Difference between revisions of "User talk:Phil"

Revision as of 22:23, 26 September 2009

Filming Roads & tracks with the 333 & 353!

May 2009

Having issues with the 353 recording in high vibration situations. Seemed to work flawlessly recording from a helmet for the 40minutes it took a pro MTB rider to ride a lap of the super rough Houffalize world cup. But recording from a car over cobbles or from a Motorbike (tarmac roads) seems not possible. The camera stream will stay on with the car set up but will tend to reset on the motorbike. recording smaller files does not help as does jpegs. My thinking is that there is enough space in a cache someplace to deal with the shock & jolts from the MTB race but not enough to deal with the constant lower force vibration of the motorbike or cobbles. I noticed that on cobbles we could always record about the 1st 200meters so maybe the cache is the issue?

Phil. it would be very interesting to find an actual nature of these problems - as you now there is a huge number of cameras mounted on vehicles that do not exhibit them.

First of all - what exactly is reset - does camera reboot, streamer is interrupted or camogm (if you are recording to disk) ? You can check if camera is reboot with

http://camera_ip/phpshell.php?command=uptime

--Andrey.filippov 23:50, 7 May 2009 (CDT)

I tried again yesterday with the car set up & recorded fine video for some hours on the road. We then did some of the cobbled climbs from the Tour of Flanders & started to see the 1st halts to the recording onto the built in HDD. Ive recorded over cobbles fine with a Toyota 4x4 so its a case of just a little too much vibration on my little renault! The camera never reset this time so that may have been the LiPo battery starting to get low. I do not think its a camera issue so much but rather a issue of the hard drive being fixed to the camera.....So the obvious solution as I write this must be a way add some form of vibration dampening between the camera & drive or go for a memory based drive. On a helmet I guess even though the drive is subject to a lot of jolts your head would remove the high frequency stuff that is probably not all that HDD friendly.

Phil, it would beneficial for the camera (video, actually) if the camera is dampened too, not just the HDD. Maybe something like this ? --Andrey.filippov 08:56, 8 May 2009 (CDT)

--Phil 10:28, 9 May 2009 (CDT) Im going for the sata external drive idea for the road based films. But to do this means I have to pull appart the camera & reconnect the zif cable of the internal HDD for times I need the helmetcam footage. Will try the damping idea later on.

Phil, there is a way (not so convenient yet) to have both IDE HDD and SATA connected as described here: 10369#Example_-_setting_SATA_to_be_IDE_slave_.28needed_if_bottom_CF_card_or_internal_HDD_is_installed.29: After that you need to reboot (without disconnecting power) the camera, and SATA will detected as slave (/dev/hdb)--Andrey.filippov 13:34, 9 May 2009 (CDT)

--Phil 03:38, 11 May 2009 (CDT) Cheers Andrey thats good to know I will try it next week.

Filming with 353

http://www.ergovideo.com/Paris-Roubaix2009/images/Image5.jpg

353 24fps full sensor width - Paris Roubaix route

http://www.ergovideo.com/Paris-Roubaix2009/

http://www.ergovideo.com/Schlecks/Phil.jpg

The black bag holds a old USB2 HDD cadi with a Sata 500GB HDD inside. Just made a hole for the Sata cable & used the cadi IDE power. Format the drive to ext2 (set as a primary drive or it will not be easy for the camera to find if you use a big partition!).

Some more 353 images from the Andy & Frank Schleck training film http://www.ergovideo.com/Schlecks/

http://www.ergovideo.com/Schlecks/images/Image4.jpg

Filming 353 normal 16:9 x 25fps 6mm lens

http://www.ergovideo.com/Schlecks/images/bimg&_time=1242298876894.jpg

Some info about our software

http://www.tacxvr.be/files/image/site/software/Tacx%20Trainer%20software/reallifevideo/reallifevideo_340x254.jpg http://www.tacxvr.be/files/image/site/software/Tacx%20Trainer%20software/reallifetraining/reallifetraining_340x254.jpg

Each frame of the 353 video footage is linked to GPS data recorded at the time of filming. Our software can then link the effort made on an indoor trainer to the terrain filmed. So you can feel the grade of the road that your riding. The frame rate will increase if you increase your speed. The video is also linked to a steering frame so you can if you want zoom into the video a bit & steer into the corners for a little more realism! Other displays show the video with your location displayed in another box inside Google Earth! Another type of video we produce has the video play with a cyclist/s in it at its native recorded frame rate. You then replicate the efforts of the rider you can see in the video on the trainer. To do this we measure the riders wattage & then match this data with the GPS data to the video time line. Obviously you can adjust it so you do not need to be at the same level of fitness as our pro riders!

if anyone is interested in any of this please feel free to mail me (email link in left pane) I really love the 333 & 353 cameras of Elphel I started with the 313 when I realised 4-5 years ago that these things can allow me to bypass the terrible low resolution compression issues of DV. I did try to go to HDV a few times but I soon could see that this video actually compressed even worse then DV. We need to fit a good 3hrs of video on our DVDs the footage is all constantly moving often with forests..Its then displayed on HD laptops, projectors etc. The 353 is now at the stage that it can finally get out into the real world away from 240v mains. Ive had it on a helmet with a Lipo & battery pack. There is some very easy to use recording software, gone are the days of 20mins of setting up, typing loads of strings into a console & keeping your fingers crossed, now its just a few clicks on a webpage & go!

http://www.tacxvr.be/files/image/site/software/Tacx%20Trainer%20software/trainersoftware_340x430.jpg Me back when I had some hair!

[1] Image of both video & GE

June 2009

Added a 2nd LiPo battery pack to power the home made 3,5" SATA external drive. Seems to work good & gets the whole set up free of needing a 240v power source. I think I can get about 2-3hrs recording from one pack. Only downside is the pack needs to be fairly close to the camera which could be an issue. At least I can record now from something like a moped (maybe a helmetcam also with backpack) & get a good 2-3hrs of 90% quality Jpeg images. The hard drive can have extra protection from shocks this way also. Power for my hard drive was identical to the 12v 1,5A POE of the 353, wish I had noticed this before. It was even the same connector so I simply plugged the LiPo - POE cable direct into the HDD cadi & hay presto a truly portable 1TB external HDD! 5mins later & I had a 2nd cable made for the spare Lipo & was able to test with the mini HP laptop out in the garden.

Noticed today that the Lan cable quality & length can have an effect on the quality of the image.

Some 1st helmetcam trial images

http://photos-a.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc1/hs090.snc1/4649_91627017617_665262617_1883088_8214878_n.jpg http://photos-g.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc1/hs090.snc1/4649_91627007617_665262617_1883086_6355461_n.jpg