Reel-Stream now taking orders for Andromeda

I watched the episode of "Extreme Makeover Home Edition" tonight. The close-ups were great, but the deep picture did show the limits of the lens. Is it me or are the face tones, especially the studio shots, a little green? (Yes, I used my calibrated broadcast monitor to view the show.) I would color correct it a little differently. Now tell me this show wasn't shot with Andromeda. If it was I am generally impressed, there were definitely no artifacts, and the dynamic range was good. Even the reds looked good.

jmf
 
Remember that Andromeda wasn't used for the entire show, they used at least 1 other HD camera. I think in part they wanted to see how well they could match the uncompressed footage to the more expensive HD cameras, he said it worked extremely well, as you can see from the show.

Also, about the DVX lens, our tests so far show that the lens on the DVX can resolve resolutions comparable or exceeding the other prosumer HD cams with no problem. The usual results when shooting EIA resolution charts show that DVX+Andromeda is capable of resolving over 800 lines horizontal and about 750 vertical. It actually looks like ~900 lines horizontally but the EIA chart is not very accurate past 800.

Cheers,
Juan
 
Juan ,
You are very impressive, thank you for all the great information. Do you think an oqo computer would work with your setup ?
Aloha
 
Hello Poi,

Because Andromeda records all the Uncompressed data available from the camera's CCD's(at the A/D stage), the data rate is about 28Mbyte/sec at 24P. Most laptops and portables such as the OQO do not have an internal hard disk that is capable of continously recording this data rate. Just now Apple has started offering 7200RPM internal drives on their powerbooks.

For this reason, most people choose to use an external firewire drive, either notebook sized(bus powered) or full-sized depending on how small the setup needs to be. This allows the drive to be used as a 'cartridge' and be swapped out when it is full. A 100GB hard disk will hold about an hour of Uncompressed HD.

Cheers,
Juan
 
Juan, I know this question was posed before, but considering the showing in the HD comparison with the HVX, your mod would really put things back on the even playing field. If you haven't read it yet, go to dv.com or go to the HVX area of this site.
 
So you have to basically lug around a laptop or something with Andromeda, huh?

No other alternatives?
 
An old camera my family used to have connected to a vcr (regular vcr size, if you can imagine) and you had to lug around a battery to power everything. It all fit into a backpack which ended up being pretty heavy, but we (my dad) dealt with it and took pretty good home movies on occasion.

Personally, from what sI hear you need (camera, laptop, external hard drive, battery), that is not a whole lot to carry, and if you are doing real production, you will need power for lights, monitor, audio equipment and whatnot anyway, so I think its perfectly reasonable. We are just used to carrying around a tiny camera though, so we are spoiled.
 
I don't know why people don't seem to understand that this is not meant to be a run and gun camera. I am starting production on a film this next weekend and we will have a 25' firewire cord, a 25' Svideo cord and a 20' XLR cable connected to the camera at all times. I can't afford the Andromeda mod yet, but when I do I don't see how this will inconviniece the way I shoot at all. If you are shooting for a production you are atleast connected to a monitor at all times, how is this any different? Deal with it People.
 
Exactly.

We completely understand that needing to have the camera connected to a computer/laptop imposes limitations if you need the setup to be completely portable. I will be the first one to suggest you purhcase a standard HDV cam or HVX if you need run and gun work, or simply use the DVX without the uncompressed cable connected as the normal camera operation and ergonomics are unaffected by our system.

That said, this comes with the territory when talking Uncompressed HD video. If you look at the other uncompressed acquisition solutions out there, this is probably the most compact and inexpensive setup available. Uncompressed HD means a lot of data, our setup manages this in the most economically accessible manner possible.

Our system offers numerous advantages over the prosumer systems we are all familiar with which are now in the $10,000 range, not counting the associated computer hardware and storage. Andromeda offers uncompressed video, no decimation, no artifacts, increased bit-depth, increased latitude and resolution which exceeds many of the new cams. Because of the large bandwidth, you need to have a laptop/mac mini connected to the camera, but as scharky pointed out, this is not new to many people. Many of you are already running applications such as DVRack in real time, or using attached monitors, etc. This is no different hardware-wise, except for the fact that it actually greatly improves the quality of the footage you record, and what you can do with it in post.

Cheers,
Juan
 
Juan I've been following your mod since the beginning and it's great to hear you're finally accepting orders.

I would like to know if you're shipping to germany too, and how much the educational discount will be.
 
Flostro,

Yes, we do ship to Germany however we do not yet support the PAL DVX's so we can only ship NTSC units for now.

Andromeda outputs format-less image data, so there aren't any differences between the output from the PAL and NTSC versions except the frame rate(24fps vs 25fps) and the PAL unit will probably yield some more vertical resolution.

Cheers,
Juan
 
Hi!
Do you plan in making a PAL DVX version for the European market?
And if so, then how long would it take approximately for them to be available?
A year? Two years?

Cheers,
Johannes
 
Hello Johannes,

Actually, the PAL DVX is so similar to the NTSC DVX, that it wouldn't take any more time to install the device on it than it would the NTSC DVX's.

The issue is bandwidth. The sensor head on the PAL DVX sends more data because:
1.)There is one more frame per second: 25fps instead of 24fps
2.)There are more vertical lines per frame

This increase in bandwidth makes it hard to record all the data because of the current limitations in speed for USB host controllers. So you see, the issue is not installing it on a PAL DVX, it's just that with the current technology we would have to compromise some of the data such as capturing less lines per frame, etc.

We've discussed this at lenght in our forum at www.reel-stream.com.

Cheers,
Juan
 
Juan, I just wanted to comment on the res chart that you have posted on your site. With all the "resolution madness" going on in the HVX thread, it is quite amazing what you have been able to squeeze out of the good ol DVX. And the cleanness of the image is absolutly amazing. Congrats once more, and I hope to be doing business soon.
 
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