Vision Research is a company that makes some pretty amazing high-speed video cameras, which generally have the word Phantom in their name. Their products run the gamut from doing 4K video at 140 frames per second (fps) with the Phantom 65, all the way to an unbelievable 1,400,000 (yes, 1.4 million) fps (though at a mere 128x8 pixels, no M, no K) on the Phantom v710 -- with, of course, a whole breadth of in-between speeds and resolutions, including some pretty impressive frame-rates at 1080p on some models (e.g. 2,560 fps on the v641, to name but one).
This project, then, is an attempt to have a set of open-source utilities for getting data out of the proprietary (though publicly documented) "CINE" files. There are, of course, a number of software packages out there already that will read these files, including the ones from Vision Research, other tools from Glue Tools, and others, but I was unable to find an open-source/free-software one, so... here is this (though note the See Also; I've since discovered other projects doing similar things).
The cameras are fairly expensive, so I imagine their availability is limited. Still, there seem to be more and more people shooting with them (as evidenced by a video search; I got 4110 results as of 2011-02-23, and over 7 million as of 2013-10-08). Add to this the fact that I happen to occassionaly have had access to one, and I have some files here that I want to read, so, here we are.
These tools are currently in their infancy.
Please keep your expectations low for this software, for now.
That said, cineinfo is starting to provide some vaguely-useful
information about a CINE file, and cine-extract will now generate a
series of PPM files (in cine-extract.d by default; changeable with
-d option) from one, one per frame.
There's also a "magic" file (a la /etc/magic). I haven't yet taken
the time to figure out how one would go about installing it on one's
system, but you can run file -M magic foo.cine and it will give some
info. Probably still needs more content there, and probably also
needs to have some of it removed (or migrated to 'magic.verbose' or
something), as the output is really verbose at the moment.
This tooling is based on documentation which, at the time of this writing, was available for public download at either of:
- www.visionresearch.com/devzonedownloads/cine640.pdf (original version used, dated 2007)
- www.visionresearch.com/devzonedownloads/cine705.pdf (updated version -- dated 2011, found 2013)
If you'd like to contribute, please feel free to fork this project from it's primary repository: github/lindes/vrptools
Then, create a topic branch, do your work, push it to your github fork, and send me a pull request. I'll try to be prompt at taking a look.
You're also welcome to submit "Issues" via GitHub. I'd be happy to give a shot at fixing bugs and adding features that are requested that way.
Or drop me a private message (via GitHub, or wherever) with any questions, requests, etc.
Copyright 2011, 2013 by David Lindes. All rights reserved.
The canonical source for this project is github.com/lindes/vrptools.
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.
If you have reason to need a different license, please contact me. It's possible that I could accomodate that, especially for other free-software licenses.
To get a bit of information about a file (note: add a -v option
before filename to get (much) more verbose output):
./cineinfo myfile.cine
To extract each frame as a PPM image:
./cine-extract -d myfile.ppms.d myfile.cine
- Create other output formats, including something suitable for streaming into ffmpeg or similar, for conversion to other formats.
- Find a way to emit (SMPTE-compliant, if possible -- for the framerates we have, it may not make sense) timecode information (or its functional equivalent) in some way (either in sidecar files, or directly encoded into the output stream, where applicable).
- Allow input-file-based output-directory(/file) naming.
- Clean up various aspects of the code, to be more modular, expandable, etc.
- Handle a new "packed" format that exists in more recent cameras.
- Optimization for speed of rendering.
(Like TODO, but more a "this is one way things could go" list. If you want things from this list, please let me know.)
- Add bindings for other languages (python, ruby, perl)?
There's a related project called pycine, which uses native Python code to read CINE files.