Messages

61

Chronos User Discussion / Re: Chronos 1.4 RAW conversion tool - pyraw2dng

« on: April 12, 2018, 01:00:25 AM »

Hi Laura,

Try converting the raw file to DNG using the tool, DNG is just a specialized form of TIFF, image editors may be able to open the DNG as a monochrome 16-bit TIFF.

David

62

Chronos User Discussion / Re: Chronos 1.4 RAW conversion tool - pyraw2dng

« on: April 06, 2018, 07:03:09 PM »

I've just seen this thread and I'm symply blown away by the comparison between RAW and h264.

Although it is a very unpopular question, could you predict a rough time schedule for this update? Can we expect something in that direction this year, maybe this summer?

We're going to get the color improvements into v0.3. The release candidate was going to go out this week but we delayed to get the color changes in, check the Software Dev forum over the next week or two for the release candidate.

Better demosaic is going to be in V0.4 or V0.5 sometime late spring or early summer.

63

Software Dev / Re: Deploying camApp from Qt Creator

« on: March 28, 2018, 10:44:05 PM »

I talked to Foobar, there's no easy way to get the live images from the OMX pipeline that's used for live display. It may be easier to use the Gstreamer pipeline that's used for saving, check videoRecord.cpp. Both of these video frameworks have quite a steep learning curve. If you're not using the LCD that makes things easier. It should be possible to spin up Gstreamer instead of OMX in live display mode.

To get RAW image sensor data you need to configure the video pipeline differently, see the routines for setting up for RAW saving, also in videoRecord.cpp.

You could also get recorded frames, albiet slowly, using the GPMC access used for black cal. Take a look at the black cal functions to see how this works.

David

64

Chronos User Discussion / Re: Disable the confirmation message about recording not saved

« on: March 28, 2018, 10:40:42 PM »

Coming in the next software update, the release candidate for V0.3 should be coming out early next week, check the Software Dev forum.

65

Chronos User Discussion / Re: transfer video to computer via code

« on: March 28, 2018, 08:31:00 PM »

Hi Stephan,

We currently are working on full Ethernet remote control, but there are some limited functions you can do remotely right now. With the v0.2.5 beta software or newer, you can set the camera to automatically save after a trigger. This will get a file onto a local storage device like an SD card. Then, with the camera connected via USB (behaves as a USB to Ethernet bridge), you can then run a script we have that will monitor the card for new files. When it finds one, the file is SCP'd over network to the PC and then deleted from the SD card.

Would this be of interest?

David

EDIT:

Here's the script as it stands. It requires a few libraries and needs to be run on a computer connected to the camera via USB.

The libraries it needs are: plumbum, paramiko

Preparation
Open the script in a text editor and make a change or two:
1. Set localdir to the destination on your computer where you want the files to be copied to
2. The script will look on the SD card by default.  If you want to change this, replace all 4 occurences of mmcblk1p1 in the script with the mount point of the partition that is selected on the camera. This can be checked on the Save Setting screen, accessible from the Play screen. If saving to a USB stick, sda1 is probably the one to use, though sda or sda2 may sometimes be required.
Usage
Open a terminal or command prompt and run the script using:
python2 get_latest_video.py
Troubleshooting
If having the error "paramiko.ssh_exception.SSHException: Server '192.168.12.1' not found in known_hosts," try the solution posted by rvcFS here: http://forum.krontech.ca/index.php?topic=149.msg2717#msg2717

66

Software Dev / Re: Deploying camApp from Qt Creator

« on: March 26, 2018, 06:57:56 PM »

Hi Matom,

A frozen image is expected with exposure trigger enabled, no images will be taken unless a source drives the external input when in that mode.

Getting an image is a little bit of work, the video is all handled by an external framework called OMX (OpenMax), there are calls that allow you to get a buffer containing video data, but I'm not too familiar with them. Foobar may be able to comment more on that.

Are you looking to get raw image sensor data or processed 8bpp data?

David

67

Software Dev / Re: Deploying camApp from Qt Creator

« on: March 23, 2018, 05:27:20 PM »

Hi Matom,

What version did you check out from Github, and what version of software is installed on your camera? There may be a conflict if you've built the wrong software version for the FPGA version on the camera.

David

68

Chronos User Discussion / Re: Trying to synchronize video capture with external trigger

« on: March 16, 2018, 08:56:03 PM »

The best way to do this is to use the new beta software, see the thread in the Software Dev forum.

Set the record length to whatever you want in Record Settings->Record Modes, then set the trigger delay to 0% in Record Settings->Trigger Delay. Turn off Invert and Pullups in Trigger/IO settings, then start recording and leave the camera recording. Once your TTL event occurs, it will save from the point the TTL signal went high, for the duration specified in Record Modes.

I believe the camera may have been capturing only one frame because it was triggering immediately when you started recording, this depends on your settings however.

69

Chronos User Discussion / Re: IR light Source

« on: March 07, 2018, 05:18:12 PM »

Search for IR Illuminator, there are many options, unfortunately it's very hard to tell if they flicker or not before ordering and testing one, unless you can confirm what LED driver they're using. One option is to get one, and if it does flicker, replace the LED driver with a good one.

70

Chronos User Discussion / Re: Chronos 1.4 RAW conversion tool - pyraw2dng

« on: February 26, 2018, 01:16:24 PM »

Well, I tested the heck out of the RAW recording this weekend and I am very impressed with the quality gains. So much so that H.264 seems to be an easy way to destroy your image information.  I believe there should be a way of improving the h.264 output to offer better de-bayering even at the cost of encoding speed.  If DSLRs and Mirrorless cameras can offer h.264 free of most Bayer artifacts the Chronos should be able to do so as well. You will still have less dynamic range and much less color information but at least the color border artifacts should be gone.

I ran into problems with file size as well so the 4GB limit warning was good but it came up even when the file to be saved was just 1.8GB So there is no way of telling.  Your best bet is to have ample card speed and do attempts.   My average RAW file size was 1.67GB by just saving a small part of the action which is always trying to capture what is best.  I had to fill 2 32GB cards in my tests.  Sadly I read that the 12 bit compact RAW is not yet supported but will be so I'll have to wait for that to materialize to see the output.  I also recorded an h.264 version of most clips so I could see the gains in quality.

Much to my surprise H.264 in camera is a horrible conversion compared to the RAW data debayer in Camera RAW, much more so than I expected based on the Krontech frames that were shared.   Noise is still a problem for the RAW files but the extra information and ability to reduce color and luminance noise in Camera RAW before developing is very nice.  The Amount of detail preserved is night and day. Dynamic range is also fantastic by comparison, no contest... the ability to white balance after the fact can also not be understated.  The DNG Converter does a great job with no quality degradation well-done team!

Things that can improve: 

1) Ability to save H.264 and RAW at the same time so you can leave the camera unattended as it takes sometimes 10+min to save a RAW file. Always good to have the H.264 just in case.

2) Ability to eject the SD Card from the save clip dialogue as I ran out of space before saving one time, it would be nice to be able to swap from the saving dialogue box without corruption possibility if force ejected.

3) Camera locked up when card filled and had to do a hard reset. There was a dialogue that said something about card space and I said ok and camera locked up.  Abort button did not respond.

4) When shooting in 720p or lower resolution it would be great to have the button / scrollbar interface on the bottom to amplify the screen real estate and see a larger preview. Only full sensor size seems to require interface to the right. A simple orientation switch would be great.

5) Of course DNG direct from camera which is coming but also a chance to take a second look at H.264 and try to improve the output, the encoder is not doing a proper job of preserving detail and could really be a near RAW detail image without all of these artifacts on edges jumping out.  Most cameras from big manufacturers can do extremely clean H.264 requiring RAW only in specialized situations.  Even if the speed on saving is sacrificed H.264 high-quality encoding should be on the timeline for a software update.  Fingers Crossed X

I am including a frame from RAW and H.264 from one of the videos side by side. Look at the detail and water patterns for artifacts on the H.264, it is night and day difference.  Chronos 1.4 comes alive with RAW. 

I absolutely agree with you there, the in-camera processing needs a lot of improvement. The current project is still Ethernet control, which is turning out to be a much larger project that anticipated. Once that's done we'll be working on a better in-camera video pipeline, the primary goals are better democratic (Likely AHD, same as used by Adobe Camera RAW last time I checked), as well as better color processing. I believe this will fix the h264 quality issues.

Metadata, large file support and write speed increases are also in the works. Right now, you can work around these issues by using an EXT3 formatted eSATA or USB hard drive. Write speeds up to 30MB/s should be achievable currently.

Combined h264 and RAW saving is something we can do shortly as well.

71

Chronos User Discussion / Re: Chronos 1.4 RAW conversion tool - pyraw2dng

« on: February 26, 2018, 01:07:42 PM »

I have made some raw recordings at different resolutions but didn't make a note of the settings.

How can I find out what length and width to put into the script just from the RAW file?

You'll need to use trial and error for now, unfortunately. Try different values for horizontal resolution, leaving the vertical resolution set to 1024, until you get an image that looks clear. Once you have horizontal resolution set correctly, it's much easier to figure out the proper vertical resolution just by looking at the output image.

This conversion tool is very much a stopgap measure until we have this functionality built into the camera.

72

Chronos User Discussion / Re: Chronos 1.4 RAW conversion tool - pyraw2dng

« on: February 22, 2018, 07:58:31 PM »

At least 5-10minutes it was saving at 3-5fps I think

That lines up with the 4GB limit. The camera should warn you about this, this was added between v0.2.3 and 0.2.5, which version are you on?

73

Chronos User Discussion / Re: Chronos 1.4 RAW conversion tool - pyraw2dng

« on: February 21, 2018, 10:16:56 PM »

so i tried my first save a raw file today and it froze and stoped pretty early on i looked at the file on the card and its 4.29 gb do you know why it may have stoped saving and froze? it saved  the h264 just fine before that

How long did it take to freeze approximately? There's currently a limitation with FAT32 formatted cards, they can't handle files over 4GB, if the file you saved was larger that would explain the problem. You can try an EXT3 formatted card if you want to save larger files. exFAT and NTFS support is in the works so this will be solved.

74

Chronos User Discussion / Re: Chronos 1.4 RAW conversion tool - pyraw2dng

« on: February 20, 2018, 12:21:56 PM »

It might be useful if you could post here the advantages of shooting RAW with the Chronos...

I'll let this comparison speak for itself:



Advantages of RAW are far greater control of the image processing pipeline, better color correction, better demosaic, etc. This ultimately results in far sharper and more accurate images than the current in-camera processing provides.

Better in-camera processing is on the way, eventually you should expect in-camera to be almost as good as the raw samples.

You can also find the full scenes, and dng attached.

75

Chronos User Discussion / Chronos 1.4 RAW conversion tool - pyraw2dng

« on: February 20, 2018, 12:13:23 AM »

For those of you itching to shoot RAW on your Chronos, you can now use the raw saving feature in the latest beta software v0.2.5 along with this new conversion tool to make DNG sequences. This method of saving raw is only recommended for legacy workflows, the CinemaDNG saving option should be uses in most cases.

pyraw2dng converts the .raw files saved by Chronos to standard Adobe DNG files.

The pyraw2dng utility is open source, you can view the source code on Github:
https://github.com/krontech/chronos-utils/tree/master/python_raw2dng

Requirements

Python 2.7, available here: https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-278/
This might work in Python 3 as well, but it has not been tested.

During the Windows Python 2.7 installation, ‘install’ "Add Python.exe to Path" as shown below:



Usage

Save your video using the RAW16bit format on the camera. Raw16RJ works, but the images are dark and need to be fixed in post.

Download the script (see link above)

Copy the script file, pyraw2dng.py and the raw 16 bit format video into the same directory.

Open a terminal (command prompt), then navigate to the folder with your videos and script

Execute the script as shown in the example below. You will need to update the -w and -l switches with your actual frame size.
pyraw2dng.py -w (width) -l (length) (filename)

Where:
(width) is the horizontal resolution of your recording
(length) is the vertical resolution of your recording
(filename) is the .raw file you want to convert

An example of a complete command is shown below:
pyraw2dng.py -w 1280 -l 1024 vid.raw

The raw video will be converted and saved as a DNG sequence in a folder of the same name as the .raw file.

Let us know how this works for you!