My Mini 2K is here!

As far as interface, what types of video scopes/meters are there?

RGB parade? Waveform/Vector? I see an RGB/luminance histogram.

In other words, is there a way to set a 18% gray card to 50%? Would you do that through the per-channel histogram?
 
There is a spot-meter/loupe (you can see the button in the lower left-hand corner), so you just place that right over your grey card (it has a 4x zoom in so you can pick out very small details in a scene) and dial it in to 50% . . . no need to guess where to look in the frame trying to read a vectorscope or waveform (which covers the whole frame).

Also we have a false-color metering mode that gives you an overall luminance distribution in the frame (sort of like a tempurature meter), so you can see what is in the shadows, mid-tones, and highlights with the glance of an eye . . . you can see exactly what pixel is exposed to what range of values without any second guessing involved.

And then yes, there is a per-channel histogram for you to see the overall channel distribution and how you are exposing the image relative to the entire bandwidth of the A/D converter.
 
BTW, you can also do some nifty tricks with the Spot Meter/Loupe, using it as a color-picker for white-balance for instance.

So no need to have to stand with somebody showing a white-card to the whole camera frame if you don't want to-do that . . . just pick the object in the frame you want to white-balance off of, and then hit "SET WHITE" and it's done.
 
One more thing . . . Rec709 actually places an 18% grey card at 40% Luminance, not 50% (i.e., 40IRE), so if you're exposing the grey-card to 50% Luma, beware that you are loosing almost a full f-stop over overhead shooting room.

I know a lot of people like to-do that, but just noting that you are actually "over-exposing" the camera at that point, and if you're clipping highlights, you should probably come back down a bit . . . exposing per the Rec709 spec is not what we would consider "under-exposing" a stop to save the highlights . . . we're just noting the specification for the Rec709 standard, and that's how we've calibrated the camera's ISO.

So for instance, we say the ISO rating of the camera is between 320 and 400 if you expose per Rec709 . . . if you expose 18% to 50%, you'll find the effective ISO of the camera is around 250 or 200.

Now of course you can treat this like a DSLR or even film . . . lower ISO's mean that you're actually getting less noise and more data . . . you're "exposing to the right" . . . but I just wanted to warn people should they try to reduplicate our numbers, that you should use an ISO of between 320 and 400 for exposing the camera, and that will place and 18% grey card in the RAW 10-bit log data stream at around 40% Luma, not 50% Luma.
 
SI at home, me drool drool :)
It look awesome that simple setup lens with noga and LCD screen!

Now you got your personal clean, neutral canvas to paint on!
Lucky you :beer:
 
Anyone interested in a 267 MB .avi file containing a few meager seconds of SI Mini footage? It is uncompressed 1080p. Basically a tilt up from a book to a flower, which I edited for the sake of file size.

I had my New HD crash and all the footage was lost. I spent 6 hours outside shooting and I'm not set up yet to do simultaneous back ups. Anyway, I'm in the process of seeing if I can recover more.

This clip is the only one where I used +12 db of gain, so it is noisy. It also has an extreme .look file applied.

Let me know, or else I will wait to see if I can put together more.

I tried compressing a smaller movie in Premiere, but it looked horrible.
 
OK. I'll try. Upload to Flyupload stalled at 2%. I time out on my own server. After my girlfriend is finished with her Skype call, I'll hook up the Ethernet cable and see if that helps.
 
Thanx Mars. Yep, Skype eats some traffic. Cant wait to put your footage in my Quantel.
Footage of Vancouver in dusk will be nice too ;)
 
OK. Uploaded the only clip I could salvage, sorry. And ironically, it is the only clip I shot at +12 db (I like to keep it at -3db or 0). I was just testing out how far I could push the thing until it snapped. Also note that I was playing with a surreal .look file.

Also, I just did a test download and the file stutters on my computer, even though the original doesn't. I have no idea how that could be, unless the FTP client used some kind of compression???

This is a huge download for what you get, ie, 3 seconds of noisy image. But if you want to download it, I'd love to hear your feedback and I'll definitely shoot a bunch more on Monday.

Download and right click to save: (edit: refresh the page if you don't see it)

http://www.shockstream.com/si2k/

Cheers.
 
Last edited:
How is the footage 267 MB for 3 seconds? Did you export it as uncompressed or something?

It doesn't make sense, SI and Cineform are spec'ing the Cineform codec as recording/holding 1 hour/40 GB.

If 3 seconds is 250+ MB that would equal 1 hour/300+ GB. That's a big difference. It sounds like uncompressed from the file size. I hope my math is wrong, or that the file is uncompressed.
 
10 seconds

10 seconds

Sorry, I just meant that as a rough "you may not want to download this 'cause it's so short" type of 3 seconds. It is actually 10 seconds.

It also may be that the finished movie is adding metadata when rendering, making the finished export bigger than the "negative". Just a guess as I don't really know how that works. Cheers.
 
oops looks I cant to play or decode your footage without Cineform CFHD decompressor!
 
Last edited:
The CineForm decoder is free is you install the trial of any of our software, you can then uninstall and request that the decoder remains. The easiest install for this is using Connect HD. Note: this bit-stream is about 26MB/s (it is not uncompressed but lightly compressed CFHD) which is rather high given the gain that was applied to the image. All this means is you will need a modern PC to play it smoothly, my old 3Ghz P4 could only manage 21-22fps. If you do have playback issues, use this tool (http://www.cineform.com/downloads/PlaybackControls.zip) to control the decoding resolution.
 
David Newman said:
Note: this bit-stream is about 26MB/s (it is not uncompressed but lightly compressed CFHD) which is rather high given the gain that was applied to the image.
David, why is the data rate so high? Everyone's been saying 2K/24p Cineform at the "highest" data rate would run 13MB/s. Why is this clip double that rate?

Metadata wouldn't add that much, would it?
 
You are confusing CineForm RAW (8-15MB/s) with CineForm Intermediate (15-30MB/s/) RAW only needs to encode 1/3 the data of a 4:4:4 full RGB demosaic that occurs when the image is developed. This 25+MB/s image is after 4:4:4 developing which cooks in the demosaic and 3D-LUT, this is normal although datarates for not gained up images would be around 20MB/s.
 
Last edited:
Okay, now it makes sense. So would actually be editing in RAW or Intermediate? Is that where the 4 simultaneous real-time streams comes from?

20-25 MB/s x 4?
 
Back
Top