Results of my first XDR Timelapse

[Aaron Newsome]

As silly as it may seem, I've taken stills with my XDR. It's a real pain since it wasn't designed to do this but I had to. It's the highest quality imaging that I own. Of course a DSLR would be a much better tool to take stills with, that's a no brainer - IF I OWNED ONE!!!

I don't. My digital camera is 10 years old and is 2 megapixels and I mean a very crappy two megapixels.

It would seem that adding the ability to take stills with the XDR would be easy easy easy, but it's not likely to happen.

Even more silly, I tried to use my XDR as a portable audio recorder. Again, a $300 recorder would do a much better job but I don't own one of those either. I do own an XDR but it won't record audio without an SDI signal.

It would also seem like adding audio recording to the XDR would be simple but, since it wasn't designed to do this, I'm not holding my breath for it.

[Aaron Newsome]

Originally Posted by John Mitchell

Guys there is a fundamental misunderstanding going on here. MPEG is a long GOP format - an I frame only format merely fills the long GOPs with I frames. A 1 frame GOP would "break" the MPEG format rules for the codecs involved - it's a standard and your NLE expects it. There is a standard technical way to get around this. You can "fool" the GOP into thinking it is full by using a flag that tells it to repeat the one frame as many times as necessary for 1080 or 720 - and the good news, it takes up no extra space. This would at least allow recording to stop instantaenously.

I don't know if you can then force the GOP to play back as one frame only - that would involve another flag or specialised software. It then becomes non-generic or needs post processing. If you have a 35mm DSLR that will do timelapse it currently seems like a better option than the XDR or Nano, but if you don't then the XDR seems like a reasonable, if imperfect solution.

John, AVC H.264 is also a long GOP format. Does AVC-Intra uses a long GOP format as well?

[Dan Keaton]

Originally Posted by Aaron Newsome

It would seem that adding the ability to take stills with the XDR would be easy easy easy, but it's not likely to happen.

Even more silly, I tried to use my XDR as a portable audio recorder. Again, a $300 recorder would do a much better job but I don't own one of those either. I do own an XDR but it won't record audio without an SDI signal.

It would also seem like adding audio recording to the XDR would be simple but, since it wasn't designed to do this, I'm not holding my breath for it.

Dear Aaron,

Without consulting our engineers, we could probably do both.

I feel that you can get a frame capture from our 100 Mbps or better video and get a very decent image.

We could definitely add an audio only mode to the Flash XDR, but would be be worth our time to develop it?

It may be, I for one would like this feature, but we have so many other things to do, I do not see this being developed soon.

For the Still's mode, many cameras have a great still's feature. I know the Canon XL H1's feature is just great. It does not even interfere with the video recording at any time.

I highly doubt that we could add a feature like the XL H1's, one which captures the stills while recording video. We are just too busy handling the video, processing it, and writing it to the CompactFlash cards.


Aaron, I feel that your comments were not actual feature requests, but I wanted to address them anyway. I feel that you would like for us to stay focused at the main task at hand.

[Gints Klimanis]

"I highly doubt that we could add a feature like the XL H1's, one which captures the stills while recording video. We are just too busy handling the video, processing it, and writing it to the CompactFlash cards."

Dan, it would be great to record single or groups of "4:4:4" full color resolution image files in either time-lapse mode or when the Nanoflash is not recording video. The NanoFlash needs to have a number of unique product features. High quality burst and time-lapse photography are two. I'm interested in photo/video features that are not covered by either the Sony EX1 or Nikon D3.

[Mark Job]

Originally Posted by Aaron Newsome

That's incorrect Mark. The Canon camera outputs a very processed signal via the HD-SDI.

.....When I say unprocessed, I am referring to the fact that the signal doesn't get crunched down into 25 Mb HDV 1440 x 1080 HD thick Raster.
The XL H1 stays at full raster HD 1920 x 1080 in uncompressed 1.485 Gigabit output via its HD-SDI.

Originally Posted by Aaron Newsome

First, half the color is thrown away which makes a 4:4:4 signal into a 4:2:2 signal.

....Uh, no its not. The Canon XL H1 is not a 4:4:4 color signal camera in the first place. The H1 is an 8 bit 4:2:2 signal processing camera

Originally Posted by Aaron Newsome

It's no where near straight off the sensor. It has white balance, gamma curve, color matrix, knee, and various other processing of the signal from the sensor.

....Good. I want to be able to color the image if I want to get a specific look. I do believe you can turn off the manual presets if you don't want to alter the camera's output and go with the straight factory output, which pretty much amounts to a RAW output at that point.

Originally Posted by Aaron Newsome

The Viper on the other hand, does deliver raw sensor data in Filmstream mode, completely unprocessed, only fitted in 10bit log 4:4:4 :-)

...The Viper ? Are you kidding me ? You are comparing the XL H1 to the Viper ? This would be like holding a match to a 10.000 Watt DC Arri Arc light ! Man, there's no comparison possible ! The Viper is a 10 bit 4:4:4 log device far superior to even a Red camera at 4K ! You have a 27 Mega pixel sensor feeding RAW data to the output ! All I can say is your Nano clips must look sweet @ 160 Mbit Long GOP.

[John Mitchell]

Originally Posted by Aaron Newsome

John, AVC H.264 is also a long GOP format. Does AVC-Intra uses a long GOP format as well?

It uses some kind of compression :) I'm not really on top of the H264 spec. I can tell you this much: H264 is a product of the MPEG4 group. My 30 seconds of research is that it is definitely a frame by frame recording (not GOP) and that the "intra" also refers to the predictive coding scheme within a frame from macroblock to macroblock. You can read more about it here:

ftp://ftp.panasonic.com/pub/Panasoni..._AVC-Intra.pdf

HTH