Low Cost HD and Near HD Quality

Josh Hill · August 17, 2004

I could just picture him shooting something. A different camera system each day. He would shoot for a day with an Varicam, go home, get online, come back with an XL2, go home, get online, come back with an F900, go home, come back with some home built HD system and an ENIAC computer hooked up to it. By the end of it he would be shooting 65mm, not because he wants to shoot film but because it would be the best he can do for the next few years until film finally dies (because of this uber-camera that his friend told him about).

GeorgeSelinsky · August 17, 2004

A different camera system each day. He would shoot for a day with an Varicam, go home, get online, come back with an XL2

That's if he could even get the money together to rent a Varicam, and get the necessary insurance for it. It seems he's way too far in outer space to come into the real world and do the work to get it all together. If I was a rental house owner I'd be scared to let someone like that walk out with a piece of my gear.

- G.

August 19, 2004

This man Pete Wright brings out some excellent pints. It appears that he is extremely knowlegable and most of this film crowd is too stale and does not understand the technicalities of HD the way Pete does.

I've been following the dvinfo forum and these things are real.

There is DVX100 was modified and will record to hard disc uncompressed 4:4:4 12-bit, the next projedct is the XL2, there are the two new 5,000 dollar cameras coming out that will have the same image quality as the Kinatta.

There was all this pro Kinatta stuff written in this forum. Well, we have a lot less expensive solutions coming up. Maybe not as convenient, a high achievement though. Thank Peter for bringing these things up.

Frank

John Pytlak RIP · August 19, 2004

This man Pete Wright brings out some excellent pints. It appears that he is extremely knowlegable and most of this film crowd is too stale and does not understand the technicalities of HD the way Pete does...

...there are the two new 5,000 dollar cameras coming out that will have the same image quality as the Kinatta.

There was all this pro Kinatta stuff written in this forum...

I've never heard of this "Kinatta" (sic) camera. :rolleyes:

Jason Rodriguez · August 19, 2004

there are the two new 5,000 dollar cameras coming out that will have the same image quality as the Kinatta.

There are two cameras coming besides the offerings from Ikegami and JVC that will use the same chip as the Kinetta, but they're just camera heads, there's no "intelligence" on them. Basically they're just PCB's attached to the chip that funnel off the 12-bit RAW data from the camera head across Camera-Link to a framegrabber which then uses software to process the images. The potential is there to have the same image quality as the Kinetta since the A/D converter is on the Altasens chip, so everybody's playing with the same toys, but in a much more round-about way with these "dumb" camera-heads. One thing to watch out for is de-bayer mosaic algorithms. There is a world of difference between a good and bad one.

Phil Rhodes · August 19, 2004

Hi,

I'm not convinced it would be impossible to do something with one of these cameralink devices. I've been talking casually to a few manufacturers asking hopefully-awkward questions about things like flare and linearity, and apparently some of them are designed for medical and industrial applications where people are sufficiently picky about such things for them to be quite good. Based on the fact that they seem a bit too good to be true, I have been desperately searching for a reason that they might not be usable, and other than the sheer practicality of shooting with something that small, I can't find a reason why they might not be OK. There's a small amount of software development between them and being able to use one on set, but it is pretty small - I could probably do it myself.

Phil

Mark Allen · August 22, 2004

It sounds the technology (the chips) is pretty well known at this point. Are there any downloadable samples of the images from these chips? Any good comparison tables?

Also - if a camera is only a chip and a lense (which is how I understand these other options to be), is the intention to run them directly into a computer for the processing or would there the be enough software to run the data to a drive (or drive cluster) directly?

Phil Rhodes · August 22, 2004

Hi,

> It sounds the technology (the chips) is pretty well known at this point. Are there

> any downloadable samples of the images from these chips?

Not as far as I know. Most of these things are designed for machine vision or medical imaging, and the idea of framing up an everyday scene is alien to these guys. I couldn't get any test images out of them at all. Ideally one would wish to see resolution charts, exposure references, and "difficult" subjects such as high dynamic range and direct light.

> Also - if a camera is only a chip and a lense

And the electronics to drive the chip and get the data out down a sensible bus - but yes, basically the camera is a 3" cube with a lens on the front and the camlink interface, which is a smaller-than-1U unit.

> is the intention to run them directly into a computer for the processing or would

> there the be enough software to run the data to a drive (or drive cluster)

> directly?

Depends how much work you were willing to do, and your level of talent as an electronics engineer. It would naturally be best to have a cameralink-interface hard disk array, since you can design a filesystem to maximise data throughput and make something that's fairly small and lightweght. Assuming you turn your data into 2K 10bit log DPX, that's 12Mb per frame and 288Mb/sec, so it's not small - you're looking at a six to eight disk array to make that work. Putting a computer in the way means that you do get some overheads, although you could offset that by supplying a lot of memory and turning it into a heavily buffered RAM recorder with trickle to hard disk. It's also easier for the computer to do things like the debayer filtering and turning your camlink data into a readable file format, which would probably be postproduction rendering otherwise. Also you can buy your cameralink interface card as an off the shelf item and use the manufacturer's SDK to create the software you need, and the computer could provide realtime or near-realtime monitoring on low-cost VGA or DVI displays with some colour correction control to make the image viewable.

Look then at how much equipment you are going to be lugging around and what the ergonomic implications of that are - a disk recorder you can put on the back of the camera is more convenient, but a lot more electronics development.

This could be done for a few tens of thousands; if anyone wants to commission me to do it, I will gladly take the work!

Phil