News
Illustrated Martianism II: An Open Source Movie Camera
Feb
You can dust off the soldering iron and tin, what you have always been waiting for already exists: an Open Source cinema camera. The project is called Apertus (yes, they have to do some marketing, but geeks have never been very good at that).
Without joking, it seems to be a very interesting idea and they are taking it very seriously. It’s a camera based on an open hardware HD camera project, the Elphel 353. The community responsible for the project has been quite active, and currently you can record on external hard drives and control the camera through a computer or tablet that we will use as a viewfinder with a program developed by them. This program allows to control different parameters of the camera such as shutter, gain, recording format, etc… As well as being able to preview the recording, control the signal with a histogram, etc… For now it only mounts ‘C-mount’ or ‘CS-mount’ lenses (with adapter) and even allows the possibility to record in RAW format and to use it to record stereoscopic material.
The interesting thing about all this is that the Open Source community of both hardware and software developments is increasingly powerful and broad, and creates more advanced tools. On top of that, more and more audiovisual projects are emerging that can be used in production (as in the case of Blender in 3D), and therefore begin to be a real alternative for our work. Let’s not forget that some companies that today are leading the market as RED, started making projects that sounded Martian then, and when they were presented, not many years ago, they sounded just as “innocent enlightened visionaries” as these guys sound today.
You have an explanatory video of the project on Youtube:
On the other hand, you have much more information on their website, which is also available in Spanish:
By the way, they have prepared a crowd-funding campaign in case you want to help them to finance the development. Let’s see where it all ends up….
