Camera specific firmware on the 7Q? Re-think?

G

Gene Sung

Veteran
I'm definitely not someone who knows much about coding or firmware so correct me if I'm wrong, but this seems like it would make life easier for Convergent.

Just a suggestion here, but it seems CD is supporting too many cameras on the same 7Q firmware - Alexa, FS700, C500 and probably the A7s. I'm assuming that it has to be a HUGE headache to have one unified firmware release that deals with all those cameras. Since the 4K on the FS700 might break the 24fps on the C500, etc... Bugs across different platforms.

Wouldn't it be smarter and easier if CD just made a firmware specific to each camera? Yeah, it would be more of a pain to have to re-load a different firmware when switching from say... an Alexa to an FS700, but I'm sure the coding on your end would be hugely simplified. And in reality, updating the firmware only takes about 15 minutes. I'd rather do that than have the endless wait that we are going through. Furthermore, most people are not switching between an Alexa to a C500 to a FS700. Most people are just using it for one specific camera. Yeah, it might be a pain for rental houses, but it seems that the 7Q is mainly an ownership thing anyways.

CD's current firmware model is obviously nearly un-doable with the huge delays which is just frustrating everyone. It's time to re-think things and take a different approach because I'm skeptical if the promised goals (4K Compressed and 4K2HD higher frame rates) will ever be reached at this point.
 
I believe the way CD has it set up the firmware for one camera does not affect the firmware for another camera.
 
As someone with a *lot* of experience designing software for products like this, I would say that CD have got it right. Multiple firmware builds make life MUCH MUCH harder, even if they share a lot of common code. In the past I have put HUGE effort in to allowing one firmware build to serve multiple products.

If CD have done it right, the bulk of the firmware in the 7Q will be camera-neutral, with just codecs to read stuff from each camera, plus some minor configuration stuff to handle different features etc. It's probably messier than that in practice, but still way easier that way than handling multiple builds.
 
gene_can_sing said:
I'm definitely not someone who knows much about coding or firmware so correct me if I'm wrong, but this seems like it would make life easier for Convergent.

Just a suggestion here, but it seems CD is supporting too many cameras on the same 7Q firmware - Alexa, FS700, C500 and probably the A7s. I'm assuming that it has to be a HUGE headache to have one unified firmware release that deals with all those cameras. Since the 4K on the FS700 might break the 24fps on the C500, etc... Bugs across different platforms.

Wouldn't it be smarter and easier if CD just made a firmware specific to each camera? Yeah, it would be more of a pain to have to re-load a different firmware when switching from say... an Alexa to an FS700, but I'm sure the coding on your end would be hugely simplified. And in reality, updating the firmware only takes about 15 minutes. I'd rather do that than have the endless wait that we are going through. Furthermore, most people are not switching between an Alexa to a C500 to a FS700. Most people are just using it for one specific camera. Yeah, it might be a pain for rental houses, but it seems that the 7Q is mainly an ownership thing anyways.

CD's current firmware model is obviously nearly un-doable with the huge delays which is just frustrating everyone. It's time to re-think things and take a different approach because I'm skeptical if the promised goals (4K Compressed and 4K2HD higher frame rates) will ever be reached at this point.
Click to expand...

Pros and cons to both ways. Implementing a new feature like playback scrubbing might become a headache when you have to code it into several different firmware versions. And where would you draw the line for universal features like multi-cam? Implementing it into 3+ different firmware versions means it could break for a different reason in each flavor of firmware. I imagine this could introduce even more bugs than they are dealing with now.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top