Canon 5D 2K raw feed update - 1920x720 possible on 1000x card?

[Andrew Reid]

At the moment heat is not the bottleneck. Let's try to stay on topic please.

[silvertonesx24]

Andrew, the sample footage in the OP is broken.

 

I am a ML donor, does that mean that I have access to this daily firmware? I have only 600x cards though. At least those will only get faster and cheaper.

[mtheory]

I wonder if a hardware mod to increase the buffer is theoretically possible.

[ScreensPro]

I wonder if a hardware mod to increase the buffer is theoretically possible.

 

Surely, at that point, you just give up... sell you camera and get a BMCC?

[Bruno]

I wonder if a hardware mod to increase the buffer is theoretically possible.

 

So you could get a 4x bigger buffer and record 4 seconds of video? :)

[Bruno]

Can ML hack the CinemaDNG file creation, or are they just copying it as it is?

Can they access compression settings and make those files smaller?

[Sean Cunningham]

So you could get a 4x bigger buffer and record 4 seconds of video? :)

 

A more practical and theoretically very possible mod would be something like what the Reel Stream Andromeda did with the Panasonic DVX-100 camcorder.  They interfaced right off the chip, bypassing all compression and other nonsense writing 4:4:4 in 10bits or greater (read specs anywhere from 10bits to 14bits) via USB2.0 connection.  

 

Worked so well, apparently, they got bought and buried so that nobody besides a few early customers could ever get the mod installed.  I never read who bought and buried them and the RS guys never said in their original announcement.  Kinda incidental now except for the fact of the sensor size on the 5D, et al, and its specific aesthetic which would make a hack like this still desirable to a select few, regardless of the eventual availability of BMD cameras or the like at similar price tags.

[MatthewP]

A more practical and theoretically very possible mod would be something like what the Reel Stream Andromeda did with the Panasonic DVX-100 camcorder.  They interfaced right off the chip, bypassing all compression and other nonsense writing 4:4:4 in 10bits or greater (read specs anywhere from 10bits to 14bits) via USB2.0 connection.  

 

Worked so well, apparently, they got bought and buried so that nobody besides a few early customers could ever get the mod installed.  I never read who bought and buried them and the RS guys never said in their original announcement.  Kinda incidental now except for the fact of the sensor size on the 5D, et al, and its specific aesthetic which would make a hack like this still desirable to a select few, regardless of the eventual availability of BMD cameras or the like at similar price tags.

I remember that mod... the sample image I saw looked [i]stunning[/i]. Much more useable than even GH2 footage (less sharp though, and obviously more DOF).

[Bruno]

A more practical and theoretically very possible mod would be something like what the Reel Stream Andromeda did with the Panasonic DVX-100 camcorder.  They interfaced right off the chip, bypassing all compression and other nonsense writing 4:4:4 in 10bits or greater (read specs anywhere from 10bits to 14bits) via USB2.0 connection.  

 

Yeah, I wondered a few times if it would possible for them to just send the data through USB to a fast hard drive.

Not sure if hard drives would be faster than modern memory cards though.

[Sean Cunningham]

I remember that mod... the sample image I saw looked stunning. Much more useable than even GH2 footage (less sharp though, and obviously more DOF).

 

Yeah, they were doing software "pixel shift" to get pseudo-HD out of it which ended up being of similar quality to the HVX, which wasn't full-HD either (I think it was the Hydra that was the version of the Andromeda tech for the HVX).  But it was 4:4:4 and, color wise, looked every bit as deep and rich as your better BMCC videos and the like.  

 

It had to make folks like Sony really pissed off because this was happening around the same time as the first picture shot on the Genesis and that was a very bumpy ride (Superman Returns, which I was working on at the time...meh, not very impressive).  HDV was still sorta trying to make an impact and DSLRs hadn't shown their true potential yet.  For under $5K an Andromeda was a breakthru beast.

 

This was also the rise of the affordable (read non-P+S) 35mm cinema adapters for DV/HDV cameras.  I had a Redrock Micro M2 and that solved the aesthetic implications of tiny camcorder chips since it gave my DVX "Full Frame".  It was just big, and heavy.

[Sean Cunningham]

Yeah, I wondered a few times if it would possible for them to just send the data through USB to a fast hard drive.

Not sure if hard drives would be faster than modern memory cards though.

 

The problem isn't the card speed as much as relying on the camera's stock internals to deliver the goods.  As it is the one thing we know for sure is that the process between the sensor and writing to the card is compromised so bypassing the intentional under-engineering may be the path of least resistance.

[Ryan McCarvill]

Yeah, they were doing software "pixel shift" to get pseudo-HD out of it which ended up being of similar quality to the HVX, which wasn't full-HD either (I think it was the Hydra that was the version of the Andromeda tech for the HVX).  But it was 4:4:4 and, color wise, looked every bit as deep and rich as your better BMCC videos and the like.  

 

It had to make folks like Sony really pissed off because this was happening around the same time as the first picture shot on the Genesis and that was a very bumpy ride (Superman Returns, which I was working on at the time...meh, not very impressive).  HDV was still sorta trying to make an impact and DSLRs hadn't shown their true potential yet.  For under $5K an Andromeda was a breakthru beast.

 

This was also the rise of the affordable (read non-P+S) 35mm cinema adapters for DV/HDV cameras.  I had a Redrock Micro M2 and that solved the aesthetic implications of tiny camcorder chips since it gave my DVX "Full Frame".  It was just big, and heavy.

 

Andromeda was good - however I doubt it was anything near the BMCC even though the BMC doesn't have the same color information - the base iso of the DVX was sub 100 and it didn't have the same DR - we are talking about a 10 year old camera here.

[Bruno]

Maybe they could even try sending a better quality (raw?) stream through HDMI?

[North]

The sad end of Andromeda Tech/Hydra: http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/archive/index.php/t-117325.html

[Sean Cunningham]

The sad end of Andromeda Tech/Hydra: http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/archive/index.php/t-117325.html

 

And still, didn't see any revelation as to who bought them.  I'm guessing the payoff was behind door number one and a gun barrel, in the form of attack-lawyers, was behind door number two if they didn't sell.  The easy guess would be it was Panasonic themselves (protecting the Varicam) though, at the time, Sony seemed to have more to gain by this product being taken off the market.

[blackrat]

It may be hard to get around buffer limitations, impossible likely. But do they have access to feed the HDMI out port? If they could do that then they could clip the DNG frame to 1920x1080 and clip it down to 10bits (or maybe 8bits if the HDMI interface used can't handle 8) and then as each frame gets sent out they delete it from the buffer and the buffer never overloads? If they have to clip to 8bits that might be tricky since without tone mapping that would be bad, if they could get 10bits out that is close to the 11 stop DR range and a bit tossed wouldn't be so bad I don't think. We get the sharpness at least.

 

[blackrat]

I´m just asking... So, cloud it be possible to get rid of the weird process the camera is doing and record a very high quality image direct from the DNG to a H.264 video?

 

That was my other thought. If they can't hook into HDMI can they hook into the h.264 encoder and clip the DNG stream to 1920x1080 and feed it to tht for compression without all the wonky stuff going on? I guess the one problem is that probably won't accept 14bits and if they can't program Digic how would they tone map it to 8bits that the encoder could handle quickly enough?

[blackrat]

1.3 crop comment: it seems that the 1DC and 5D3 aren't that different. The 1DC's full frame image looks very similar to the 5D3 (soft), whereas the ~1.3 crop and S35 mode looks pretty good.

 

I'm no longer so sure because of the DNG stuff, but my original speculation was that the 5D3 has a hardware AA filter scaled to match stills shooting and thus not nearly rough enough for video (2MP vs 22MP) so while reading it in 3x3 blocks and binning those to one pixel they have some residual aliasing and they did some blurring and AA to try to get rid of it and that made it go soft.

 

Now if you look at the C300 and so on, they read chips in 2x2 blocks off of 8MP sensors. If you read 2x2 off of the 1DX you'd get crop mode video and 2x2 blocks are closer to the AA filter's scale so maybe they don't have to mess with it as much as they for 3x3 blocks and thus maybe it looks much sharper (while a touch more aliased since maybe they don't even bother to mess with it at all).

 

I'm not quite sure that explains it anymore. It is also possible that the 1DX with dual-digic and a fast sensor is able to simply read an entire APS-C/H-ish sized chunk all at once with block binning and then simply downscale it to 1920x1080 and maybe that is why that mode looks so good. For FF mode it's too many pixels for them to read all at one off the sensor. ?

 

I kept writing Canon to ask for a cropped 2x2 binned mode for the 5D3 for these reasons. Maybe the hardware wasn't designed to do 2x2 though? A shame if nobody though of that. Crop modes are also much better for wildlife shooting.

[blackrat]

Can ML hack the CinemaDNG file creation, or are they just copying it as it is?

Can they access compression settings and make those files smaller?

I wonder if they can feed it to the jpg compression engine in the camera? Proably lots of this stuff is not possible without complete documentation and ability to program digic fully though. The jpg processor probably has 8bit limit too.

[jgharding]

So if someone can hack an SDI into a 5D you might have a chance, bypassing the buffer with just a stream of raw data.

 

But it might be best just to get a different camera. I don't think there's much spare space in a Canon body to fit stuff.