Slashdot Mirror
Apertus, the Open Source HD Movie Camera
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'."
Is open hardware really that big a problem? It's not like opening a Fab is cheap.
Didn't I read someplace that MPAA, in collusion with camera equipment manufacturers and the camera operators' unions, is looking to place patents on these devices so as to preclude competition?
Last time I checked, .mov was a container, not a CODEC.
A .mov file can use a lot of things. Quicktime 7 gives me PNG, JPEG, JPEG 2000, DV, DVCPro, Apple Pixlet, MPEG-4 and H.264 as video CODEC options. Older Quicktime versions would have offered me older CODECs too.
And what's JP4? Never heard of it. I sure hope they don't mean their camera runs on jet fuel.
Unfortunately, while the camera will have some interesting features and can do some things well, it will be hampered by an interface that only a CS grad student could decipher. Further development on future models will come to a standstill as the developers engage in fierce, unyielding debates about minutia. Eventually the camera will be forked into four different projects, with only one making it to market and carrying the same flaws as the first.
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.
This thing is trying to compete with the RED camera system and the 5D Mk. II. As others have said, the sensor is already behind. Everyone doing 2K on the cheap is using the 5D Mk. II as a video camera - it has a bigger, better sensor than anything anywhere in that price bracket, plus Canon's awesome lenses. The next step up is the RED system for 4K, which is just on fire right now because of its revolutionary modularity. This thing is pretty small potatoes compared to either of those two. It might be good for student filmmakers though. A school could buy a batch of them.
That's because in serious cinema (and still), there's no such concept as "the lens." It's "whichever lens is best for this particular lighting situation/distance/position," and you have a bag full of them that you swap out at will. While you can buy some SLR (and possibly cinema, I'm not really familiar with that world) cameras in a package deal with a lens, experienced users generally won't, unless the package just happens to include a lens that they want to have at a discount for buying it with the camera. Shipping a single lens with every camera would just be foolish, and turn away buyers who either already own or just don't want whatever particular lens you chose. Besides, at this point the entire camera has to be purchased piecemeal and assembled, so even if it were standard to include a lens with a camera purchase, it wouldn't exactly be the single issue standing between them and market dominance :/