Hello
I am the Wayne Morellini over at the dvinfo threads involved with homemade cameras. I am not a representative of the group, but I have been involved in the discusssion, and would like to clear up a few things mentioned here. I don't have too long, but I'll give you some comment and invite anybody that wants to help out in this garage, grass roots (semi commercial) movement, to come over.
Firstly not much is settled, until we see what Sumix and Silicon Imaging are offering on the hardware Indie side. Secondly there is a lot of "enthusiasm" but few firm directions at the moment. But things are starting to take shape. There are a couple of programmers looking to do custom versions of commercial software for the camera, and openware. A silicon Imagining 1.3Mpixel camera has been bought and is being used as a test subject for developement before the first wave of HD targeted cameras comes through. Both Sumix and Silicon Imaging have expressed an interest in the Indie market, and are observing the forums as a fact finding mission. At the moment, apart from the ones mentioned. There is also an adaption of a 16mm Russian film Camera, and Jaun uncompressed Panasonic DVX100 project. These are all contained in the Alternative Imaging forum that also houses the 35mm adaptor threads.
Low Cost Viper
Home made camera designs
Russian Film Camera Modification
Forum: Alternative Imaging Methords
Now from my piont of veiw. I would like to see a low end introductory Indie camera that also is usefull for all other styles of commercial work. Something that eclipes the quality of low end HDV, and comes close to the broadcast's $50K market. This with the bonus of RAW 4:4:4 footage. The price would hopefully be from $2.7K to $5K for the basic camera system, plus the capture computer etc. Unfortunately there also seems to be a great interest in cheap 720p bayer single chip cameras as well. There are also people interested in 10K/20K packages, and I've reminded them that Concept HD and Kinetta are comming in that market. The chip options are single chip Bayer, and 3 chip. We have been on the lookout for the best possible, picture perforamnce wise, affordable chip, and people, Sumix and even the SI rep think the new Micron Megapixel chip is good, if anybody knows of a better affordable chip please let us know.
I think the reason why we can look at doing this so cheap now is that the rate of technological developement has pushed up the performance of affordable mass produced PC parts into the realms of past, expensive, limited production broadcast equipment. This has been happening while Broadcast manufacturers have been trying to maintain their past pricing, and CMOS manufacturers are trying to catch up from the low priced market and CMOS camera makers have been keeping costs low (100 $1K 1.3MP cameras in a hotel complex is much cheaper than 100 $25K broadcast box cameras).
Now, I see that, apart from the existing indie market, there will probably be a great deal of low end professionals, prosummers, novices, and wannabees with their own websites and music bands, wanting to get into something like this, Leading to market possibilities way beyond the Indei market alone. But if you increase the total cost of ownership much more you will probably loose most of this.
A seperate peice of software should be able to be made to simply control camera capture and internals, and even be hooked upto external comntrols.
For manual controll of the lense, I hope to make a 35mm or medium format still lense lense adaptor for myself, and attached variouse knobs to it to make life earlier. Alternatively I have seen a device that does much the same by clamping to the still lense.
What I have been advocating is a system that allows the use of any supported: camera, capture system, OS, format and editor by variouse plugins for each. The idea is to support the most popular combinations that people are familiar with lego style. But this all requires work, volunteers etc. I am mainly illustrating what ideally could be done here, the existing programmers will eventually do what they can.
External LCD/Veiwfinder. We are going to have to settle for good small LCD pannel (but much better resolution than you find on prosumer hardware), or head mounted microdisplays with full HD resolution. Colour balance is not such an issue if the external monitor is filtered properly to obtain true white balance (much as newer DVD playback software provides profiling for LCD monitors).
Portability, and battery life. I have been pionting towards the use of future high speed cheap Mini-itx (17cm*17cm) or nano-itx (12cm*12cm) mainbaords, that are low powered and fanless (pluss there are a number of minipc's). No car battery required, but would result in something like a small ENG camera, the camera head could be seperate and mounted on a tripod if needed. So it is possible to make a very portable system that could also be used as an editor (as faster mainbaords come along). I have been advocating that a battery of standard cells (cheap) could be fitted in the 5 1/4 inch drive bay of the chassis of a modified case for the unit. So it can be well made for docos and feild work.
As far as sound goes, there are a number of suitable systems in the PC recording industry, apart from the cheap mainbaord solutions.
HDSDI*2 is very expensive, possibly one camera may have it, as well as possibly component and S-video. To keep cost down we have been considering cameralink capture and Gigbit Ethernet. I have been advocating mutiple channel USB2.0 (1 USB 2.0 could do 2MP Bayer) Gigabit Ethernet, PCI-Express Cameralink (Is there an AGP version??), Ethernet 10G, and I remember some 5Gb's consumer HD serial cable standard. The problem with cameralink is the PCI bus restricts the capture cards perforamnce to just over 100MB/s (could be more) and satuates the PCI bus. The truth is that we don't need broadcast standard interfaces until we want to deliver content, then a standard PC link (or harddrive swap) to the destination computer system may be all that is required to download the file, or an optional SDI PCI card could be used or component (if the camera does not have it a some min-ITX boards do).
Now for simplicity, and ease of use, a standard profile, with specially matched hardware, drives, software, custom interfacing software, and camera canbe worked out to provide this functionality, with the user able to change what they wish. If done right it would be little more trouble than the current setups.
Over time we can work out more and more of these things, and hopefully bring out the Working mans camera we all want. But it will take time, and effort. It may not be the perfect camera for all jobs, but what I am looking for, inparticular, is a good cheap all round workhorse. Any objections that you may have today could be resolved with future parts releases and developements.
If you can steer us into better directions, do programming or hardware electronics/controlls, advise us on sensors, or how to accurately read sensor specs (a few terms in them I'm not familiar with), please come on over and constructive do so. Only some of us are gunho on the technical or video side.
Thank you,
Wayne Morellini.
