"Biggest Advance in Camera Design"

[Athan Merrick]

It's not the modularity that is special. It's that the modules can be built by any company or person. So if there is demand for a compact pro res module someone will build it. Anything that is needed on a camera can be built by anyone. You do not have to wait for the camera manufacturer to build. Just like people buy 3rd party shoulder rigs you can buy 3rd party module add ons that fit the ecosystem perfectly. Great idea. I wish them success, but it will be a long hard road for them.

 

[Lawrence Bansbach]

That's what they said about RED.

Well, it did happen with the 2/3" 3K Scarlet, both the original design and the modular design.

 

[Lawrence Bansbach]

It's not the modularity that is special. It's that the modules can be built by any company or person. So if there is demand for a compact pro res module someone will build it. Anything that is needed on a camera can be built by anyone. You do not have to wait for the camera manufacturer to build. Just like people buy 3rd party shoulder rigs you can buy 3rd party module add ons that fit the ecosystem perfectly. Great idea. I wish them success, but it will be a long hard road for them.

Great idea, but not very practical. Virtually every third-party module will be a Kickstarter project. And, depending on the open-source license they adopt, could they require module creators to publish full specs, schematics, and a list of components and their suppliers?

 

[Wayne Morellini]

Open Source, Modular, off-the-shelf sensors etc. is fine, I like it. Though RED deserves props for promoting the "add-on" philosophy, basically.

I probably proposed it before Red, and I like their modules, how is it the same as Red, their modules are slimmerlinable extending as part of stream lined body piggy backed several deep in a shoulder mountable format to, so less can be included in thinner aswell as more, not like those bulky things that hang off the back of the other system. I'm sure they can go further. And I thought up compressing greater than 4k resolutions to (along with tens of thousands of others likely) and in wavelet form, so another invalid patent.

 

[Wayne Morellini]

From vague recollection, the Apertus project in some form or another was being nurtured along at about the same time that Jim Jannard posted his wish-list invitations for the first Red One on dvinfo.net. It differed from Red in that it was developed around commercially available sensors. As sensors have evolved, the project engineering has been revised. Someone might correct me on this. The project as such is not immature.

Yes, and he was following my recommendations very closely (except the very tight timeline) until he scrapped the fixed Scarlet. I was also the first one to approach Ephel about doing a cinema camera with the ephel camera, but he did not come on board until somebody else approached him several months/the year latter, that is where the Apertus group came from.

 

[Craig Parkes]

It's not an insult - it's a conception of something different from a fixed entity with fixed capabilities, known to all on the camera team and the producer, with known levels of reliability and potential for failure.

And while we're hurling around insults, you sound like a hobby-ist who has never seen the challenges of a real pro set with lots of hired people on high hourly rates and has no real conception of what that's like and completely misses my point. I make my living on sets like that, in the present, not the past.

I could care less whether Red runs over Linux, Mac OS or has an Atari 2600 at the core - - it's been tested, my Epic is the same as hundreds of others, I know what it is, exactly what it can do and cannot, and so do my clients. Its' not some thing I cobbled together in my garage using a soldering iron or some guy did in his spare time with a kickstarter campaign. Who knows what that would be - maybe it would work great sometimes - but again, the point is it would be a complete unknown and thus not suitable at all for real, pro production. The probelm with "open source" is inherent per-unit variability which is the nature of the beast.

You saw Frankie, or the Breadbox right? Red was at this point once, what got them past it was Jim's passion, Jarred's passion, both their smarts, Oakley's resources to get industrial design kickstarted at a ridiculously rapid rate, and a boat load of cash and connections to hire the right people.

The question will be, can crowd funding fill the gaps, not whether the project is open source or not.

 

[Wayne Morellini]

You saw Frankie, or the Breadbox right? Red was at this point once, what got them past it was Jim's passion, Jarred's passion, both their smarts, Oakley's resources to get industrial design kickstarted at a ridiculously rapid rate, and a boat load of cash and connections to hire the right people.

The question will be, can crowd funding fill the gaps, not whether the project is open source or not.

Lots of money to pay for smarts and everything, doesn't guarantee the best results or people. In all my time around here I've discovered I've only had intelligent conversations with something like 2 or 3 'right people' the rest just get it wrong, even in their own fields, and can't see past it. Seeing what's wrong and on towards the right solution is fundamental to be the right person in the chain. Likewise, you don't need money to be the right person or have the right idea. The right person knows that you can open source develop something, have a official locked down version. and have a sand boxed plugin system and black box individual functionality, to increase reliability. The operator picks either the official version or known good versions and among known good software components if they choose, one extra step that can be very simple. If big budget money is the issue, hire a Sony, Alexa or Epic, but this system will suit the larger market of smaller budgets until it is proven. Open source has been used in reliable embedded/industrial design for years, these are groups that traditionally prefer to write custom systems for reliability that work first time and every time.

 

[Jay A. Kelley]

Jim once said: "You know how to become a millionire? Have a billion and start a camera company."

Look at what RED has gone through to get here. They had a lot of the same dreams as these new guys. Then the realities of business got involved.

I will be amazed if these new guys succeed.

 

[Graeme Nattress]

It's funny that some people seem to think that to make a great camera you plug a great sensor into some kind of recording mechanism and you're done. One only has to look at the bother Aaton got into with their Dalsa sourced sensor to know that there's vastly more to it than that. I'm not about to go into details, but there's things you only learn about cameras when you "do them for real" and there's gotchas you never believed would occur until you're faced with dealing with them, especially as dynamic range, sensor size and frame rates increase.

Graeme

 

[Paul E. McCarthy]

I take zero stock in this annoucement.

I think new Cameras will be a dime a dozen.

I honestly believe that the Dragon, the new Alexa, F55, they will be around for a long long time. Its been 7 years or so now since the RED 1 Classic dropped the technology has arrived and its cheap.

There are Sensors everywhere now, the color science is there, and people have converter to 4k. IMHO Any camera that comes out in the Next 5 to 10 years will not be worth the big cash to upgrade. From my limited research, all I can see happening in the future is that the manufacturers reduce the micron size of the photosites of the sensor, which will probably only make things unnaturally sharper, which probably isn't necessary.
I think this is why Jim and Ted are on extended vacations. There is not much left to do but watch what people have shot with different cameras and argue over aesthetic minutia, and personal taste.

There are no shitty cameras out there only shitty DPs, the competition is over.


Walmart sells the 4k GoPro. That says it all.

My prediction is a 4k camera coming from Nikon any day. That company is f'd at the moment. Their point and shoot biz is in the toilet and their Pro Line of DSLRs are the best in the world and there lense are more film friendly then canons. They have a professional client base, they just need to learn from the mistakes of Canon and put something out there

 

[Wayne Morellini]

Jim once said: "You know how to become a millionire? Have a billion and start a camera company."

Look at what RED has gone through to get here. They had a lot of the same dreams as these new guys. Then the realities of business got involved.

I will be amazed if these new guys succeed.

One thing is certain in business one way to spill money is to throw it at something. Where there is a lot of money there is a lit of spillage ussually, with the right people they get by on a lot less. I'm not saying any of these people are top industry people, but learning from what is out there will mean they burn less.

It's funny that some people seem to think that to make a great camera you plug a great sensor into some kind of recording mechanism and you're done. One only has to look at the bother Aaton got into with their Dalsa sourced sensor to know that there's vastly more to it than that. I'm not about to go into details, but there's things you only learn about cameras when you "do them for real" and there's gotchas you never believed would occur until you're faced with dealing with them, especially as dynamic range, sensor size and frame rates increase.

Graeme

I agree, in the beginning I warned people not to try developing a custom fpga camera system, because it was going to be harder and longer than they naively thought, I suspect it landed up at Red. I recommended no custom processing parts, but regularly available mass produced parts, apart from the crucial ones like the sensor. PC based Linux based recommendations were the only successful.
Red had the money to do fpga and custom asci and everything.

Please share details of the obstacles Graeme, I enjoy hearing new ones? I appreciate as data rates, readout frequency, performance properties and size increase and photosites get smaller, conditioning and use etc get more complex.

The group came out of the Elphel security cameras with custom fpga/sensor boards etc, long before Red, so it is based off of some experience. I left the original group due to low bit rate and contentment with small consumer sensors in face of Red/red scarlet. There are today worthy consumer sensors to be used at a descent enough level. The company that did those sensors did the Nikon J1 sensor that can do 4kp60. On the software side they have been developing for years. It is also the cases that a lot of stuff is out there on open cores they could draw upon.

I take zero stock in this annoucement.

I think new Cameras will be a dime a dozen.

I honestly believe that the Dragon, the new Alexa, F55, they will be around for a long long time. Its been 7 years or so now since the RED 1 Classic dropped the technology has arrived and its cheap.

There are Sensors everywhere now, the color science is there, and people have converter to 4k. IMHO Any camera that comes out in the Next 5 to 10 years will not be worth the big cash to upgrade. From my limited research, all I can see happening in the future is that the manufacturers reduce the micron size of the photosites of the sensor, which will probably only make things unnaturally sharper, which probably isn't necessary.
I think this is why Jim and Ted are on extended vacations. There is not much left to do but watch what people have shot with different cameras and argue over aesthetic minutia, and personal taste.

Far from it I used to do a lot of research for digital cinema camera projects, and still do a little. They can't drop the ball yet, Sony isn't.

Sony is prototyping 16k+ holographic cameras. I imagine that eventually they will go to 64k+ . New sensor technology is reaching quantum efficiencies of 4000%. Liquid lens. Quantum dot computing. New versions of 3 color sensors (Sony too). This doesn't include the things I've come up with. Dragon will look like a good but dated canera. You might be selling yours for $200 in ten years. There is a very lot to go, but until we get past some of the processing/bandwidth/storage issues we won't be hitting the high end, maybe the end of the decade or yet. We need to concentrate on component infrastructure to take advantage of this processing power, that is worth a lot more money than what Jim has made so far.

 

[Jamil Yosufi]

+1:emote_hippie:

 

[Andrey Filippov]

The group came out of the Elphel security cameras with custom fpga/sensor boards etc, long before Red, so it is based off of some experience.

Wayne, I will not comment on the merits of the project, but there are some misunderstandings about our (Elphel) company. First of all - we never worked in security camera business (you may find that from Wikipedia), our products are mostly used in scientific research and testing of new applications - areas where freedom of the products is mostly appreciated. The second is that Apertus group did not "came out" of Elphel, they started as Elphel camera users.
Sorry for the late reply - it took me thwt long to get my registration on this forum confirmed.

Andrey

 

[Wayne Morellini]

Wayne, I will not comment on the merits of the project, but there are some misunderstandings about our (Elphel) company. First of all - we never worked in security camera business (you may find that from Wikipedia), our products are mostly used in scientific research and testing of new applications - areas where freedom of the products is mostly appreciated. The second is that Apertus group did not "came out" of Elphel, they started as Elphel camera users.
Sorry for the late reply - it took me thwt long to get my registration on this forum confirmed.

Andrey

Sorry, Andrey, I thought the name was familiar. I had thought you were in the surveillance camera market too. Yes, you are right, "it came out of the Elphel ...cameras" could be read two ways, as from the company itself or from use of the Elphel cameras. It was meant as the use of the cameras, sorry. I do recognize your encouragement and sponsorship of those users too, thanks.

Out of curiosity, did the head with flash recording card frame ever go ahead?


Thanks again.


Wayne.

 

[Andrey Filippov]

I do recognize your encouragement and sponsorship of those users too, thanks.

Wayne, yes we did sponsor projects that used our cameras (as other companies do too), but we are not involved in Axiom project.

Out of curiosity, did the head with flash recording card frame ever go ahead?

I'm not aware of the results. Ourselves we are now mostly interested in multi-sensor systems, so the new camera system board I'm working on now will accommodate 4 sensor front ends without additional multiplexers.

Andrey

 

[Wayne Morellini]

Wayne, yes we did sponsor projects that used our cameras (as other companies do too), but we are not involved in Axiom project

I was just thanking you for the past help with the original Elphel cameras, and acknowledged that the group gained previous experience originally building on your platform.

 

[Wayne Morellini]

Speaking generally of low cost camera development. Personally I think it might be more productive to use at least two small 4k sensors 65mm apart than one 35mm sensor. Axiom will be hopefully a truly great product I would want to own and be part of, but I've always been looking down the road to newer ways to design things. If I had the backers today I could see a few radical new cameras that most here would love to own, and most consumers. If only I had my preferred processing engine available to do it and not have to pay for it to be designed and fabricated, some interesting things could be done.

 

[Andrey Filippov]

Wayne, you really do believe that "help with the original Elphel cameras" was constructive? It seems to me that the number of new interesting projects and activity of the Apertus group (according to their forum) went down during last couple years. Their group consists mostly of the camera users who can really be innovative in their areas expertise instead of betting everything on competing with Red and other camera makers. 4x4 enthusiasts mod/tune their cars for extreme travels, not competing with Ford or Toyota and building the cars from scratch. Yes, there are such cars, but they are usually not that good for extreme travels.

 

[Wayne Morellini]

Wayne, you really do believe that "help with the original Elphel cameras" was constructive? It seems to me that the number of new interesting projects and activity of the Apertus group (according to their forum) went down during last couple years. Their group consists mostly of the camera users who can really be innovative in their areas expertise instead of betting everything on competing with Red and other camera makers. 4x4 enthusiasts mod/tune their cars for extreme travels, not competing with Ford or Toyota and building the cars from scratch. Yes, there are such cars, but they are usually not that good for extreme travels.

I was being thankful Andrey. Sure not much might have come directly out of it at the time, but it was appreciated. As far as competing with Red, they don't really, Red refuses to go that low in price, but they are the alternative and whatever else they turn their hands too is a extra bonus. It is all about what people will buy and support. I tend to not be to negative be a use they are trying to do the right thing and are putting in a effort. The truth is that the market is mainly established markets that people want to buy in. Sure anybody can compete, but few do, and an open source project sets a standard other companies can use, which is good for a healthy market. I would be happy if they just used 4k Aptina sensor used in the Nikon J1, if it had been out this or last year. Most people will not want to lug around a s35 cinema zoom lens on what would normally be a handheld job. There is a lot of market cinema cameras don't service.


I first started out hoping for a 50Mb/s mpeg2 720p pro video camera that was just good enough to do cinema. The obsession with cinema raw went too far, and these markets got left behind.

 

[Andrey Filippov]

Wayne, I do not see how Open Hardware camera can be cheaper than similar performance proprietary one. Designing for hackability imposes additional design requirements, and currently developer of the proprietary system has more "freedom" than one working on the open design. Proprietary system developer is not limited by the development tools (we only use freebie FPGA tools so our users can recompile bitstream without spending extra thousands $$ in addition to the camera cost), they can sign NDA with the chip vendors, can use closed interface standards using the documents, not collecting reversed-engineered pieces of the information here and there, as we have to to be able to use modern sensor standards. To say nothing about closed products manufacturers are routinely infringing on each other patents, as Marc Levoy wrote when working on their Frankencamera.
On the other hand, there are applications where Freedom is appreciated, where users are eager to pay extra. Not a huge market, but it exists. And I do not believe in "poor man's Red".

Andrey