...only one cable between the laptop and the camera.
How are you doing with you Elphel Forrest?

Theres no surprise, you are getting from 30-70mbs (from what I seem to understand) which is upto around 9MBytes second, next to nothing and a number of drives can handle that now days.

Forrest or Oscar,
Have you tried playing with higher frame rates for slow motion shots? 640 X360 would be like letterboxed standard def, and you could get framerates up to probably over 100fps. It may not look very good at that low resolution, Then again, until the recent HD cams, SD was just fine. In conjuction with a 35mm adapter to make the subject pop, you'll be able to do some really cool slow motion.

Also, does the camera do windowing or sub-sampling for lower res?

Overall I really like this experiment that Forrest and Oscar are trying, the heavy compression keeps it from being a real professional camera, but it's affordable, has a manageable data rate, and can do real slow motion (I hope).

There should be a whole host of new Gig-E and firewire B standard industrial cameras coming out soon that will be the subject of much experimentation, which is great.

Thanks guys, neat thread here...

Which new cameras are those? You know there are already thousands of industrial cameras.

I said "should" and "whole host"
not "know" and "thousands".

Rob at Graftek (http://www.graftek.com) discussed it with me. He said that "when new faster connectivity standards come out so do new devices that can take take advantage of the extra bandwidth; ; so expect a whole host of new industrial cameras in a few months." Made sense to me, so I thought I'd voice my enthusiasm.

Industrial Cameras
 

double post, oops

GigE
 

Wayne -- RE GigE camera heads: I found through Google the "GE" series by Prosilica. The best is the GE-1600 which is a 2 megapixel Sony CCD camera, 1600 x 1220 x 15 fps (but can ROI to get you back up to 24 fps), progressive scan, 12-bit digitising, global shutter (hey!), can use cheap 100 meter long network cable, C-mount for lens, includes an SDK (not clear about the out-of-box software). Their previous similar spec Firewire cameras were $2k - $3k, so this one probably at least that much (have not contacted them for a quote). Wonder if there will be cheaper ones coming along -- GigE PCI cards for a desktop are cheap, and more notebooks are including GigE ports as well (just need cheap cameras now!).

Their website:
www.prosilica.com

Regards,
John.

15fps at 1600x1220. how can it do 24 at that resolution if it can only do 15? isnt the ROI like a windowing function?

I was asking which, and letting you know that there already were. Thanks for the follow up.


John,

There is at least dozens of manufactures of box cameras out there, too many to check, and there are many USB, GIGE and Firewire models. Just remember USB2.0 gets performance problems because the processor is forced to divide more time to run the interface.

My technical thread has a number of links through it to lists of manufacturers of cameras and sensors etc, and to cameras themselves, so you can find most of them.

Lots of these manufacturers are quiet expensive for what you get, and probably don't ship with software to record to disk in a pro video fashion (so be careful to find out).

Wrapping up!
 

Well, I am here to let you know I am wrapping up on the DIY cameras, and have posted some lengthy informative project summary posts in my "Home Made HD Cinema Cameras - Technical Discussion" thread. I am just dropping by to let you know they are there, and are well worth the read. The thread itself, probably lists half of what you need to know there from this site. If the two posts suddenly disappear, please ask the moderators to restore them.

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showpost....&postcount=470
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showpost....&postcount=471

The Technical Discussion thread itself:
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=28781

Forrest -- sorry I didn't make it clear; yes, when you ROI a smaller frame size within the max frame size (to get faster fps) obviously the frame size is smaller (usual trade-off); I simply meant that this camera has the ROI ability to give you the faster fps.

Wayne -- all the best: you gave a great impetus to many (including me) who have this crazy idea they want to modify cameras to make movies...

Regards,
John.

thanks John, I got ya.

About the compression....
 

As far as I can see in my tests: with the camera set on 85% quality or more, most of the 'bad' compression artifacts are minimized.
What is left is a small grid pattern and much larger blocks. Both of those can be minimized too when you put a box-blur of 0,4 or 0,5 on the image. The image itself will hardly loose detail ánd you can now put a bit of an unsharp-mask on it without sharpening the compression effects.
Here is a test (on the right has the box-blur filter). You have to save the image and zoom in to notice the difference.
(Note that the images are a just fraction of the whole image, so the grain you see is just 'normal' grain, not compression noise)
I'll do some better tests soon, but I'm very busy this week...so..

Fps?
 

[QUOTE=Oscar Spier]As far as I can see in my tests: with the camera set on 85% quality or more, most of the 'bad' compression artifacts are minimized.......QUOTE]

Oscar or Forrest,
Any luck trying higher frame rates. Check page 9 for my question posted if you missed it.

Thanks.

Wayne,
I mis-read your response last time. Need to read more slowly. thanks.

Donnie. i have done the slo-mo tests. upto 120 fps i think. and the slo-mo is there, and looks good. But when you window it that small, the resolution isnt all that great. i think it is even sub-sd at 640 x 480. Its alot harder to make everything in this package work for you than i had first invisioned.

I've found a link to a list of firewire camera on the market
http://damien.douxchamps.net/ieee1394/cameras/index.php

maybe is usefull for you!
Matteo

what do you think about the
Marlin F-131 http://www.alliedvisiontec.com/produ...=18&a=selectid
990 euros!

Looks like IBIS sensor based camera. You can find a lot info about this cmos sensor in treads like this:
http://dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=25808
http://dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=28781
http://dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=35227

and especially in tread dedicated to Drake camera:
"Rai & Markus' "Drake" HD camera"
http://dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=34339

many thanks
Matteo Pozzi

Hi to all sorry for my prevews post ...wrong place!
I want to know if it is possible to use the elphel camera under win xp or only under linux and about the camera hardware :
how many f-stop dynamic range have the elphel 333?
comparing the images to the image of the SI-1920hdvr camera that have 10 f-stop dynamic range the image looks washed out, is that a wrong setup or not?
many thanks Matteo Pozzi

It could be the lens quality, even the setup or codec/processing, but yes you are right. I noticed this from the beginning and it is severe.

Yes, I am still subscribed, waiting till the 433 comes ;).

it is 353

Hi Andrey
congratulation for your work is awesome
are you planning to use micron cmos
on the 353
or some other brand?
why not the altasens ProCamHD 2462 1280x720 1/3" 60p
or the ProCamHD 356X

I'm planning to build a diy hd camera and I think that your technology
is what I need
did the camera work only under linux or also is recognised by the win xp?
many thanks and best reguards
Matteo Pozzi

It will be rather universal, as all the previous 303-313-333 boards and preserve compatibility with the current sensor boards. And yes, we plan to use Micron sensors first - but the design is open, anybody is free to add support to other sensors not waiting until we do it.

We use RTP streaming and provide support for it for Linux (prebuilt software is included on the Live CD/DVD). But it is possible to use cameras with MS operating systems, we just don't provide full support on our own.

I finally got some time to rebuild my wax adapter to fit in front of the Elphel camera.
I'm doing some test shots to see if I'm not loosing too much resolution and light in this setup (home made macro lens etc.)
I'm pretty happy with these last tests, although I need to find out what's causing the blurry left side. Probably the diaphragm I just put in there with tape.

http://bosshogg.logjam.com/oscar/Elphel/35mmRoof.jpg
http://bosshogg.logjam.com/oscar/Elphel/35mmRoof2.jpg
http://bosshogg.logjam.com/oscar/Elphel/35mmRoof3.jpg
http://bosshogg.logjam.com/oscar/Elphel/35mmRoof4.jpg

can we get a recap on all the progress on this project. the things we know and want to accomplish

many thanks andrey and
hi oscar
very interesting pics
are color corrected?
or are raw file from camera?
are from a 24p footage?
some more questions:
I don't use linux but now I'm thinking to jump in ...
the problem is that I use sony vegas 6 to edit
how can I load footage in it ...can you send us a theora file
from the elphel camera with 35 mm adapter in raw?
I'm planning to built a hd camera
what are the minimum pc spec to achieve 24p 1280x720 videos
I have an old p3 450 I have to garbage it or it is usefull
what do you think?
what kind of c-mount lens did you attached in front of the camera?
than macro or achromat?
....your result is amazing
by now many thanks
Matteo Pozzi

Matteo,
they are color corrected a bit. And I applied a little bit of an unsharp-mask because I have to use a small box-blur to get rid of a fine grid all over the image.

I don't know if the p3 450 will do.. but I guess not. I use an Intel Celeron 15 GHZ laptop with 1 gig RAM. It's about the minimum I think.
The fact that it's a laptop makes it so much more suitable for this purpose.
The Linux comes on a liveCD that functions as the hard drive with OS so you can load it on almost any computer.
It's not perfect because it works slow and I didn't got a chance to find out if you can save the settings of both Linux and camera (like frame size and shutter and such)
I use an old 16mm camera c-mount lens on normal shooting. For the 35mm adapter macro lens I build my own from 8mm camera parts.

Here is a new frame grab to show a good example of the 35mm DOF: http://bosshogg.logjam.com/oscar/Elp...oof5_00003.jpg

EDIT: You can use Video Cleaner Pro to convert the OGG files to any other format like quicktime or avi. Even to image sequences.

clip
 

here's a clip of HIGH RES

http://tacx-video.com/

..
 

hello
if it's not so much trouble can you post a full SIZE resz of 24p
without using the 35mm lens.
35mm lens maybe good for DOF but it really decrease the quality of original picture.

I know that the final result will be better without 35mm adapter
but with it,for me,is visually better more cinelike and that is what i'm looking for

For Jung: is the mountain street video made ith the elphel?
is very crisp!
For Oscar: thanks for the pics and about the 16mm camera lens can you tell me
if the result is very crisp and clear?
and about the size of the chip: is smaller than that of a 16mm film camera or is equal?

Many thanks
Matteo Pozzi