Apertus - Open Source Cinema

New Apertus Short Film: Open Land

Sebastian — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 11:30:00 +0000

A new Apertus short film is available!

More Details

Nathan did it!

Sebastian — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 08:09:29 +0000

Straight from our forums:

Dude! you're the first human being to shoot stereo imagery on a free and open cine camera in human history!
how cool is that?!

Also on Youtube

Now get those stylish 3D glasses out!

Apertus Interview

Sebastian — Mon, 30 May 2011 18:40:19 +0000

We recently answered questions in an interview we did for the Russian website Blackbyrd. Now since we do not speak Russian very well - извините! - we thought it would be a good idea to also publish our answers here to the community as we originally provided them - in English.

I. Company

1.1 In today's cinema equipment manufacturing world new products are shooting out almost every day. What was your inspiration from other manufacturers?
1.2 What new features does Elphel Inc. bring to the community?
1.3 How widespread is the Elphel community?
1.4 Are you interesting in Russian market and customers? Maybe you already have a representative in Russia?
1.5 Are you interesting in dealership in Russia? What requirements goes to a dealership candidate?

We answered:
Regarding all above questions:

Maybe the website doesn't state this clear enough: Apertus is a community project and has no direct connection to Elphel Inc. Elphel Inc. is aware of the Apertus project of course and does list it as one way for their camera application. Elphel Inc. also kindly offered to host the Apertus website but Elphel Inc. does not fund the Apertus project. All Apertus community members work for free and on their own.
Apertus is a group of individuals not a company, we do not have an office and we do not have any customers.

II. Apertus Project and Elphel Camera

2.1. Apertus Project targets at "professional production environment", but can Elphel Camera be compared to Canon 5D M2, 7D or Red One? Or its more a camcorder like?

There are some similarities and some differences. The first thing that comes to mind is that the chip diameter in the Elphel camera is much smaller than the ones in a Red One or HDSLR camera. We are aware of this and are eagerly waiting for the next generation Elphel 373 camera that will sport a new range of bigger diameter sensors.

In terms of video quality the Elphel camera offers RAW recording and resolutions above Full HD what only the around 20 times more expensive Red One offers. Also the Elphel camera is much more flexible than what current HDSLR cameras offer: freely scale-able resolution and framerate as well as control over datarate and the ability to connect external devices like SSDs to record on to name just a few. There are also things were we are currently lacking behind, for example the audio recording capabilities are still experimental. The Elphel camera has no native audio recording support but features a USB port and you can connect any audio device that is supported under Linux (all that we tried so far have worked) and the software (still work in progress) can then record the synced multi channel audio streams in the same container with the video.

2.2 Can you use vintage c-mount cinema lens like bolex, wollensack etc? DSLR cameras has a problem of using c-mount lens (vignetting) and some PL-mount lens (have to eject the mirror)

The Elphel camera only has a c-mount so only c-mount lenses like the ones you mentioned work.

2.3 Aptina CMOS and 2x2 binning are tech. specifications of many cctv's cameras, how much does CCTV equipment affected Elphel?

Elphels main market are scientific and industrial applications. The camera is too expensive and too powerful in terms of resolution, etc for most surveillance applications but of course its possible to use it that way.

2.4. Is there a room for "pushing to the limits" in Apertus Project, for example, increasing mega pixels or coming up with new Elphel camera with high speed recording feature?

Apertus is the project to add everything around an Elphel camera needed for digital cinema work. We have no plans to modify the Elphel camera core hardware ourself.

2.5 One of the "grande" problems of Canon DSLR which I've experienced is trouble with rolling shutter — optical distortion of objects on high shutter's values. Does Elphel Camera have similar problems?

All cameras using CMOS sensors and no mechanical shutter are affected the same way. Global Shutter CMOS sensors are emerging now, lets see what the future will bring. The current sensor in the Elphel camera is also a CMOS.
For the next generation Elphel 373 camera there will be a wider range of possible sensor front ends. Kodak CCDs are currently being considered to be one of them. CCDs do not suffer from Rolling Shutter but have other effects like streaking, blooming, lower dynamic range. What is most interesting for us in the next generation Elphel 373 camera is that the sensor front end could be swapped easily. So you can connect the sensor that fits your needs and applications the most for your next shot - CCD or CMOS.

2.6 As I understand Apertus Project centered on camera and equipment but not focusing on Lenses?

Correct. We are interested in lenses of course and we are very willing to support efforts that for example center around hacking electronic control interfaces of lenses but we currently have no one doing that and do not plan to design and manufacture any custom lenses for Apertus like Red does for their cameras.

2.7 Recently the DSLR community started to play with anamorphic lenses and adapters. But professional pl-mount anamorphic lenses are very expensive and c-mount anamorphic lenses are even more rare and hard to find but less expensive and maybe an interesting solution for digital cinematography. Did you done any examples with these lenses?

So far we have not done any tests with anamorphic lenses. But it sounds like an interesting experiment.
We can select an anamorphic sensor region though and get real native anamorphic footage with a normal lens though.

2.8. Are 5 megapixels enough for fullHD video with decent quality?

Full HD is around 2 Megapixels so 5 Megapixels are more than enough resolution for a decent image.
If you want a 16:9 image you can record with a resolution 40% bigger than FullHD. See http://apertus.org/sites/default/files/AMAX.jpg

2.9 Due to status of "cinema camera" did anyone used footage from the camera to print it on film?

Not that we are aware of yet.

Aggressive question: What is Elphel — a revolutionary ready-to-use non-major-brand good video camera until you turn yourself to Arri Digital or — ordinary Chinese CCTV toy with custom housing and nothing-interesting picture quality?

The Elphel cameras openness offers incredible flexibility. There is no other manufacturer that offers free software and open hardware products like this and it's really incredible how Elphel Inc. managed to keep the prices this low, if you look at other scientific/industrial camera manufacturers (proprietary ones) you will notice their prices are multiples (sometimes tenfolds) of what the Elphel camera costs even for cameras that have much lower technical specs (resolution, framerates, connections, etc.).
Also you shouldn't forget that the Elphel camera already has a harddisk-recorder inside. Cameras like the SI-2K (just the camera part, SI-2K Mini) spill out the data over HDSDI and you need another external device to grab and store the signal.

III. Sales, prices and usability

3.1 Kit price of 880 dollars is 2 times cheaper than Canon 5d mark ii or 7d but very close to Canon 550d. What marketing goals are targets by these price? Is Elphel an alternative to Canon (in terms of shooting video)?

As I said Elphel Inc.'s main business is in different areas so the prices do not "target" any HDSLR or film camera product competition (like Canon or any other competitor) in particular. In addition Elphel produces "open hardware" and so the prices are not set primarily set by marketing decisions but rather by manufacturing costs.

3.2 What software should we use to operate camera? I've got confused with ElphelVision, Piwik etc. Is it possible to capture video stream direct to pc/mac?

Where did you read about Piwik?
You capture the video to a camera connected SSD/HDD and can use any computer (Windows, Mac, but prefered Linux) and ElphelVision connected to the cameras to control camera parameters.

3.3 Does the products comes with technical support?

Not commercial technical support like from a real company but the Apertus community is a rich resource of knowledge and will help each other with any trouble that might occur. In addition you get the technical support from Elphel Inc. when you buy the camera from them.

3.4 What can you tell about future developments? New products, new prices, new features?

Elphels next generation camera called Elphel 373 will be a very interesting new model for Apertus. It will feature Gigabit-Ethernet instead of 100Mbit Ethernet, USB 2.0 instead of 1.0 higher performance in both CPU and FPGA and the most important features for us filmmakers will be that it sports new and different kinds of sensor-front-ends.
Also the FPGA code will get an overhaul for example allowing multiple video pipelines. This will allow streaming a lower resolution preview to our controller tablet/netbook over ethernet while storing the full resolution, high datarate videostream to SSD.

New Feature Showcase: Pre-Recording

Sebastian — Thu, 19 May 2011 18:59:59 +0000

Let me first explain how the so called circ-buffer or ring-buffer (more technical details here on wikipedia) inside the Elphel camera works as it is essential to understand the tech behind the pre-recording feature:

Around 19MB of the total 64MB SDRAM that are available in the Elphel camera are used as main circular buffer to store a constant stream of video frames that finished their path through the processing pipeline in the FPGA. The latest available frame always overwrites the memory where the oldest frame just was (the read pointer rotates around the ring). When you start recording a video in the harddisk recorder software (camogm as used in ElphelVision) a read pointer inside the ring buffer comes into effect. It takes one frame after the other from the circ-buffer and writes it to the hard-drive. If the hard-disk recorder cannot store the frames to hard-drive fast enough (faster than new frames are added to the buffer at the write pointer) the buffer will overflow, meaning the read pointer will fail to read the oldest available frame and suddenly read the latest (or a part from the latest) frame. This overflow will result in dropped frames.

To visualise this idea you could imagine a rotating cake plate where at a certain point a baker constantly puts new slices of pie onto the plate. Your job is to eat all pieces as fast as possible ( Lets call you the "cake-recorder" and you have to store all pieces in your stomach). Delicious idea isn't it :)

Recently Andrey from Elphel Inc. sent me a pre-release version of modifications he did to the camogm source code that integrate a new feature. This new feature called "Pre-Recording" lets you store frames from the video stream to hard-drive that were recorded before you pressed the record button. The write buffer starts with storing the oldest frames instead of the latest ones first.

The following video shows this feature in effect, it might not be a pretty video but it serves its purpose. The camera films me when I pressed the record button on my screen. The number of frames stored in the circ-buffer depends on the actual data-size of the frames. In this video that are around 6 seconds of video.

Projects shot with Apertus

Sebastian — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 11:28:44 +0000

I recently worked on 2 video projects where I used my Apertus rig as one of the cameras used in the project:

Check out the full story (with pictures) here: http://apertus.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=62

Check out the full story (with pictures) here: http://apertus.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=63

Growing the Community - Elphel sponsors hardware

Sebastian — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 14:56:21 +0000

~~code.~~
~~share,~~
~~design.~~
~~engineer.~~

participate!

With this motto Elphel and Apertus formed a partnership to maintain a pool of sponsored cameras for developers. Elphel will initially donate 2 camera kits to the pool. Apertus will deal with developer applications, project selection and all communication related to the donated cameras.

We set up an application form and created created the Sponsored Hardware subpage on this site explaining the application process.

Applications can be submitted from now on!

Update: Translations

Sebastian — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 12:46:36 +0000

You may have already noticed the red "Français" and "Español" links at the very top of each page.

With community effort the entire website (excluding dynamic content like the forum, etc.) has been translated to these particular languages.

Please help us adding even more new languages (or reviewing the existing translations) by joining the team of Apertus translators. Contact us!

New Sample Footage: Stormy Clouds Timelapse

Sebastian — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 12:36:13 +0000

Last time we posted some high speed footage shot with over 300fps. This time we turned the FPS wheel in the other direction and shot a video with new frames just every couple of seconds.

These new GUI elements in ElphelVision make timelapse easily accessible.

Check out our other videos as well!

We are now using Flattr

Sebastian — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 21:09:36 +0000

Since the Paypal fiasco some time ago I dedicated some time to finding an innovative alternative. Now the truth is that there are countless providers like Paypal who let you digitally transfer money but I thought that it was time for something more innovative.

Flattr has the subtitle "social micro-payments". You sign up and decide how much money you want to spend on micro-payments (minimum is 2€) each month. Then you click on the "Flattr" button on projects that you like and want to support: film projects, music, art, photography, written text, etc.. At the end of the month your money is split up between all the projects that you "liked".
Here is our Flattr button:

New Samples Footage: 310 frames per second Slow Motion Video

Sebastian — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 15:27:28 +0000

With the 5 Megapixel CMOS sensor we can easily reduce the so called WOI (Window of Interest) to only a small portion of the sensor. The smaller the area gets the higher the maximum possible framerate. For this particular video I used 320x240 and achieved a maximum framerate of 310 fps. This high framerate results in a much shorter possible exposure time (1/310 = 3.2 milliseconds), therefore additional lighting is essential for shooting slow motion footage.

100% free GPL processing workflow

Sebastian — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 12:07:19 +0000

Thanks to Flavio's valuable contribution this website has a new sub site about the research to achieve a 100% free software workflow to post-process video under Linux.

Introduction

The research presented here aims at establishing a digital cinema editing workflow made exclusively under Linux machines. The steps described below start at the point in which we already have a sequence, or many sequences, of digital negative (DNG) files. In the diagram, they correspond to the stages immediately after the third grey box. Everything described from there on has been tested and is documented here.

Even though it is the aim of this documentation to gather information related to the whole process – which includes capturing and monitoring the recording, transferring the data to the computer, playing the JP4 files and finally converting them to DNG sequences - the previous parts are can be retraced by putting together information that can be found at Apertus’ site or that is spread throughout Elphel’s Wiki. We can consider that, therefore, as a second step towards our objective.

Read the full content at GPL Workflow

Apertus closes its Paypal account

Sebastian — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 17:27:48 +0000

We just cannot promote freedom and still use Paypal's services. We closed our Paypal Donation account (effective immediately) and are now looking for an alternative provider who honors the users rights, freedom and liberty.

Aspectus - the open source tablet

Sebastian — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 09:29:37 +0000

Michael Green has started raising funds using a kickstarter hosted project of building "Aspectus" - a viewfinder tablet for Apertus.

Aspectus is an open source, open hardware tablet computer running off of a customized version of the linux operating system. Some of its key features:
• Cortex A8 processor
• 512MB of ram
• up to 32GB of storage (flash based super fast storage!)
• 10.1" hi-res touch screen
• highly customizable linux operating system
• open hardware configuration
• 2GB of free online storage space
• Possible Internal 3G/ GSM internet

For more information please visit the kickstarter project.

And for discussion head on to our new forums where Michael created an Aspectus thread

Should Apertus get its own hosted forum?

Sebastian — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 11:42:25 +0000

The new Poll is now live.

Because there have been several people who had trouble signing up (account activation, etc) on our current forums kindly hosted and maintained by DVInfo we are now starting to consider a solution that puts control back into our own hands.

If we would put up our own hosted forums we would choose a well established open software solution like: phpBB or SMF, we would then adapt the theme to be Apertus-like and integrate it into this website.

The second consideration is using a dedicated mailing list, which is handy for people who do not want to browse through a threaded forum but just want to get any new posts delivered directly to their Inbox. This can also be problem though as overview quickly suffers if post counts go up and mail archives are in general more difficult to look through for new people.

UPDATE: The vote concluded we should get out own hosted forums, DVInfo in the meantime deleted our subforum because they apparently did not like us considering to become independent. The new forum can be accessed from the sidemenu or through this link

Viewfinder Poll Closed

Sebastian — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 10:41:02 +0000

It's time for a new poll and to analyse the results of the last one.

In our last poll we asked:

What kind of viewfinder would you prefer?

The results were:
optical viewfinder plus electronic/LCD viewfinder
53% (193 votes)

7"-10" LCD
26% (94 votes)

electronic viewfinder with eyepiece
12% (44 votes)

optical viewfinder
9% (34 votes)

So the majority wants to work with both an electronic and an optical viewfinder, over half of the remaining votes were cast for using an LCD monitor alone. One factor that would have gone beyond the scope of this poll is the cost of the individual solutions though. Optical viewfinder solutions tend to be rather expensive so they question is if 193 voters would be willing to pay the increased price.... Anyway we now know where we should put our focus and will do more exploring of possibilities. Thanks for all the votes!

Should Apertus get its own hosted forum?

Sebastian — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 10:28:48 +0000

Yes!

70% (14 votes)

I would prefer a mailinglist

10% (2 votes)

No, the current DVInfo Subforum is just fine

20% (4 votes)

Total votes: 20

We are on facebook!

Sebastian — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 12:44:51 +0000

Apertus now has an official page on facebook!. Feel free to "like" it and engage in discussion and suggestions with other fans or developers from the project. We will also try to post some exclusive content of ongoing development there, stay tuned.

DNG Workflow

Sebastian — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 16:51:36 +0000

We closed the Post-Production circle for working with JP4-RAW files with a new tool developed by Paulo Henrique Silva: movie2dng (will soon be renamed to jp4-convert)

This neat piece of software is able to convert the camera internal JP4-RAW movie files to a DNG image sequence that can then be imported into most popular editing software. To make using this tool a little bit easier for people not too familiar with the commandline. We also started creating a GUI that interfaces with movie2dng.

Read more about this on the new Software subpage: DNG Converter.

Post-Cinec2010

Sebastian — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 09:48:36 +0000

Thanks to all the people in the audience who were not opposed to listening to my talk about Apertus in the big conference hall the last Saturday at Cinec. :) Also thanks to the nice people who made this possible and thanks to the people who I met and had a nice chat with!

Finally I have 3 image to shares to give a tiny insight in what a visitor got to see at Cinec:

Apertus at Cinec

Sebastian — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 12:45:45 +0000

Many thanks to the organisers for inviting us to the Cinec 2010 in Munich, Germany from 18th to 20th September 2010. Unfortunately for you visitors we decided to not do it (yet). We are still in the middle of development and so we did not feel like showing anything unfinished to the end users (which is the main audience there) yet. But some of us will still be going to the event. If anyone wants to meet up let us know: on the forums or through our contact form.

Elphel workshop in Bordeaux during RMLL 2010

Sebastian — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 10:13:19 +0000

Elphel is going to organize a workshop at this years RMLL (Libre Software Meeting) in Bordeaux, France on 6th to 11th of July.
The covered topics will also deal with Apertus relevant features like:

JP46 post-processing workflow
Gstreamer plugins for Elphel

For more details check out the original blog post.

Apertus Talk at VideoCamp conference

Sebastian — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 14:30:21 +0000

Some time ago I gave a talk about the Apertus project at a conference called the Videocamp in Vienna. Unfortunately we had to move the second part: "realtime HDR video" to another room before we were about to be kicked from stage ;) Sorry the website hosting the video has stopped its free public service, the video is no longer avaiable.

Poll Change

Sebastian — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 20:11:44 +0000

The sensor frontend poll is now closed and replaced with a new poll asking about your prefered viewfinder configuration.
If you want to express your opinion in a more elaborate way then submitting a poll entry go over to this thread.

Lets do a short analysis of the last poll:

It seems like the (H)DSLR revolution has already reached the majority (33%) of our users and the current camera of choice even for cinematic work is using an APS-C sized sensor. Second place goes to Full Frame sized sensors (24%) now this either means you are shooting on film (reconsidering I could have added another selector for just that) or a Red, 5D Mark II, Genesis or alike. Third place goes to the good old 1/3" CCD video camera, possibly with a 35mm adapter. Or did the adapter guys cheat and vote for the Full Frame option.... :) ?

What kind of viewfinder would you prefer?

Sebastian — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 19:57:43 +0000

7"-10" LCD

26% (94 votes)

electronic viewfinder with eyepiece

12% (44 votes)

optical viewfinder

9% (34 votes)

optical viewfinder plus electronic/LCD viewfinder

53% (193 votes)

Total votes: 365

ElphelVision Progress

Sebastian — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 11:03:54 +0000

ElphelVision Viewfinder software is starting to be useable and will soon be available as Alpha Version 0.3

A series of screenshots like the following one has been added to the Software page.

For more details check out this forum post.