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Our goal is to create a powerful free and open cinema camera that we as filmmakers love to use. The idea of using an Elphel camera for this particular purpose was born in 2006, found many followers over the years and ultimately resulted in this community driven project entitled "Apertus" and this website.
Latest News:
Poll Change
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.... :) ?
ElphelVision Progress
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.
Near Future: New Camera / New Sensor
With the next generation camera from Elphel called "Elphel 373" (Blog post by Andrey Filippov) soon being hardware complete we were starting to think what this new camera will mean for us filmmakers. The featurelist is long but for us one of the most important changes is definitely USB 2.0 support which will allow us to connect any external HDD or cardreader with an USB cable and record video onto it.
In another blog post Andrey talks about the addition of a second FPGA video output stream at lower resolution which will ultimately solve all the problems we ran into when thinking about how to build our viewfinder options. With this lower resolution stream of the cameras live video we will be able to use a much wider range of lower performance products like a beagleboard with HDMI ouput as viewfinder. This will also allow us to make Apertus PC-free, if you don't consider a beagleboard or similar a PC as well.
After release of the new camera the focus will shift to a new sensor frontend which is the heart of any cinematic camera. This new sensor choice will hopefully be a fundamental improvement and could potentially warp Apertus into the high end of cinematic camera products. To get a better overview of what sensor types and sizes you are currently using we started a poll which you surely have already notice on the right handside of the website. The list of some sensors currently being considered can be found here. On the forum discussion about the future sensors has also been started here.
Apertus twisted
A nice sideeffect of the high resolution of the CMOS sensor used in Apertus is that you can shoot 1088x1920, which is actually just Full HD rotated 90°. No problem with square pixels.
On another sidenote we are evaluation using GStreamer as second (alternative) videodisplay system in ElphelVision. It's node based modular way of working could open up some great new possibilites for us.
New Videos and Programming Progress
There are 2 new videos on the Videos page. Many thanks and credits go to Phil Stone (more videos are available on his youtube profile).
On the other front we are making good progress with the ElphelVision Code. Live video is already working under windows AND linux as well as sending commands to the camera and retrieving image/video information.
Forums and SVN
Thanks to dvinfo.net Apertus now has its own dedicated forum. Most if not all prior discussion threads have already been moved over.
The source code of the first version of Elphel Vision is now also commited to the official SVN respository hosted by Elphel & sourceforge. I will soon add details on how to obtain and contribute to the source code on the Software page.
Welcome !
This site is created to develop Elphel digital cinema cameras. The cinema camera idea started in the first part of 2006 in the mind of a member of the dvinfo forum, and in March 26th 2006 started a new thread called High Definition with Elphel model 333 camera. After the thread grew to over 1000 replys, searching through them to find good information became pretty difficult.
This site was born to try to solve that problem.
Infos are being moved from this page : http://wiki.elphel.com/index.php?title=HD_cinema_camera_Development_FAQ