Regarding the recording media: new generation of CF cards appears to be in the works, called CFast:

http://crave.cnet.com/8301-1_105-987...eed&subj=Crave

Should have up to 375MB/s bandwidth.

And, it is *incompatible* with today's CF cards.

Will Cineform recorder be future-proof and support CFast cards?

CFast clarification
 

To be clear they are talking about the interface bandwidth, not the card performance.

You may as well expect a SATA Hard Drive with 300MB/s read/write performance.

I think this sort of answers itself- the Cineform recorder will either support CF cards and be incompatible with CFast or it will support CFast and be incompatible with CF cards.

There is a remote possibility that Cineform could make a unit that had both CFast and CF card slots, but in a device of this size that would be a waste.

Should we care about CFast compatibility at this stage?

I don't think so.

When CFast first appears it isn't going to have much practical advantage over CF cards.

Before I go further let me point out a fallacy in the Crave article. CF cards support 133MB/s peak theoretical bandwidth, not the 80MB/s the article claims.

The various manufacturers aren't making CF cards faster than 300x because the flash chips aren't fast enough.

If faster flash chips were available they could at least get out to 600x CF speeds.

(While the theoretical max speed of the PATA bus is ~900x CF speed, practical signaling issues would limit this to closer to 700x I'm estimating based on peak PATA hard disk performance.)

The proposed Cineform SOLID recorder works with 133x CF cards, as does the Convergent Designs Flash XDR.

I expect that that both of these devices have hardware to take advantage of increased read/write speeds of 300x CF cards- and possibly even faster. If so I expect software/firmware updates will allow us to do a bit more. (like capture at higher data rates)

Finally, while CFast is coming, CF cards won't go anywhere for a long while, just like PATA drives are still readily available.

So... again we don't need to be worried about CFast for the time being.

I am going to keep an eye on the technology, and eventually I expect to purchase and use it, but my guess that eventually is two to three years down the road.

It would be lovely if the DDR supports 1394 as well. For normal wedding video guys like me, most of our cameras don't have HDMI or SDI. Please add this support, we are a big market for this DDR.

I think they should add that support too, but you must understand that the Cineform will just be a CF recorder for your regular DV or HDV then... you won't get any quality improvement AT ALL. None... zip zilch nada.

This is because the video signal out firewire is already compressed.

You'd probably be better served with a Firestore.

By CF do you mean CineForm or CompactFlash?

I'd love to have an alternative to Firestore that was already encoded to CineForm - even at a higher price point! The responsiveness and support of the CineForm gang would be worth the price difference!

I mean Compact Flash.

I can also see I was not clear enough... if you use firewire as input to the Cineform Recorder, what you will get is compressed DV or HDV footage exactly as it comes out of the camera.

(I don't know what would happen with DVCPRO or AVC Intra cameras, but I expect they'd have to be recorded in their native output mode.)

This is because the camera outputs COMPRESSED video via firewire.

All Cineform would record is the raw stream exactly as it comes out the camera.

There is no point in decoding and recompressing it again in the recorder. Doing so would actually DECREASE quality.

I would lobby Cineform to make recording whatever comes down the Firewire pipe possible... just because it would occasionally be useful.

I am all for flexibility in the product... so long as it doesn't raise the price unnecessarily.

What I really want is the ability to use firewire for storage, to control the camera, and to hook up to a computer to offload stuff from the Cineform Recorder.

If FW is enabled for all that then recording raw camera data shouldn't be a huge thing.

That's right. I just need a CF recorder with multi CF slots. Unfortunately this thing is currently not available. If Firestore records to CF, that would be great. However, it does not. I like this DDR to record to Cineform avi as well... however, that would eat up the CF capacity.

Is there any way possible to include an "audio recording only" mode in the SOLID?

That's a great idea Robert, I hope they do.

I hope they can tease us with some more info on this product before NAB, but I'm guessing they won't. Hopefully this product is coming out soon though.

more on media - 0.3Lb HD bandwidth hard drive is here
 

Another alternative to CF:

http://www.videography.com/articles/article_15613.shtml

Quote: "Maxell Corp.’s Professional Media Products division will introduce a new lightweight, rugged and shock resistant compact removable hard drive solution for field archive operations at NAB."

"connects directly through a bi-directional USB or e-sata adapter to a shoulder-mounted camcorder capable of delivering 10-bit, 4:2:2 master-quality video and native full HD video. In its current form factor, Maxell iVDR solution can store 160 GB of data and has a transfer rate of 540 Mbps."

Duhhhhhhh. Excuse my ignorance, but since when does any cam have

"bi-directional USB or e-sata" ports with video out? Sounds like any portable USB/eSATA drive!

And even more, why would that replace CF? One of the reasons we use it in the field is to process the video from the SDI or HDMI before it's compressed, thus getting the bump to 10-bit and 4:2:2 and having ready to edit material when we return to the studio.

If they're talking "removable" as in RED or something, this news is in the wrong place.

I think that he ment CF in the term Compact Flash and not CF as in Cineform... it can be a bit confusing... iVDR seem to be a new standard for removable disk. Check out http://www.ivdr.org/iVDR/ivdr_e.html for more info on it. Basically that would be the storage part of the solution. Probably more manufacturers are making solutions that bridges between a camera and the storage in the same fashion the Cineform HDMI recorder will.

Okay, that makes a whole lot more sense!

Light begins to shine thru the mud of the ruins of my chocolate-clogged neural network.........

iVDR seems like a short-lived bridge technology to me.........(sort of like BluRay will prove to be).

The R&D investment in fast/big, non-magnetic, non-mechanical storage tech is too great and too far advanced in my way of thinking. We've certainly seen a lot of this type mechanical stuff come and go since the mid-80's.

The estimate is for over a 100 SSD OEM's this year in the marketplace, and with Intel's entry, things will most probably continue to go that way.

The newest offerings from BiTMICRO, Memoright, Mtron, and Samsung are 1.8"-2.5" form factors and all do at least 100-120MB sustained writes and all have SATA interfaces.

We still have boxes of cartridge-based disks sitting on a shelf somewhere, that we hope to never pay for again. It's just not as good as SSD, period. It may be cheaper...but I'll bet money you'll live to regret it if you buy into it.

My two bits

23 pages - too much to read, if my question has already been asked then apologies.

Ok, can this unit record the 35mm full frame output of a Nikon D3 liveview via HDMI?

Yes. Because HDMI limited to HD (1920x1080) resolution :)

"record the 35mm full frame output of a Nikon D3 liveview via HDMI"

Wow, this seems like it basically turns the D3 into a camcorder! How does the D3 compare to the HV20, and what framerate(s) does it record at?

Man, this would be a dream come true! If this is possible, I would strongly advise Cineform to make the analog audio inputs a reality. I would love to see the day when I could set up a Nikon DSLR, a good microphone hooked up to a mic pre-amp and route the HD video and audio signal to a Cineform SOLID unit that recorded both onto Compact Flash.

Talk about revolutionary! Can someone with a D3 please tell us if this is even possible?

To me, at first glance, this looks too good to be true, but.........
I'd have some questions like:

What kind of signal is REALLY coming out that HDMI port?
Is there any way to get RAW data out a HDMI port?
What processing is applied to the signal BEFORE it comes out?
Why would a major manufacturer want to threaten their higher end video cam lines by making a HD "solution" that would only need separate audio recording and utilizes all their good lenses?

Something somewhere is just too good to be true ... these guys are too wiley for that...

To the best of my knowledge, neither Cineform nor Nikon make any kind of "higher end" video camera, or for that matter, any "video" camera at all. So, I don't think they'd have much to lose.

It seems like there are a few key things we'd need to find out:

1. Does the Nikon send a live feed off the CMOS sensor out the HDMI port when the camera is in shooting mode? OR

2. Is the HDMI port just for viewing pictures already taken?

If 1., then we'd need to know the frame rate and what kind of processing is done before it sends the video signal out the HDMI port.

Don't recall refering to or even suggesting Cineform as making cameras...but you're right about the Nikon. Brain spasm for sure...problem was I've been reading about the Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III and it has video out and "Live view". The Sony and the Canon got mixed together in my brain.

Must be lack of chocolate...

Anyway, comment on the manufacturers motives aside, the questions still stand.

For those wondering about the video output on the Nikon D3 or, in my case, D300, read my post here:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=117734

In short, it's not looking good for practical use.

Since my earlier post, which was sparked by frame grabs I saw on the bottom of this page which look pretty good

http://www.dpreview.com/previews/nikond3/page9.asp

it appears the LV HDMI is only about 15 fps.

As for overheating - this doesnt apply since the on camera display is turned off when HDMI is connected - which is the primary source of heat generation..

So we must wait for the D4...

If Nikon go with the latest FF35mm Sony chip in the D4, then it should get interesting.

D3 output at 6400 ISO is amazing

I've been watching this thread for awhile. It seems like there are a lot of good suggestions to add to the concept and some of those may eventually be incorporated, since Cineform is developing, "a range of recorders". But I would suggest that the concept recorder (on the CF website) might also benefit from having an even simpler little brother, in a fashion similar to the portable audio recorders sold by Sony and Zoom, etc.. Zoom has the bigger H4 and the smaller H2. Sony has the bigger PCM-D1 (~$2K US list) and the smaller PCM-D50 (generally available in the sub-$500 range)

The CF recorder "mini" would only have a small digital numerical display/buttons to indicate status and to control the unit. It would have one 16 GB CF card as the media, only HDMI in and no output ports at all. With a little effort, the size of the unit could be reduced to that of a a pack of playing cards.

BTW, I suspect that someone will soon develop a similar unit, but the codec will be AVCHD.

Awesome!
 

Just stumbled across this-- awesome little box, I wish it were here today!

Regarding audio connectors... do most of the HDMI camcorders take their audio inputs and embed the signal into the HDMI, or are they lame and don't do that? I'm assuming that that's why this is a discussion at all. Otherwise, there's no point in audio connectors. If you did have them, though, do not settle for anything less than XLR connectors-- Cineform is for professionals, and professionals need to use balanced audio. (you could also try "mini xlr" if you're worried about space, and provide some adapters). Don't use BNC for audio, it's way out of spec to do that.

http://www.futurlec.com/XLR-MiniXLR.shtml

Audio can indeed be embedded into the HDMI signal. I would imagine that the inclusion of a separate audio input would be invaluable for audio coming from another source. Surely a dedicated mic would provide better quality sound than a camera-mounted mic?

David, what you think about GPU usage for RT encoding to Cineform ?
http://www.elementaltechnologies.com/how_it_works.php

Iridas already use GPU for RT debayer of RAW...

I think from a coolness perspective, use of the GPU would be great. The question is, with a commercial perspective in mind, why CineForm would want to develop it - Intel CPUs are getting ever more powerful and ever more cheaper, and it's safe to assume that by the time development work would be complete on such a project, they'll be even more powerful and even cheaper.

In addition, while GPUs are very good at certain operations, the large amount of entropy encoding/decoding required by a higher bit-rate compression is not one of the areas they do well at. Our compression would be slower if implemented solely on GPU and deminishing returns for a split CPU/GPU implementation.

Are there any news on the progress of the recorder, such as decided features and estimated arrival on the market?

I wonder how/if Cineform have revised their plans (if not technically, then perhaps with regard to pricing) with Matrox's announcement of the MX02.

If the Cineform recorder doesn't come out soon the Matrox may have to do. It's just not my preference. But it seems like the Matrox box is format agnostic and would allow recording into Cineform directly, as long as the Cineform codec is installed on your MacBook Pro or Mac Pro. (They use ExpressCard or PCIe) which is probably why they don't mention a regular MacBook as being compatible.

Nope, we haven't haven't changed our plans. There are just too many reasons for a range portable CineForm capture devices.

I take it though, that with no announcements at NAB this year, we're still at least a year off? Ever since you guys announced this thing, my HV20 has been begging for a playmate. :)

-burk

Not a year off. But we knew all along it wouldn't be ready for this NAB. The point on the thread was to collect your feedback to make the best product we can. This not just feedback to CineForm, but to hardware partners that complete this project. CineForm is a software company, yet we are porting our compression to hardware so that will appear in a range of forms (this is just one of them.)

I'm not sure I see the comparison. MX02 is an attachment to your laptop for $1,500 and it's limited to Mac to boot - the CineForm unit would be a complete standalone piece of equipment at $2,000. I know which I'd rather have!

They're not 100% identical, no. I guess they're only similar in the fact that both products would allow you to record straight into Cineform via the HDMI, bypassing long-GOP and HDV compression, preserving 4:2:2, and recording straight to hard drive.

I understand that the Cineform box would be a complete stand-alone, and would also allow Compact Flash recording capabilities. They both would have their pros and cons, but to say there's no comparison at all, well...

Don't get me wrong, I want this Cineform Recorder as much as the rest of you. I'd buy it today if I could.

Another similar hardware solution? Although does not look too mobile:

http://www.telestream.net/products/p...utm_source=NBM

Standard def and SDI only. Watched the presentation and I'm kind of struggling to see the point of it to be honest over and above the obvious coolness factor of capturing over LAN.

Another competitor...
 

http://ffv.com/products/elite_front_4.pdf

This is an SDI i/o device, it records JPEG2000. (Which they call/abreviate J2K)

It is 10 bit sampling at 4:2:2.

It uses hot swappable 2.5" SATA drives for storage.

I prefer an HD-SDI solution built around Cineform codecs, especially FILMREC. I also prefer commodity solid state storage whenever possible.

What Alexander said, agreed on all accounts.

Note to Cineform: please don't forget to provide a switch to use your built-in analog audio line in, instead of HDMI-multiplexed audio!