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The next 4K digital mag for Aäton Penelope described by JP Beauviala! [english subt.]

Sanjin Jukic

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The next 4K digital mag for Aaton Penelope described by JP Beauviala ! [with english subs]

Aaton_4K_01.jpg

Aaton Penelope 4K (uncompressed), Dalsa sensor, digital mag storage.

Aaton_4K_02.jpg

Aaton Penelope 4K (uncompressed), Dalsa sensor, digital mag storage.

Aaton_4K_03.jpg

Aaton Penelope 4K (uncompressed), Dalsa sensor, digital mag storage.

Aaton_4K_04.jpg

Aaton Penelope 4K (uncompressed), Dalsa sensor, digital mag storage.

YouTube video>>>
 
JP told a lot more publicly than I thought he would ...

You guys are gonna love this. By the time this rolls around, Uncompressed RAW will not look so scary. We do it every day with Phantom. There are absolute advantages and there are also ways around it if you really want.

Penelope is so beautiful ... Can't wait for NAB ...
 
I was told by a reputable insider that the back will be 6K resolution. I posted about this a couple on months back. It seems that some of the specs have changed, no biggie, aatons are some of the most beautiful and technically advanced film cameras ever built.

Most fail to realize how much influence Aaton has had on the film industry. Timecode is just one of the many innovations. That man is a true artisan of film camera construction.
 
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JP told a lot more publicly than I thought he would ...

By the time this rolls around, Uncompressed RAW will not look so scary. We do it every day with Phantom. There are absolute advantages and there are also ways around it if you really want.

Hmm... uncompressed looks pretty scary to me. The storage required is one thing, but the RAM/CPU bandwidth required to have an on-line workflow... can't wait to hear more, but I hope good usable compression is something that has been thought through. I also hope the price point has been inspired by Red (but somehow I doubt that :).
 
Remember with uncompressed you get something back to a degree bt bypassing the decompression stage. Also Intel X25s make the IO requirements if not the total storage solution seem more down to earth. Anyway we can let's Moores law deal with the total capacity point.

Then again I'd love to see someone repurpose an Epic as a digital back.
 
Uncompressed takes it out of the hands of many people that RED has brought 4K to and will bring 5K and 6K. I'm sure many people will like the idea of this camera but when they start shooting with it and begin to realize how much data they are burning through they will miss how easy REDCODE is to deal with. Plus I'm sick of people complaining about how long the RED One takes to boot up. Is a minute really that long. I don't care what your doing or what the shot is. If you need it up and running instantly maybe you should try and plan your shots a little better.
 
Remember with uncompressed you get something back to a degree bt bypassing the decompression stage. Also Intel X25s make the IO requirements if not the total storage solution seem more down to earth. Anyway we can let's Moores law deal with the total capacity point.

While I agree with the general sentiment that things are getting bigger/faster/cheaper, as a computer engineer I've got to make some corrections here, lest the crack smoking continue:

1. Moore's refers to performance, not capacity :).
2. Bypassing decompression saves CPU cycles, not bandwidth
3. According to this site (http://4kafrica.co.za/node/5) data rate for 4K uncompressed (with only 8-bit color) is 875.25MB/sec. That is well over 3x the maximum bandwidth of your Intel X25s, and even if the X25s could digest the datastream, its capacity would hold a total of 91 seconds.

Trust me, 4K uncompressed is NOT a good idea any time soon. Maybe when the aliens land with holographic crystal storage...

- Tim
 
The Sensor is from Dalsa, we all know what happened to their camera. The Dalsa Origin came too early in the digital revolution. As an uncompressed camera, the data storage was simply too much to overcome. We are much better today. I remain optimistic from this system. I do not see this as a Red competitor in terms of providing it for the consumer. The Penelope is quite quite pricy and I am sure that the digital back will be equally expensive. This is a rental item plain and simple. I am almost positive that within the next year or two, dealing with 4K uncompressed will not be as daunting as it seems now. This is perfect for films that use both digital and film in the same production.
 
I am almost positive that within the next year or two, dealing with 4K uncompressed will not be as daunting as it seems now.

I don't agree. It's going to be more than a couple of years.

Let's assume 12-bit color. That's a data rate of 1.3GB/s. So a 1TB drive = 12 minutes of footage. And by the way, a 1TB drive CAN'T EVEN DIGEST 1.3GB/s. You would need a high-end RAID to pull that off. Now let's talk RAM. DDR3 memory bandwidth is maybe 1.6GB/s. So in an ideal case, you get one stream.

Yes, these problems will diminish over time. But don't underestimate the time that will be required -- it's going to be more than a couple of years before we have affordable 10TB of storage that can digest at 1.3GB/s, and multi-GB/s RAM to do an on-line edit.

Meanwhile, I expect the Red world will be happily slinging around multiple 4K streams in real-time on the Mercury playback engine on a lap-top, and distributing for projection on the format formerly known as RedRay. :)

Don't get me wrong, I admire Aaton as a company, and I owned an XTR+ for over a decade. I just think they're barking up the wrong tree with uncompressed: the disadvantages outweigh any theoretical visual improvement.

I suspect this is merely a short-cut for them, which they are trying to spin in a positive way -- the engineering involved to create compression competetive with Red would be non-trivial, so they are skipping that and hoping people won't think too much about the real implications of dealing with uncompressed footage.

- Tim
 
In editing bandwidth is the bottleneck. In compositing processing power is the bottleneck. If you're shooting FX plates you'll probably be debayering to uncompressed anyway.
 
You can do light lossless compression at 5:1 ratio without taxing the CPU/DSP using dedicated circuitry.
 
Lossless compression for images doesn't get better than about 2.5:1 max. 5:1 is not possible. DV is 5:1 and how does that look?

Graeme
 
I don't agree. It's going to be more than a couple of years.

Let's assume 12-bit color. That's a data rate of 1.3GB/s. So a 1TB drive = 12 minutes of footage. And by the way, a 1TB drive CAN'T EVEN DIGEST 1.3GB/s. You would need a high-end RAID to pull that off. Now let's talk RAM. DDR3 memory bandwidth is maybe 1.6GB/s. So in an ideal case, you get one stream.

Yes, these problems will diminish over time. But don't underestimate the time that will be required -- it's going to be more than a couple of years before we have affordable 10TB of storage that can digest at 1.3GB/s, and multi-GB/s RAM to do an on-line edit.

Meanwhile, I expect the Red world will be happily slinging around multiple 4K streams in real-time on the Mercury playback engine on a lap-top, and distributing for projection on the format formerly known as RedRay. :)

Don't get me wrong, I admire Aaton as a company, and I owned an XTR+ for over a decade. I just think they're barking up the wrong tree with uncompressed: the disadvantages outweigh any theoretical visual improvement.

I suspect this is merely a short-cut for them, which they are trying to spin in a positive way -- the engineering involved to create compression competetive with Red would be non-trivial, so they are skipping that and hoping people won't think too much about the real implications of dealing with uncompressed footage.

- Tim

Have you watched the video? They address many of the points you have brought up.
 
Keep in mind that likely the sensor will be a bit oversized to allow lookaround in the EVF, so a 6K sensor may be used to record 5K, or a 5K sensor used to record 4K, etc.

since this is basically a digital back/magazine for a film camera I imagine you will still shoot using Penelope's optical VF... but then maybe the digital monitoring (he speaks about having an HD output) could have also a lookaround à la RED.
 
Have you watched the video? They address many of the points you have brought up.

I watched it, here's what I saw.

"..removable SSD hard disks. RAID0."

(insert hand waving)

"And two years from now, this won't be a problem anymore."

Hand-waving != actually addressing, IMHO (pardon the C syntax :).

- Tim
 
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