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DALSA, the leader in high-resolution digital motion picture cameras, selects Aspex to power its next-Generation Origin® 4K workflow.
DALSA
Founded in 1980 by digital imaging pioneer, Dr. Savvas Chamberlain, DALSA has led the transition from “film-based” capture to digital capture in demanding applications such as high end professional photography, machine vision and medical imaging. Over that period, they have built an international reputation for designing and manufacturing the highest performance imaging solutions available.
http://www.dalsa.com
The product
DALSA 4K Lab-in-a-Box is simply the fastest, most portable and cost-effective solution for reconstructing RAW 4K Bayer image data.
Accelerated by Aspex Semiconductor's powerful and proven "Linedancer" extreme processor technology, the DALSA 4K Lab-in-a-box Workstation reconstructs Origin RAW 4K images into RGb at up to 5 frames per second, 10 to 40 times faster than rendering in software and on par with the speeed of a multi-node render farm, but at a fraction of the costs.
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Customer Success Story
Overview
DALSA Digital Cinema
- The leader in high-resolution digital motion picture cameras.
Challenge
- DALSA's 4K digital cinema camera captures a staggering amount of data which must be transformed from its raw Bayer format to an RGB image that can be used in the post-production workflow..
Solution
- The 4K Lab-in-a-box uses two Aspex Accelera 3000 cards to provide the power of 32,768 processors and enable high-quality 4K reconstruction at 5fps.
Benefits
- Space
- Power
- Money
- Accelera provides a high increase in performance over a standard workstation eliminating the need for PC render farms saving DALSA all of the above!
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The Requirement
DALSA's 4K Origin digital camera captures over 8 million pixels per frame at 16 bits per pixel, 24 frames per second. In order to provide a responsive workflow, their system must be able to convert these frames from Bayer format to RGB at a rate of several frames per second. DALSA has developed sophisticated image processing algorithms to reconstruct the highest quality RGB images, and these algorithms require immense computational power. To achieve this level of performance on standard PC hardware would require a render farm with dozen of workstations.
In addition, DALSA wanted to get their 4K Lab-in-a-box to their customers quickly. There was no time to develop custom hardware to solve the problem.
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“the real magic is what it delivers to our customers..."
"It's like having an entire render farm in a single workstation”
- John Coghill, Vice President and General Manager, DALSA Digital Cinema
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The Solution
DALSA chose the Aspex Accelera 3000 for the image reconstruction because this plug-in card provides the programmable flexibility to achieve the desired image quality and the raw computational power to achieve the desired performance.
DALSA's algorithms were quickly ported to the Aspex platform, the Accelera plug-in card enabled DALSA to get the 4K Lab-in-a-box product to market without spending the time and resources that would have been necessary to develop custom hardware.
The price-performance of the Aspex solution is far superior to that of a render farm. In addition, the space and power requirements of the 4K Lab-in-a-box are substantially lower than those of a render farm.
Moving forward, the software programmability of the Aspex solution will allow DALSA to continue to improve their reconstruction algorithms without hardware changes, and to accelerate other parts of the production workflow as they choose.
"At a technical level, we chose the Aspex platform because of its unique combination of software programmability, scalable performance and fast time to market", said John Coghill, Vice President and General Manager of DALSA Digital Cinema. "But the real magic is what it delivers to our customers - the ability to work with our 16-bit, 4K images, efficiently and cost effectively. It's like having an entire render farm in a single workstation". |
About Accelera
Aspex Accelera consists of a full length PCI-X or PCI-Express plug in board and the software tools customers require to develop their products. Accelera uses four Aspex Linedancer devices containing 4096 processing elements each, an embedded RISC CPU and an ASProCore Controller. Supports Windows 2000, XP, Linux and Mac OS-X.
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