Home
  • AXIOM Beta
    • Overview
    • Modularity
    • Tech Specs
    • Image Sensors
    • Development Status
    Stay
  • Participate
    • Contributing to apertus°
    • Donate
    • Join the Team
    • Mailinglists
    • Wiki
    • Newsletter
    • IRC
    Stay
  • About
    • Project History
    • apertus°
    • Mission Statement
    • Why Open Source?
    • apertus° Association
    • apertus° Company
    • Team
    • FAQ
    • Sponsors & Benefactors
    • Hardware Contributions
    Stay
  • Contact

Search form

Major Breakthrough: Moving Images from AXIOM Alpha Prototype

Submitted by Sebastian on Fri, 02/28/2014 - 13:45

We have made a major development breakthrough enabling real-time Full HD video output via the AXIOM Alpha prototype’s HDMI port. (The final AXIOM camera is planned to have 3G-SDI instead of HDMI interfaces, but for now we are using what is available on the Zedboard development platform). Our current prototype allows us to output progressive 1080p video at up to 60 FPS downscaled from our 4K Super35 image sensor. This represents the completion of a major milestone on our path to the crowd-funding campaign.

HDMI Output from AXIOM Alpha Prototype at the Berlin Photonics Congress
HDMI Output from AXIOM Alpha Prototype at the Berlin Photonics Congress

So where are the videos?

While the Alpha prototype is working correctly with a wide range of HDMI monitors and screens tested thus far, we overestimated the compatibility of HDMI field recorders (or rather the combinations of HDMI converters and SDI recorders). So far we have not been able to find a combination of devices that is able to record our HDMI stream, even though we have tested countless different modes and formats that are listed as “compatible” in each device’s manual.


Deep Color - and why you probably have a device already supporting it

In marketing terms, anything above 8 bit color depth per channel (24 bit RGB) is called “Deep Color”. The HDMI standard has supported it since 2006 with version 1.3 for 10 bit (30 bit RGB/YCrCb) and 12 bit (36 bit RGB/YCrCb). Surprisingly, a lot of (even older) LCDs already support Deep Color - not natively but via FRC and dithering - despite the fact that manufacturers don’t really advertise this feature. The problem is that only high end video cards support deep color HDMI output and each piece of software has to incorporate unique support for it. As deep color is also still a niche application for PC users, driver support issues will almost certainly start piling up. With this aside, the HDMI driver chip on the AXIOM Alpha already supports Deep Color and as we have captured images at up to 12 bit color depth with our selected image sensor, we’ve found ourselves in a strange situation: on monitors supporting deep color, our camera prototype can display more beautiful images and with greater colour fidelity than most PCs.

Project: 
AXIOM Alpha

2 Comments

11 years ago
Red hot smasher

Couldn't you just reconfigure

  • Reply

Couldn't you just reconfigure the camera to output 8bpc (non Deep Colour) video and record that? Might not look as good but, like you just wrote, 99.99% of people wouldn't be able to view a Deep Colour video in Deep Colour anyway.

11 years ago
Sebastian

The output bitdepth can be

  • Reply

The output bitdepth can be switched easily. Its pretty common to acquire footage at higher bitdepths that the delivery format and many field recorders already do 10 bit recording now.

Add new comment

More information about text formats

Plain text

  • No HTML tags allowed.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.
apertus° is a member of Free Software Foundation Europe and the AXIOM project is certified Open Hardware by Open Source Hardware Association .
apertus Logo
apertus° - open source cinema BV
Wolstraat 21
2000 Antwerp
Belgium
Contact
Contribute
Join the team GitHub repositories Live chat (IRC) Donate
Projects
AXIOM Beta AXIOM Remote
Association
About Contact Team Mission Statement Project Background
apertus° Association
Mortaraplatz 11
1200 Vienna
Austria
Association Details
AXIOM Camera Project Brochure Download:
AXIOM Beta Brochure
Resources
Wiki Regional communities Social media accounts Imprint Privacy Policy
For occasional project updates:
Subscribe to our newsletter


Github Icon Twitter Icon Mastodon Icon Wiki Icon Login Icon Login
Thanks to our Sponsors
© apertus° community 2006-2025
Website content available under CC-BY 4.0 International license