Oscar please check your inbox, I sent you a PM some time ago.

Sebastian , somehow PM is disabled on my account. Can you sent an email? (lijsten@degalerie.nl) Thanks.



If we now also get some kind of display we finally freed ourselfs from the laptop.


I started another thread about that, because it could also apply to other DIY camera projects.
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=124102

Thanks for your input. Interesting ideas!

Some Elphel Hardware News:

Andrey silently added a bunch of new pages in the official elphel wiki:

http://wiki.elphel.com/index.php?title=10369

There is a new interface board: the 10369 - interface board with SATA port, 2 CF card slots, USB (4 ports), RS-232, 2 channels of optoisolated I/Os for synchronization, clock/calendar with super-capacitor backup power.

No official news are announced or if the board is available or what can really be done with it.

Yes, we've got these boards built at the factory as well as the camera enclosure parts as shown here - http://wiki.elphel.com/index.php?title=Elphel_camera_parts#NC353L_with_10369A and now testing everything (so far so good) so the factory can make complete assembly of the cameras.

We do not yet have 12V version -- there is a known issue (discovered by the guys from http://www.hackerbotlabs.com/) - these DC-DC converters do not seem to have undervoltage/overcurrent protection. It is not an issue in the standard PoE camera - PoE chip takes care of the protection itself, but this chip is bypassed in 12V or 24V non-IEEE802.3af compliant versions, so the 12V camera virtually went out in flames - dying 12V battery caused DC-DC to increase current (to maintain output power), got overheated, failed and had the input diode bridge burnt. We plan to use different model of the DC-DC converters that are supposed to have such protection, but not finished the testing yet.

It has more details on the 10369 - http://linuxdevices.com/articles/AT5102023409.html

Andrey

Between...

Does anybody still have the BloodSimple(TM) codec source Zsolt Hegyi posted here about a year ago?

I am afraid he edited out the links in his original post.

Andrey, which Micron (Aptina) sensor ( 5MP 1/2,5" MT9P401 or 1,6MP 1/4,5" MT9M002) is better for shooting video (sport) 720p60 ?

I can not really help you - it is very difficult to get any information from the manufacturer, we only use now MT9T001 and MT9P001/MT9P031 (seem to be the same chip, just different marketing name). We will have MT9P001 with BAR coating - among others that will improve performance when you have sun in the view (standard sensors have plain glass)

It has more details on the 10369 - http://linuxdevices.com/articles/AT5102023409.html


Here are two links to that article:
http://mobile.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/05/1711221
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/12/1851251

The new elphel 353 cameras can now write full HD 1920x1080p quicktime *.movs @ 25fps to internal HDD or cf card.

I updated the HD cinema camera Development elphel wiki page: http://wiki.elphel.com/index.php?title=HD_cinema_camera_Development_FAQ

Can we see a sample clip Sebastian? If compression is low or at least not too visible, that could mean a huge step forward.

Yes, soon I hope.

While I now wait for my Elphel camera to arrive I started working on the next big project:

A new Elphel camera body especially designed for professional filmmakers.
Working title for now is the "Elphel Cinevision"

It will be a lot bigger than the current surveillance like camera body and should have enough room for 2 swapable CF cards and 1.8" or 2.5" HDDs. There will be some custom battery pack solution and an HD LCD display at some point.

The first thing I started to toy around was designing an exchangeable lens mount that is not just an adapter ring.

The image below shows the (not assembled) lens mount parts.
The lens mount plate can contain mounts for C-Mount, PL-Mount, Canon, Nikon, ....
I also had the idea of adding rods to the mount plate.

What do you think of this so far?

I like the idea. I also liked the camera body for developers they where discussing at Elphel : 10349 - ElphelWiki (http://wiki.elphel.com/index.php?title=10349#Body_of_camera_for_developers)
Maybe you could keep the idea of an expandable body where you can easily ad a new part.
It's a bit similar to the RED camera.
Otherwise you'll maybe end up with a big square box.

I got my camera (possibly the first delivered model with built in 1.8" HDD) this week, thanks Elphel!

On Friday I did some tests with the harddisk recorder.

I successfully recorded a 1920x1088 movie at 90% jpeg quality and 25 fps. One frame was around 550kb big which resulted in a 100mb quicktime file for 7 seconds.

Sorry but no file upload yet to take a look at yet as the video showed just a dark empty room. But stay tuned! As soon as I shot anything, that I don't have to be ashamed of showing, I will post it here.

In the meantime I did some modifications to the web based camera interface to honor the video filmers choice in framesizes a little more than the old list (see attachment).

I also did a comparison between elphel internal and post applied demosaicing algorithms over at the elphel wiki. -> Demosaic on client side - ElphelWiki (http://wiki.elphel.com/index.php?title=Demosaic_on_client_side)

The conclusion was that the certain amount of blur that the elphel shot images still show are the result of a still very basic implementation of bilinear demosaicing in the camera.

not dead this thread , way big fun
still alive, way better
take please a look at
Active Silicon Limited - Imaging Products, Systems and Solutions (http://www.activesilicon.com)

Core 2Duo
Firewire
Usb2
GIG E
total passive cooling
I bet looks like a wearable portable solution
could do anything the Ephel cam does not have on board

good piece!

But I think I would prefer if the elphel camera itself had everything onboard that I need ;)

I'm working hard and hope to have 7.2 software soon (all FPGA and most driver code is written - starting debugging next week) - it will support pipeline operation - coordinated parameters change without acquisition pipeline restart. And - it has multiple modes of encoding, JP4 (JPEG-encoded raw Bayer) in it can run 1.5 times faster, supporting full sensor FPS (i.e. 5MPix@15fps)

I finally was able to shot RAW video with my elphel camera!

Having enough free time, software development progress and good weather finally fell together yesterday.

The image sequence was converted to a DNG sequence and could then be imported into AfterFX.

Video will follow later today.

Check out the image below:

That's an enormous progress. What frame rate/frame size where you able to capture?
Did you capture to the PC or directly to the cameras HDD?

I recorded 1920x1080 Full HD @ 24fps to camera internal HDD.

The workflow is still a bit cumbersome:
-) Camera writes jp4 encoded jpeg image sequence onto internal HDD (the HDD recorder webinterfaces I wrote simplifies this task greatly)
-) grab the images from the camera with an ftp client of your choice.
-) there is a linux commandlinetool (dcraw author & elphel cooperation) from the past that transforms a jp4 jpeg into adobes digital color negative file (*.dng) which is a raw format. I wrote a small script that batch converts a whole directory
-) batch rename your dng sequence and import it into a software that can read dngs (since its adobes own file format most CS3 Suite tools should be able to open it), I used After FX CS3

Full HD xvid avi (63MB): http://www.oneartplease.com/files/elphel_raw_full.avi

I also uploaded it as 1280x720 video to vimeo but it says its still compressing:
Elphel Raw Test Footage on Vimeo (http://vimeo.com/1896684)

vimeo says its private video...

Vimeo video is now online, but the avi is much higher quality.

Not bad at all! There seem to be some artifacts in moving objects in the RAW video. But overall the quality has improved very much, also the mjpeg compressed one (compared to my own test a couple of months ago).
I hope I will have time to do some testing with this soon!

Vimeo video is now online, but the avi is much higher quality.

Here is a mirror http://community.elphel.com/videos/elphel_raw_full.avi - it may be faster

wow looks good with a very good dinamyc range!
how about the rolling shutter problem!?
have you done something to reduce it?

Hey Matteo

There is no satisfying way to remove rolling shutter distortion in post.
The only way is a hardware based global shutter.

BUT: The problem is mostly exaggerated.
The effects are far not as strong or distracting a some people claim them to be. These distortions are the same for ALOT (if not ALL CMOS based) professional cameras including Canon HV20, HV30, Sony A1, EX1 and 3 and YES for the Red One as well and many more.

But yes, we need to deal with the issue in the future But there can only be a hardware based solution

thanks for the reply
I know the problem but I think that using / fixing the master clock of the sensor to 96MHz could reduce it a lot :-)

One year ago I tested the same sensor. The rolling shutter effect was almost unnoticeable at 96Mhz.

Hi Sebastian (and others),

I'm wondering if it'll be a good idea to buy one of those 7" mini laptops (UMPC) to make the camera portable. Can you tell if the hard-disk recording on the camera works well enough so the (slower) inexpensive laptops will work. I don't need the preview function because of the optical viewfinder I built for the camera. I know that the ultimate goal is a mobile phone controlling the camera, but such a small laptop is not a bad start. I noticed that a lot of them run on Linux (Xandros).

Hi Sebastian (and others),

I'm wondering if it'll be a good idea to buy one of those 7" mini laptops (UMPC) to make the camera portable. Can you tell if the hard-disk recording on the camera works well enough so the (slower) inexpensive laptops will work. I don't need the preview function because of the optical viewfinder I built for the camera. I know that the ultimate goal is a mobile phone controlling the camera, but such a small laptop is not a bad start. I noticed that allot of them run on Linux (Xandros).

Yes, I am using an EeePC 900A which here in Austria cost me only 300€.
Performance ist not an issue at all.
I already tested live streaming to this laptop and it worked quite well for lower resolutions(lower than the laptop screen which is 1024x600). I had no luck streaming full HD to this device though.

I think even the cheapest UMPC is sufficient for controlling the elphel browser windows.

Harddisk recording works so well that I newer even thought about testing the DVR setup.

The only issue I spotted so far was that the camvc interface is higher than the 600 pixels screen(especially with browser menues and toolbars) so you need to scroll down if you want to change exposure, etc.

About the OS:
Xandros ships with EeePCs and a simple mode (with big buttons and simplified navigation) is preconfigured for everyone who has first contact with linux.
You can then switch to a "full desktop mode" which sadly works poorly. Xandros in default full desktop mode didn't support half of the laptops insternal hardware and programs like openoffice would refuse to start.
So I installed Ubuntu using an USB Stick and since then everything worked like a charm.

That's good to hear. So you don't use the live-DVD that comes with the camera? Was it easy to install all the software needed for Elphel? I was planning to install Ubuntu to my hard drive, but I was afraid to mess up my Windows Vista. Using a cheap small laptop only for the camera will make things a lot easier.

I would not recommend staying with the OS preinstalled on EEEPC - switching to (K)ubuntu needs some initial setup (nicely covered on the Internet), but after that you can easily add any of the packages available for Ubuntu - there are much-much more of them than for Xandros. I've (actually my kids) got 3 of EEEPCs (in the order of availability) - 7, 9 and 10 - the largest one has a useful for adults keyboard

Andrey/Sebastian,

I noticed someone wrote on the Elphel wishlist on wiki: "Flash mode for rolling shutter"
Would this be some kind of semi-global shutter?

I have no idea.

I posted this on the Wishlist:Talk page:

Interesting suggestions Kimstick! Could you please give us more details what you mean with :

* Flash mode for rolling shutter
* Lens distortion hardware correction

Why would you want the camera to be a motor/servo controller?

Great news everyone!

Camogmgui version 0.5 is released.

Changelog:
* It's a real GUI now, not just a list of buttons and settings
* you don't need to be a Linux guru anymore to record video -> no more shell command typing, the application takes care of everything
* fancy filebrowser that can be used to download files as well
* more advanced settings/features (timelapse, file split after certain size or length, renaming video file after recording, etc.)

More infos and download in the elphel wiki: Camogmgui - ElphelWiki (http://wiki.elphel.com/index.php?title=Camogmgui)

Hi Sebastian,

Would it be possible to get a sequence (like 1 sec) of the JP4 files you used in the impressive sample you posted previously ?
I just wrote an small avisynth filter that reorder such file to "raw" and debayer them in vdub using a DFAPD filter (http://www.dei.unipd.it/~ballanlu/demo.html) (i still need to re-write my own avisynth plugin) so I would like to compare the output.
Using Avisynth should simplify the workflow (open the image sequence... get debayered RGB video in any application :)), at least to people using Windows.

Thanks !

Great news ! Thank you very much ...

While I now wait for my Elphel camera to arrive I started working on the next big project:

A new Elphel camera body especially designed for professional filmmakers.
Working title for now is the "Elphel Cinevision"

It will be a lot bigger than the current surveillance like camera body and should have enough room for 2 swapable CF cards and 1.8" or 2.5" HDDs. There will be some custom battery pack solution and an HD LCD display at some point.

The first thing I started to toy around was designing an exchangeable lens mount that is not just an adapter ring.

The image below shows the (not assembled) lens mount parts.
The lens mount plate can contain mounts for C-Mount, PL-Mount, Canon, Nikon, ....
I also had the idea of adding rods to the mount plate.

What do you think of this so far?

Question:
What CAD app did you use ?

I think about doing a stereo3D "duoElphel" body with micrometer dials for imager shift and maybe adjustable stereo base.

What holds me back yet is the new class of proprietary cams using the next gen KODAK chip with 12bit FullHD quad output up to 64fps that might better suit cinema needs.
Given the now outdated KODAK CCD options of the 3xx series, I very much hope Elphel also looks into this. I'm a software guy and not able to do Hw design yet.


Suggestion:
I guess the middle part will be very tricky to manufacture with CNC (Unterschneidung).

Do you know the IMS (Interchangeable Mount System) from P+S Technik (Munich) ?
It's probably much more expensive than self made gear, but comes with most lens mounts available.

Hi Sebastian,

Would it be possible to get a sequence (like 1 sec) of the JP4 files you used in the impressive sample you posted previously ?
I just wrote an small avisynth filter that reorder such file to "raw" and debayer them in vdub using a DFAPD filter (http://www.dei.unipd.it/~ballanlu/demo.html) (i still need to re-write my own avisynth plugin) so I would like to compare the output.
Using Avisynth should simplify the workflow (open the image sequence... get debayered RGB video in any application :)), at least to people using Windows.

Thanks !

Great to hear about ongoing progress, keep it up!

I uploaded 25 of those jp4 jpegs:
http://www.oneartplease.com/elphel/jp4s.rar

@Thomas:

I used Solidworks for the original plans, which are about to change a little atm.

"Die Unterschneidung" could be solved by doing 2 pieces and screwing them together.

We once used a Canon XLH1 and P+S 35mm Adapter but I can't really remember much of the mount system.

With version 0.6 we are nearing the final 1.0 release of camogmgui.

* sensor state info added
* added some help text
* quicktime *.mov is now the default format
* the filebrowser can now go into subfolders, also create them or set them as target for recordings
* live video preview image added in expandable tab
* tabs remember their state across page reloads
* bug fixes

Details and Download: Camogmgui - ElphelWiki (http://wiki.elphel.com/index.php?title=Camogmgui)


And I am working on a more advanced hardware concept for a new body.
More about this here soon...

Micron sensors continue to get better. How much would a 3D version of this camera setup cost, and is there going to be an PC independent version (flash/drive recorder, display, and micro-controller)?

Have been delving into the Ambarella based $100 hybrid HD cameras, many with Micron sensors, but none with reasonable manual controls or quality output (reasonable rather than high grade consumer).

I think 3D camera (3D security camera) is the last unexplored part of the market on the low end. The prices of these 3D systems can be pretty expensive, and there is now a number of displays with 3D support.

Here is a question about the web based graphical interface. Does this mean I can use a PDA, or micro-controller like the beagle board to control the camera?

BeagleBoard.org - default (http://beagleboard.org/)

Hey Sebastian,

I came across a battery powered phantom power supply for microphones. It's not that expensive (45 euros over here) Since it is 48V, I was wondering if it is possible to adapt this to the camera POE injector. What do you think?

PS to all of you.. I recently bought a 7" UMPC with full tablet function running Ubuntu. I'm in the middle of installing everything necessary for the Elphel camera. Right now I've gotten as "far" as loosing the touchscreen and wireless LAN drivers and still not able to run the camera... but I'm learning working with Ubuntu... so give me a little time and hopefully I'll have some interesting to share :)

EDIT: I've mailed about it, and the power supply works on 9V batteries and weights 500g. Would be nice if it could be used.

We are well on our way to an "external-pc-less" version of the camera.

First Release Candidates (RC1) Version 8.0 of the new firmware was released on sourceforge this week. There are still some bugs and unfinished areas but everything is starting to come together.
This new firmware adds some major new features like pipelines (article coming soon) and a decent performance gain in image processing (150% in some areas) which means the camera can achieve higher overall frame rates.


Andrey mentioned considering a main CPU change in the future to a Davinci based TI ArmCPU (tms320dm6467) with HD video coprocessor. This would mean much more performance some new interfaces as the CPU supports USB2.0, Gigabit Ethernet, LCD controller.

.) Dual Programmable High-Definition Video Image Co-Processor (HDVICP) Engines, Supports a Range of Encode, Decode, and Transcode Operations: H.264, MPEG2, VC1, MPEG4 SP/ASP

.) Video Port Interface (VPIF): Two 8-Bit SD (BT.656), Single 16-Bit HD (BT.1120), or Single Raw (8-/10-/12-Bit) Video Capture Channels, Two 8-Bit SD (BT.656) or Single 16-Bit HD (BT.1120) Video Display Channels

.) Video Data Conversion Engine (VDCE): Horizontal and Vertical Downscaling

Actually it's similar hardware as the mentioned beagle board.


@Wayne, with a little coding effort you can use any microcontroller, PC or PDA that can communicate with the camera via Ethernet, RS323 or USB.


@Oscar do you have link to the battery you mentioned, sounds interesting?

Yes, I was reading about the firmware update on the Wiki.

@Oscar do you have link to the battery you mentioned, sounds interesting?

The one I saw would be very similar to this one: http://www.fatpro.com/images/1fbps_1.pdf

Yet another thing I came across:
http://www.thomann.de/gb/the_tbone_micplug_usb.htm?partner_id=87171]THE T.BONE MICPLUG USB - U.K. International Cyberstore

If audio recording is functional on the Elphel (like tested on Camogm2) would the microphone have to be plugged into the camera usb or the pc usb port?
Now, lets say you'd use this to connect a regular mic to record audio and use the 48v phantom power (powered by the usb!) to power the camera. ??

Oscar, microphones use very little of the power, it will not be enough to power 353

I wrote a script that converts CVS commit logs to a RSS feed that you can use to have a peek into our development activity (at least code-related part of it). It is here: CVS log for Elphel projects (http://feeds.elphel.com/elphelcvs.rss)

Hi all
the last postings sound some promising to me,
thought once the project got lost.

But beware audio is another cup of tea
a recording device should be separate.
They are out dead cheap.

Don't follow the consumer setup.
I do guess Scarlet does no sound either.

Yet another thing I came across:
http://www.thomann.de/gb/the_tbone_micplug_usb.htm?partner_id=87171]THE T.BONE MICPLUG USB - U.K. International Cyberstore

If audio recording is functional on the Elphel (like tested on Camogm2) would the microphone have to be plugged into the camera usb or the pc usb port?
Now, lets say you'd use this to connect a regular mic to record audio and use the 48v phantom power (powered by the usb!) to power the camera. ??

It might not be a good option for powering the camera but it looks like a promising option for getting audio into the camera via USB with a professional XLR jack and preamp.
Need some research if this is USB1 or 2 and if it there are linux drivers available.

Hi all
the last postings sound some promising to me,
thought once the project got lost.

But beware audio is another cup of tea
a recording device should be separate.
They are out dead cheap.

Don't follow the consumer setup.
I do guess Scarlet does no sound either.

If you record sound externally there should at least be a way to electronically sync audio and video so we don't have to go back and use a clap for every single recorded clip.

Adding this sync signal is most likely more work than actually recording audio and with the USB option I think it's a very flexible solution.



Here is the camera concept I promised some posts ago:

It's a very modular design which "wraps" around the basic Elphel camera case with HDD.
Still missing is the LCD, Battery Pack and I/O Panel.

What do you think so far?