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Apertus, the Open Source HD Movie Camera

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the now-that's-a-project dept.

osliving writes "This article takes a tour of the hardware and software behind the innovative Apertus, a real world open source project. Led by Oscar Spierenburg and a team of international developers, the project aims to produce 'an affordable community driven free software and open hardware cinematic HD camera for a professional production environment'."

2 of 152 comments (clear)

  1. Cinema on a Sensor that Small? by bieber · · Score: 4, Informative

    Reading through the article, I'm loving just about everything about this camera, except the most important part of all...the sensor, which is absolutely tiny. Forget about a camera for cinema, with a sensor that size you're going to be struggling to get it not to look like a webcam video. Looking at the company that makes the actual camera element, though, it looks like they also sell a model with a more reasonably sized sensor, but it can only do 5fps. If they really want to pass this thing off as a motion picture camera, they need to find a solution that will give them a big sensor at a respectable frame rate. Hopefully that will be possible in the near future, because the rest of this project looks downright awesome.

  2. Re:Open hardware? by bws111 · · Score: 4, Informative

    I think you are wrong. In "GENERAL TALKING PICTURES CORP. V. WESTERN ELEC. CO., 304 U. S. 175 (1938)" the SCOTUS found that a patent holder CAN authorize a manufacturer to only manufacture for a particular market (home use vs commercial), and that any subsequent purchasers only get the same authorization that the manufacturer had. For example, if MPEG-LA authorized Canon to use MPEG patents in consumer cameras only, and you bought one of those cameras and used it for commercial use, you are infringing the patent.