About

Mission Statement

We intend on creating an affordable community driven free software (FLOSS) and open hardware cinematic HD camera for a professional production environment.

About this Project

The goal is to create a modular camera system consisting of several hardware and software modules around the Elphel free software and open hardware camera to add all cinema relevant features that are required for shooting in-the field. Some Apertus modules deal with mobile power supply, physical camera control, live video preview, etc.

Project History

The idea of creating a cinema camera based on an Elphel 333 started in spring 2006 in the mind of a member of the dvinfo forum, who in March 2006 started a new thread called "High Definition with Elphel model 333 camera". A lot of people got involved and the project grew and developed. As time passed this thread broke the 1.000 posts mark in 2009. Overview really suffered from the length of this thread. As the community gathered to create a website for the project the search for a unique project name was started. From several candidates "Apertus" - which stands for open; free; public; frank, clear in Latin - won the vote to be the project name from now on. Elphel Inc. offered us to host the Apertus website on their servers and we kindly accepted. In addition to the cinema.elphel.com sub-domain we also registered apertus.org (and apert.us) as main project URLs.

Current State of Development

Maybe the most asked question we get is "When is it done?". Please first read the FAQ section as we tried to put some very comprehensive answers in there. So back to the general state of development, this project is constantly evolving so by finishing writing this block it might already be outdated :). But we will try to keep this information up-to-date, promise. The Elphel 353 camera is a great piece of hardware but its not fullfiling all the cinema peoples wishes/dreams a hundred percent, so we are eagerly waiting for the release of the Elphel 373 successor camera. But the new Elphel camera will be highly compatible with the software/hardware of the current one so all progress we make with current software and hardware is not lost as it will also work with the Elphel 373 with very little or no modifications.

From a technical perspective the Elphel 353 camera as it is available now already features everything you need to shoot a movie, but in a way that is not very convinient to operate in the field. So the main focus of Apertus is to bring all the cinema relevant controls in the usabilities foreground and put all the features that are not relevant for film-making or things that a camera operator does not want to deal with in the background. We do not remove any features so if you need to get access to the low level controls that is still very well possible. As a end-user this means that you do not need to be a programmer or even know Linux when controlling the camera.