ACHTEL 9×7 Digital Cinema Camera: An “IMAX Mini” That Shoots 18.6K RAW

[rand thompson]

Meet the ACHTEL 9×7 Digital Cinema Camera: An “IMAX Mini” That Shoots 18.6K RAW

By Ymcinema

Article
https://ymcinema.com/2020/09/14/meet...ots-18-6k-raw/

Sample images
https://24x7.com.au/9x7/sample.htm


Achtel.com website
http://24x7.com.au/

About the camera
http://24x7.com.au/9x7/index.htm

Price
$143,000 USD

[David Rasberry]

Link to their web page: http://24x7.com.au/9x7/index.htm

Why mess around with all these low end compressed cameras? Get the real thing.

[rand thompson]

David,

Yeah, forget all those other cameras you don't have to sale your house for and take out an additional mortgage for. Stop the B.S. and get this camera, Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha

[Tom Gleeson]

I have been helping out in a small way Pawel shoot tests with this camera. It is certainly capable of beautiful pictures and 65 million pixels recorded uncompressed makes for some amazing images. The compressed JPEGs on the link do not do justice to the images from the camera. If I remember the internal 8TB memory is full in 30 minutes at 24fps so this is not a camera for corporate videos or reality TV. I believe Pawel has targeted both Imax and VFX plate photography with the 4X3 aspect ratio and resolution. The camera head is tiny but it is tethered to a small processor/recorder (80 x 80 x 70 mm)

Lens choice becomes interesting as there is only a limited number of lenses that can do justice to this sensor.

[rand thompson]

Tom,


Thanks for the info on this camera. I believe the files are converted to .DNG files? Have you tried editing any of the footage with any conventional NLE software(Davinci Resolve, Premiere Pro, Final Cut-X)?

[Karim D. Ghantous]

The global shutter sounds awesome. 14 stops is also damned good. However, I would think that even a cropped Monstro would be terrific for IMAX. Not that you'd say not to more resolution, of course. But I am not feeling it with the Achtel. Of course, I say that without any experience with it.

There is nothing wrong with the specs, really. It's just that, as far as I can tell, the photosite density is a bit much for current tech. Perhaps if they made this a large format sensor (more than Vistavision) the readout frequency would not be as high.

I predict that Red will make a 45x30mm sensor that's a bit more than 8K, but not dramatically so. You have to balance a lot of factors.

Edit: Okay I've seen the sample images. I am not impressed. I was right about photosite density, it seems.

[Phil Holland]

I'll certainly give kudos to Pawel for making a camera via industrial head and recording module, but there's a lot of surrounding questions even from the examples shared on the site when you poke around with them. To that point, it's early days in his effort and I'll certainly be tracking it from here. I know the core components used in this system as well as the general workflow being presented.

As for IMAX, there's still a few companies who can afford to shoot 70mm 15-perf, but it's been an area where RED has shined a bunch with a couple of long, long term IMAX production companies switching over to RED Helium and Monstro over the last few years. My last IMAX project I shot on was Monstro after a healthy round of tests.

Not entirely sure where the 18.6K quote is coming from and would like to know about 18.6K delivery from a 9344x7000 sensor, perhaps stitched or an array, but I'm sure that will all be discussed in time.

I do think it's interesting all the various pixel sizes and pixel designs we're seeing pop up as of late in our industry. This particular one is 3.2 microns. RED world, the closest pixel size would be Helium at 3.65 microns. Pixel quality has become quite the talking point as of late in the world of higher end productions.

As of now between all the companies we've seen 2.2 microns through 8.25 pixel pitches with a few that are outside of that range land in digital cinema cameras, but I'd say that's the most common pitch range for sure. And of course lots of different sensor technologies. I think this is where we're going to see a lot of innovation this next decade as there's some real wild stuff not in cameras yet that can be utilized.

Somewhere between this, the Axiom, and even Fran the general concept of an open sourced camera is becoming easier by the day with more interesting sensors becoming available to be used in this capacity. Lots of other image pipe related things to tend to with all of these systems, but I'm betting we'll see a few good stabs at this over the next decade.

[Tom Gleeson]

Rand,

I am not intimately involved in the project but Pawel is active on CML and is in discussion with people there. As I understand the camera records the RAW stream uncompressed from the sensor which is why the bandwidth is so huge. The files I have seen are .DNG and they are way superior to those .JPGs. Check out http://achtel.com/9x7/sample.htm

I suspect that the uncompressed path gives this machine the extra leg up over an 8K Monstro. I will add you you need to peeking pretty deep into the pixels before R3D 5:1 compression begins to show its ugly face and outside the world of Imax this extra performance would be mostly wasted. Smart and appropriate compression is your friend.

[Karim D. Ghantous]

The files I have seen are .DNG and they are way superior to those .JPGs.

Who the hell made those JPEGs? They are awful. The DNGs, even just opened in Preview, are lovely. I exported my own JPEG from Preview and it looks exactly the same. I don't know if there is 9K worth of detail in any of this footage, but the images look great.

Not entirely sure where the 18.6K quote is coming from .

It's mentioned only once on the site, as "up to 18.6K delivery". So that's not a claim about resolution, but I don't know what it actually means.

[Michael Tiemann]

The global shutter sounds awesome. [...]

I predict that Red will make a 45x30mm sensor that's a bit more than 8K, but not dramatically so. You have to balance a lot of factors. [...]

Global shutters do indeed sound awesome. I suspect that one of the reasons RED went with a 2:1 sensor instead of 16x9 or 3:2 or 4:3 is that they wanted to have maximum horizontal resolution and also maximum fps specs from their rolling shutter. Yes there are cinema format standards that justify the existence of RED's WS format, which does give even better fps stats than FF. But RED's choice of FF definitely helps those who want a decent fps rate vs. those that want a tall anamorphic image.

In the world of global shutters, the amount of jello from top to bottom is zero, so there's no longer great shame shooting taller formats vs. wider ones. I would love to see a 45x30mm or 48x32mm sensor with 12K resolution and RED 5:1 compression!