I dont want to touch it and freeze my fingers off, nor have them stick to it.

really though, as long as it has a rubberized something-or-other on the outside I'd be happy.

...Oh Yeah ! Good point !

I've had a few more thoughts on this device, and I've thought of a potential way to make it fully programmable, basically codec agnostic. I'm not a programmer or asic designer, so I could be totally wrong, but I know computers and keep up with technology. I'm sure it could work, but it may not be practical.
The current graphics cards available have huge processing potential that is only just starting to be used outside of games and CAD. A sub $100 card can transcode 4 full HD mpeg2 streams into mpeg4 simultaneously faster than real time. The graphics card companies are starting to release development tools to harness this now. They also develop low wattage mobile versions for laptops, in modular form.
These chips have great deal of dedicated video processing for decoding AVC and VC-1, as well as HDMI interfaces, audio passthrough, scaling, and bucket loads of DSP power.

http://img209.imageshack.us/img209/2...3d000edf28.jpg

ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 4830 / HD 4860 Graphics - Overview

GPU Technology for Accelerated Computing

In it's low power state it might have more than enough power to encode a HD stream into any format you like. The wattage needed for real time is your main stumbling block with this I think.
The software development tools seem to be there. I think a company like ATI would probably offer the support needed to overcome major hurdles, especially if it can open a new market for them.
This may not be practical in the short term, but for a highly flexible programmable mobile encoding platform it could be a hugely powerful device. People would be able to add any codec they cared to, you could also use it to transcode from anything to anything.

All pie in the sky stuff, but worth pondering :)

....Our device will be 10 bit and possibly even 12 bit in order to handle 4:4:4 colorspace as well as 4:2:2. We are taking a hard look at MPEG 4 AVC HD as a main codec.

...We are leaning more toward a voltage range of 9 to 14 volts DC with a chamberable 9 volt DC battery option and a standard 4 pin XLR for 12 volt external power.

....The LCD will be 16 x 9 in aspect ratio and will measure about 3.5 inches diagonally. The LCD screen will be the main feature situated on the front of the device for confidence recording and playback. You will see picture overlayed with full time code and vu meters.

....We are looking to keep the device to within 15 to 16 ounces in weight. There will be one heck of a bright Red tally lamp on the top center of the box. It will also say Record in captitol letters for two seconds on the screen, then revert to normal screen view with picture, sound (Monitor out), TC, and VU meters. superimposed over live action screen.

...No. Absolutely not. This is an SD Card removeable SSMRD. There shall be no expensive SSD or micro HDD's on my device.

....It is interesting you mention this, because we have been tossing around the idea of incorporating a digital video conversion circuit. This circuit will enable us to record in any kind of video format, but write to any other format as it gets onto the SD cards plugged into the sockets. How about shooting in Blu-ray disc format ? Why not ? The camera encodes a stream of audio and video data using its own encoder circuitry into HDV format anyway ! So why not program a hardware engine to re-wrap or convert the Long GOP as Blu-ray and add additional scaling to unsqueeze the HDV out to 1920 x 1080 Blu-ray pixels. In this mode what you would get is either an Blu-ray .ISO you could burn to disc directly from the SD cards, or an unwrapped M2TS Blu-ray you could author yourself. I think the device must be able to record in MPEG 4 AVC HD, QT MXF, RAW uncompressed, HDV all with either standard embedded TC from the camera, or generated from the box, or inputted from an LTC BNC input from an external source. You want to be able to Jam - Sync the box directly in case you're using a camera which cannot have its TC externally jam synced (For music video and Music Concerts shooting).

...Not at all. All is worth pondering. I don't want to limit any discussion or feedback from you folks. We are listening. We may not actually do all the stuff you are suggesting to us, but we're open. At this stage of our project, there are no plans to partner with any company. The only person I wish to please right now, is myself ! If I can get a fully functioning prototype unit to work with my Canon XL H1 camcorder on our web Tv series, then I will be *very* happy. Where we go from there will be a decision I will make when the project is at that stage of development.

Project update on St. Patrick's Day ! :-)
 

Happy St. Paddy's Day to all of our Irish friends ! Our project continues and we are moving along, albeit quite slowly, but progress is being made. There isn't much more I can tell you at this point, but as I know, then you'll know. This is an "open" project.

hey mark, how's your project coming along? Any new developments?

Hey David ! Good to know there's still some interest in this project. I'm sorry I haven't got back to this forum more often lately. I'm doing three things at once here. The visual effects on Episode 2 of our series Please Stand By are costing way more than originally budgeted, plus I'm re-organizing my production company, and last, but not least, we're still building our prototype board (s) to start the capture tests. I hope to have something to post/show within a few months. The project is going slowly and most expensively at this point. The good news is my box will blow any simular SSDR away in both functionality, size and at price point in US Dollars. The bad news is everyone and their uncle will be on the market by the time we're showing public demonstrations :-( Many companies are going to beat us to the market, but I can promise you this- No One will beat us in terms over overall practicality, since we're concentrating on a duality concept of use. We insist our SD recorder must function as well as a full HD/SD VTR replacement unit as well as an on camera recording appliance. This crazy little device will have *every* realistic digital and analogue I/O signal path. It will record to SD, SDHC, and SDXC cards. Our device will work with Avid & FCP NLE's.

Oh I'm sure there's quite a bit of interest :)

Mark,

Are there any plans for your unit to be compatible with Sony Vegas Pro 8 or 9 ?

Hi Mark,

At the risk of being tagged a pariah because of my use of Premiere Pro CS4 on a PC, do you have any plans to seek compatibility with Adobe PPRO CS4?

Many thanks,
Alan

....That's good to know. I'm now in the middle of moving to a place which is not quite finished being built yet, so we're crazy busy now. We are still determined to produce a reasonably priced SD card SSDR device. We will get there folks. I promise.

...Yes. We like Sony Vegas. We are concentrating on Avid Media Composer right now, but we wll slowly branch out from this point. I'll be happy just to get a functioning box we can plug into our Canon XL H1 for testing. Man ! This project is a long and winding road. - Expensive too !

...Only via AVI files.

SSDR recording
 

Couple of thoughts based on the last few posts.

Someone wrote about hoping his hands won't freeze off. Whilst doing that ensure it operates where ambient is 35 deg Cent. (95 Fahrenheit) in the shade. And it doesn't need ice-packs to operate.
So all that plastic and rubber is going to insulate too well.

About encoding, even HDCamSR is 440 Mbps or 880 Mbps. That's considered good enough, so that bit rate (as MPEG4 which is what HDCamSR is) should be acceptable and totally uncompressed should be a feature when cards get fast enough. ver. 2.0 perhaps.

An interesting device is the Pipeline from Telestream. That takes in HD-SDI and encodes it with hardware to Apple ProRes, DVCProHD, IMX and MPEG-2 (even DNxHD and VC-3 I think) and passes it through Ethernet. What I'm pointing to is their hardware which is an Ambric FPGA.

FPGA Journal

Well to be fair, HDCamSR is 880 for 10 bit 4:4:4 RGB with 12 audio streams at 24bit/48khz. I don't see anything like that here.

Uncompressed recording is useless. No one wants it anymore. Put 10bit log to preserve the color space, use wavelet which is more efficient than Mpeg4 and call it a day. This is nothing different than you're seeing out of RED. Use the available technology to your advantage.

Jpeg2000 and Dirac are sitting there for the taking. 440 - 880 Mbits of wavelet compression should satisfy anyone outside of George Lucas. Especially at HD resolutions.

No offense but you are the first person I ever heard refer to Sony Vegas as one of the big three NLE's. Sure it is nice but it only has a niche market share compared to Premiere. Just take a look at what Aja and Blackmagic support as their main PC NLE and that will tell you that Premiere is much more one of the big three then Vegas is. There is also the fact that Premiere can be used on a Mac just like Avid and FCP.

Errr.... I want it.

I do as much uncompressed as possible and love the texture (I call it digital grain - not to be confused with noise) and grading head room it gives, it´s CPU friendly and all you need is a bunch of large fast disks.

1 TB HDs are dirt cheap now, so why compress?

On the other hand you are right, the next best thing to uncompressed is jpg2000/wavelett (like Cineform) but it´s a CPU hog. Till you dont have any solid state chip that does the encoding you need a macho cpu. Not good for a "on camera" device with batterys.
Not to mention cooling/fan.noise problems.

Frank

I think we are looking at this from two different ends.

We are talking about acquisition. Are YOU going to drag around a RAID array to your shoots so you can record uncompressed? I'm sure not. I'd like to be able to record near uncompressed wavelet footage onto CF, SDXC, or something similar. Now what we do with it back at the edit bay is a different story. Yes, uncompressed has some advantages there, but honestly, if you're assembling multi-camera work, you are going to need one heck of a RAID system (15k SAS or SSD) to make it work well. Or, you can go to a reasonable intermediate, or if you have a high horsepower machine, you can edit native in what you acquired in.

So I don't get your argument about fan noise and cooling. I'd rather try to keep a small set of chips cool (like my Firestore) than to have to try to drag around a bunch of RAID.

I see your point Perrone.

But the Firestore usualy just records what comes out of the Firewire cable (thou I had the Firewire fan nuise on some recordings) no much processor power is needed here.

But converting a component or SDI signal from the camera on the fly to Jpeg2000 takes a hell of a processor (see Cineform) = heat = fan = noise and not battery friendly.

You are right with the raid, but I don´t do run and gun stuff so I could live with that.
I also could live with a good wavelet based codec in a small Firesore-like device (actualy you can buy one, but they are about $6000).

I wish cineform would finaly come out with the recorder they talked about since about a year.

Frank

The firestores also handled HDV (mine does) as well as DCVProHD. Neither is as hard as Jpeg2000 on the fly, but surely without having to power a hard drive in the unit, that additional power could be redirected to cooling the chips.

I'm pretty much done with Cineform. Too much money, too little flexibility. I haven't heard anything about their recorder in a long time. The Convergent is real, and very compelling. I'd voiced my concern earlier during development about a better codec, but they choose Mpeg2 for some solid reasons. I just don't care for it. I wish my Sony used something more robust.

Five years from now, I think we'll see massive shifts in codecs.

Hi Thomas, Frank & Perrone:

My machine will do compressed and full uncompressed on SDXC cards. Heck, You can do 4:2:2 10 bit uncompressed on a striped pair of class 6 SD HC cards ! The new SDXC cards will be 1 TB plus and have write speeds fast enough for uncompressed 4:4:4 10 bit anf 12 bit color space. My design spec calls for 10 bit 4:2:2 & 4:4:4 compressed and uncompressed recording. We are seriously looking at using an MPEG 4 compression engine. We are not sure what data rate the MPEG 4 will be encoded at. It will depend a how good the image looks coming out of the Canon XL H1's 10 bit 4:2:2 HD-SDI socket. (Yes, I know the H1 is an 8 bit camera). Whatever looks great out of this camera wins ! If you are shooting live action for multi-layer digital visual effects compositing, then you're nuts to shoot anything less than uncompressed. Shooting with any form of compression *does* show up on the end composited scene - especially if you're going out to film ! How many folks are working this way ? Not that many, but I plan to go this route in my digital film making, so I will build this capability into the unit.

Guys, can you tell me what forms nof TC functionality you want to see built into a unit ? Do tell :-)

Hi Mark!

i'm interested about your project...when will be out? I need for motorsport applications..

While I am not in the market for at least a year (more if this economy doesn't pick up), if I were looking for a unit like this, I'd want a few things:

1. HD/SDI input and outputs (One for monitor, one passthrough. I'd like to monitor AFTER the recorder.

2. HDMI input

3. SDXC or CF recording. I've never seen SDXC so I don't know the performance.

4. Codec: Uncompressed AVI/MOV for those that need it, but that is a SMALL percentage. Something like Jpeg2000 or other wavelet codec would be most welcome. More so than and Mpeg4. At least to me. I can't think of any advantages of Mpeg4 over wavelet.

5. A low power display screen that gives status and info on the signal being input.


As for the idea that people would be crazy to not record uncompressed for VFX... well, I don't know. Mathematically lossless should be plenty good enough and have numerous advantages. And for bit depth, 10-bit or 10--bit log should be plenty.

...Bonjorno Roberto ! Who knows ? We can't give a specific-solid date anymore. We are working on it as fast as my pocket book (Read cash financing) allows.

......Done. Both, with a switch between REALTIME and POST RECORD.

....Yes. 4:2:2 & 4:4:4 .

...SD, SDHC, and SDXC *only* CF cards are expensive and evil ! Did I mention not readily available in many markets also ? SD cards can be had at our local corner store.

....It will record RAW data, MPEG 4, Uncompressed AVI and QT. And we want to create our own special format. (I have no idea what that will even be called, or if it works yet.)

...Yes, we had intended to have a 16 x 9 aspect ratio LCD screen showing what's being recorded with a data overlay switchable to on or off.


...Mathmatically lossless is good enough if you are going straight out to film or TV from that, but as soon as you composite it, then it slowly reveals itself through multiple layers. More noticeable on film than on television.

Update as of August 28 2009
 

Hi friends. I thought I'd drop you folks a quick line on our progress. We are having a gentle internal debate as to what final codecs we will use in our device. One of my engineers is strongly pushing AVCintra to be included, while I want to see how far we can go with a high quality MPEG 4 based codec. My concern is having to approach the patent owners of the AVCintra codec for licensing rights. Would they license to a bunch of guys fooling around in our garage ? (Because this is all we're doing at this stage) Do we have enough money to obtain those rights if we were to head in that direction and the owners said yes ?

We're also trying to decide on final box dimensions. I claim that this is the least of our problems now - just give me something that records and plays back for a public demonstration ! The other bummer is it's taking too freakin long to get to successful protype stage ! Oh well - Edison tried 99 times on the lightbulb filament - not 98 !

It's still fun to work on this project, although, it's become somewhat of a personal vendetta now. :-)

go for whatever keeps costs down. there are already high end options out there and that market already is tapped.. the budget demographic is the one that hasn't been targeted yet and are the people keeping an eye out for yous guys.

That won't change as long as you allow the engineers to run you instead of you running the engineers. I don't mean to sound cynical but one of the most frequent problems that start up companies have is that someone comes up with a good idea for a product and decides to "go out and hire a couple of engineers" only to find they have a giant mess on their hands. It's important to set the rules from the beginning. If left to their own devices, most engineers think they have all the answers as well as know more that all future customers combined. Lastly, the thing that many engineers enjoy more than anything else is arguing. I call it - "Recreational Equivocation."

....Man, you are so right on about this subject ! I came damn close to firing one of them last week ! I'm the one with the *vision* for this project. This is my party. I'm paying for it. To be fair I am in awe of what engineers can do. To know what chip does what and how to design circuits and programs to run on EPROMS. Frankly, some of this stuff comes darn close to alchemy as far as I'm concerned. I think some (Not all engineers) can become a little arrogant at times. I guess that's why larger companies hire a "Project Manager" who is an expert at rangling in folks as they float up to the mountains on their own hot air. Our arguments have been intense, but good and fair ones. I don't want to limit anyone's creativity, or ever prevent someone from being able to say, "Well, what if we tried this ?" I remain somewhat philosophical by accepting this as part of the growing pains of designing something. At the end of the day, I have executive decision and/or I just run out of money.

...Hi Ron. True. True. I agree about the high end market being tapped out. I'm really interested in independent - no budget shooters like us ! I can't find anything that does what I need to be done at a relevant price, so we just have to make it ourselves :-) But it is expensive to make "one of" something. Still, if I only ever make "one of" something which is fully functional and immanently practical, then I will be happy to show that around at trade shows and see who wants to buy it, or approach us for a manufacturing deal. I think that to have your very own SSDR on SD cards is the coolest thing ever !

And Im one of those eagerly awaiting the product.
Firestores and the nanoflash are out of my price range.

Ben

.....Hi Ben. Yeah, me too ! I think Convergent Designs has done a good job with the Nanoflash. I might even dare to purchase one of those boxes myself one of these days. I can't get the Flash media very easily in my market, and it's really pricey. The SD cards are cheap and are available everywhere. I think the CF cards are a media which has always been associated with strictly professional imaging - thus their added expense and special order status in most Montreal stores. If you want the really fast and largest capacity CF cards which meet CD specifications, then you special order and wait and fork out big dollars. This is justifiable if you have the big client on the other end of the equasion. If you're a digi-underground shooter, then you need to go a different route. I'm sure the Convergent Designs folks must have spent a *ton* of money developping the Flash XDR and the Nanoflash ! CD's approach to their SSDR could not have been an inexpensive one.

.....Regarding the Firestore, it's a $500.00 technology retailing for a whole lot more ! Let us not forget the Firestore has no actual encoding engine built into it. The encoding is performed by the camera attached to the device. The Firestore is essentially a portable hard drive with some programmable software flashed into a few chips. I like the Firestore because it's firewire friendly, but not quite at the price point it needs to be at. I've used them and they get the job done if you're shooting in HDV, but they lack multiple digital alternative inputs, like HD-SDI.

Hi Mark-
While I cannot purchase our recommended CF cards (Sandisk 32GB Extreme III) at the local discount stores (Best Buy, Staples, etc), the cards are readily available from major on-line retailers (B&H, Adorama, etc) for next day delivery. These cards are not a special order items and while more expensive than most CF cards, we have found that the Sandisk cards are the most reliable. If you want high-quality video you need the faster cards to accomadate the bit-rate. I doubt the high-speed SDHC cards (like the upcoming 32GB Extreme III SDHC) will be any less expensive than comparable performing CF cards. Both CF and SDHC utilize the same NAND Flash memory, the only difference is the controller. In fact the SDHC cards may be more expensive since the manufacturing is more difficult due to the smaller form factor.

Yes, we have spent a considerable amount of money (and time) developing the Flash XDR and the nanoFlash. This is a very complex product with many technologies to develop, including HD/SD-SDI I/O, HDMI I/O, QT/MXF/MPG/M2V file formats, 1080i60/50, 1080psf30/25/24, 720p60/50 video formats, audio/video synchronization, video pre-buffer, power supply design, cabinet design, cooling and heat considerations, etc, etc. We were fortunate to have access to some outstanding CODEC technology from Sony, which greatly reduced our development time and costs.

I wish you continued success in your development efforts, competiton spurs everyone to make better products!

Cheers-

...Hi Mike :-) Thank you for the cheer on. You will have to wait about a year or so to start having that so called *competition* from us ! At the rate we're going at this in my garage, I'm concerned that everyone and their brother will have some kind of an SSDR out on the market at all kinds of price ranges. In the mean time, even I had to order a Flash XDR for a high end project a client has asked us to shoot here in Montreal. If the high end budget is there, then why not go for the XDR for that kind of production ? Uhh, those folks can't wait a year plus for me to perfect our SD card recorder.

.....One look at the nanoFlash or the XDR, and one can only arrive at the conclusion it is a complex and highly engineered product. I particularly commend you on the finishing quality of your SSDR boxes. Right now, we are making cardboard model after model of different boxes trying to visualize in 3D space what our SSDR should look like, and how it should fit on a camera. Should we have one motherboard ? Do we need two, or shall we have three ? This is a really big question. It's so expensive to make this stuff ! (For the first time, and only one)

Addendum: Concerning the availability and easy enough access to the correct CF cards to use in the Flash XDR, the sources you quoted are US sources. Obviously, we want to use what you folks at Convergent Designs recommend. There's no point in throwing CF cards at the XDR for which it wasn't designed for. I'm sure you well understand our tendancy to try and source a local supplier (In Canada) for the proper CF card media, for which we can pay in Canadian currency if we can. I'm not saying one does not exist, I only state here what I've been told by some of the high end digital photography boutiques and computer parts suppliers in the city - that they consider it a special order for CF card performance versions. I naturally want to invest in the Sandisk 32 GB EXtreme III, or something comparable, if I can obtain them. If we have to source these CF cards on line from the US, then we will go this route. Four of these super fast 32 GB cards in an XDR would prove to be a killer combination for shooting time at higher data rates.

Ever thought of something like that:

Quad-CF PCI Controller from Addonics

Frank

...Hi Frank. This is not really a practical way for us to go. For one thing, we do not want to base our SSDR on CF card media because it is more expensive than other types of solid state media. Secondly, CF card media availability is not so universally accessible in all markets in yet. The larger physical foot print of the CF card socket and media forces a larger system layout and over box size, which we want to avoid.

Hi!!


any update with your new recorder?? i'm still interested about it..when you'll be ready, please let me know: info@onboardcamera.it

bye!

Project Progress Update
 

Right now folks are waiting for me to inject a little more cash, which I will do shortly, but our project is *far* from the prototype stage at this point I'm sad to say. I am seriously considering making the recorder a full uncompressed RAW recorder only, with perhaps, the capability to record HDV via FW interface.

....The reason why I'm leaning more toward a full uncompressed only recorder, is to.....

a) Get around paying expensive royalties to the MPEG folks.

b) The new SDXC spec will definitely be fast enough and large enough in capacity (1 TB +) to make uncompressed capture practical.

Any Progress?
 

Hi there,

I know I may be jumping the gun but I was just wondering if you have had any updates, I have been following this project in the shadows and it seems amazingly promising!

Have you decided to make it an uncompressed RAW recorder only?

I wish you luck!