A-cam dII 'High Definition RAW Format Motion Picture Camera

Oooh interesting, and without all the marketing gimmicks this little potential gem is developing nicely. I'll be curious to check these out when there er out
 
This looks like a very early implementation. This is from the IBC footage perhaps? There is no color matrix so the color is off and has little saturation and judging by the smear when the street lights get closer it uses a straight gamma curve without highlight protection or any attempt at film emulation. It does match the color profile of the uncorrected 2/3" Kodak sensor so I bet that's the sensor they use. You should expect far better results in the final implementation. The sensor can do much better.
 
Hi Otis

It's actually IBC footage taken from a pre-production model. I saw the original clips at ibc and they looked a lot better then the quicktimes they put on the web. Probably because of the h.264 codec used. But the color is still not where ikonoskop want it to be. Daniel said at ibc that they have work to do on the way the color is recorded in the final version, especially red.

I like ikonoskop. They have a good sense of humor. Everyone was yelling: "FOOTAGE, FOOTAGE, FOOTAGE!" Now, they put up some old IBC clips like: "Here you go. Now give us a break and let us do our job."

Peter
 
I do like their sense of humor a lot, but this footage is not enticing me into buying their camera at all.
I hope they can put something together soon a little more serious.




i'm just really impatient.
 
They have an engineering attitude which is a good thing. I honestly prefer a watch on a table or a badly done night shot compared to that stereotypical well photographed sexist video with models drinking milk and implying sexual behaviour of most intimate nature. The market is full of boys (of any age) but it's getting boring and many female and male cinematographers find it insulting.
 
augenblick said:
Hi Otis

Daniel said at ibc that they have work to do on the way the color is recorded in the final version, especially red.

Peter
Click to expand...

I also noticed that in my tests. There is a little extra red in green and blue. A good color matrix takes care of the issue.
 
Hi Otis

I also like the ikonoskop approach to to market. The had a pre-production model ready at NAB this year and decided NOT to show it. That takes balls in a market like this.
They show the product when the product is ready. A no forum member whatsoever will ever be able to change.
I prefer delivering of a finished product a thousand times over making a hype and then not delivering because "the market has changed" or telling me that "specification are subject to drastic changes"

No, in my opinion Sweden rules!
And so does Greece!
(and Switzerland of course)

Peter
 
The king of compressed intermediate formats is over at the ikonoskop forum giving advice on optical low pass filters. These guys should be careful:)
 
If you are building steam engines and somebody is introducing a combustion engine, you have to defend your product I guess, even if it has nothing to do with your market segment. Steam engine is by comparison green power after all. Anyway, I believe uncompressed will be the norm in a few years. Storage will also switch to IT storage, just like many cameras already switched to SD and other memory cards. Firewire and usb links will also be outdated really soon and normal IT storage links will be used. I use native sata2 and there is no going back.

I read Ikonoskope will release pricing this week. USD is up and most components are traded in usd, so no change for US companies buying components, more expensive for us in europe. Everything is up 20% in euro prices from the time I did my original pricing estimates even though SSD got cheaper so it balanced out. Hope the USD trend stops at some point.
 
Last edited:
uncompressed will be the norm in a few years
Click to expand...
That's an interesting topic. I'm undecided.

I used to be sure that visually lossless compression is always better, because, why not reduce your storage costs by 5 to 20 times if you cannot see any loss of picture?

But the RED One (compression) uses 75 W, fans, and takes a minute to boot. The Ikonoskop (uncompressed) uses far less power, no fan, and hopefully boots much faster.

But then, again, I see camcorders like Panasonic's HMC150 (compressed) run on only a few watts, have no fan, and boot in seconds. AVCHD is a pretty intense codec. How do Panasonic, and the other big companies, accomplish such efficiency?
 
Here is where the power goes in an embedded system that records video:

Solid state or hdd storage, up to 5watts (large and fast media you will not find in camcorders)
audio circuitry 2.5watt
tft and touchscreen using ccfl (large, very bright, high resolution like no camcorder will ever be) 10watts
ccd sensor and ADs 6watt
graphics and display circuitry 5watt
overall control and IO 4watts
dsp for embedded cpu 15watt
large ram for cache, previews and display 4watt
dc input losses, a few watts

A modern digital cinema camcorder by Sony uses as much power really and many digital cinema camcorders have fans. 50watts is hard to dissipate. The regular high volume production camcorders use simpler circuits, more efficient sensors (CMOS or small CCD), small displays, optimised in chip processing of the compression format, etc.

How a camera behaves in terms of noise, heat lockups etc, is a matter of carefull design.

I think the A-CAM must use less than 30watts because of the small efficient displays. Less than 25 perhaps. When you are designing for a larger camera you have to budget for lots of extra things the user might want to put on the camera supply so nothing saves you from the large batteries. Having different batteries for everything is not fun. Check how much wattage the larger Anton Bauer will handle. You bet somebody needed and is using most of that wattage in film and tv production:)
 
The Ikonoskop runs of regular medium sized Sony batteries. It says NP-F770 on their website. Thats a 4400mAh batteriy.
Daniel Jonsater sayd in an interview at freshdv, that the camera will run for 2 hours straight from one of those batteries, which I think is very very efficient.

The interview can be found here and is very interesting to listen to.

Peter
 
combatentropy said:
...
But the RED One (compression) uses 75 W, fans, and takes a minute to boot. The Ikonoskop (uncompressed) uses far less power, no fan, and hopefully boots much faster.
....
Click to expand...

comparing apples to coconuts again :angry:

Red One or any very hi-res system must deal with huge amount of data (like 4.5K) in hi fps and A cam only with HD, that`s quite difference - chip creates huge ammount of heat so it needs fans and everthing else to deal with it. If you want big resolutions you must pay otherwise it melt like Chernobyl reactor. Its like when your qiuet notebook change to screaming monster when you start rendering or playing HD footage instead of reading mails :) If you see camera only as black box with lense which delivers some colourfull moving pictures and don`t care about whats going on inside and why that`s another story.

I would rather compare A-cam to other HD ones like Viper, Genesis, or Sony cameras. That`s way more interesting fun :)
 
Last edited:
So, it's 16watts or something. If you want a remote monitor or a large resolution lcd that is readable in sunlight you have to get an exernal battery because it is usually 8 to 16watts depending on backlight, as much as the camera itself. If you want mic preamps and audio control monitoring and distribution you have to power that from another source also. When you add the capabilities one might need in actual production, the power budget cannot stay at 16watts and it gets a lot more complicated with many smaller batteries, especially when it's not 12-14 volts. Extra batteries, cables or dc adapters and mounting issues (geometry, positioning, center of gravity). I think the purpose of the camera is to be used with the 640x360 (in 16:9) viewfinder by itself. That's where the form factor and the size will pay off and where its advantage is obvious. If you want larger storage, heavy lenses, large monitoring, better audio etc, you are better off with a larger camera. I can't imagine lots of cables hunging from such a light camera. The design paradigm is obviously a very small camcorder such as a sony consumer or prosumer handheld camcorder which actually matches the camcorders in its price range. If the shooting style fits the camera design, it will do wanders, but it cannot compare to Red and the larger cameras in some production situations. The Ikonoskope film camera also has its niche.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top