Cool My keychain 8gb camera came today...........

[randall1959]

Maybe he needs a defrag. Mine stutters sometimes and it's a good indication I need to defrag.

[etman]

Video specs for those interested.

[VasMan]

I have been reminded tonight of something I had mentioned earlier:

Originally Posted by VasMan

However if you're planning on using it on a micro, like a ParkZone Vapor, Blade mCX or mSR, every gram counts. Without the shell (or heat shrink) the camera weighs in at 9.7g, and that's with the battery.

So, I didn't test it with the camera's stock battery, but used the E-flite Blade mSR battery (120mAh @ 14C) and it hovered very nicely:

E-flite Blade mSR with onboard camcorder (1 min 16 sec)

By the time I recorded the flight the battery already went through some "testing" inside the house (including blade stress testing on furniture ), so it didn't have as much charge left as I wished.

Vas

[ronaldf]

Originally Posted by Tom Frank

Does that camera comparison video you posted stutter for you? It plays back fine on my system... maybe your PC video card/hardware is a possible bottleneck and the camera is better than you thought?

Maybe stutter isn't the proper discription. As I watch it, there appears to be a dropped frame at regular intervals. It is more evident when there is motion. It is not in the clip from the TZ5. When viewed in the media player, the TZ5 clip is smooth, were as the key chain clip has the regular dropped (?) frames.

[tymbrewolf]

Vas can you show your setup for the mSR battery usage?

[edfardos]

Originally Posted by etman

Video specs for those interested.

Thanks for that image.

That confirms the 720 is a stretched image (aspect ratio is 1.5, whereas most video is 1.333 (4x3)).

r,
-edfardos

[edfardos]

Originally Posted by ronaldf

Maybe stutter isn't the proper discription. As I watch it, there appears to be a dropped frame at regular intervals. It is more evident when there is motion. It is not in the clip from the TZ5. When viewed in the media player, the TZ5 clip is smooth, were as the key chain clip has the regular dropped (?) frames.

The flycamone2 has the exact same problem. Best i can tell, they're changing the frame rate by duplicating a frame now and then. It'd be nice to know which frame, so we could use software to remove it and get a more fluid picture.
I see the exact same issue when I convert PAL and NTSC video, there's really no good solution for that.

--edfardos

[Crash One]

Is that skip causing the time/date stamp flashing?

[Absolute0]

I purchased two of the keychain cameras off ebay, one was the cheap 25fps (upsampled from 12.5fps) and the other was the 720x480@30fps cameras that requires an external micro SD memory cards. The good quality camera was purchased from "myzone50" from ebay for around $20USD and has been giving me some battery problems that I want to see if anyone else has encountered.

The camera is able to record video without any problems as long as it is only for a few minutes at a time, however there seem to be battery problems with the device. I have charged the camera for well over 3 hours then attempted to record as long as possible. After 25 minutes of recording, I pressed the top button to stop recording, but it seems the battery is dead as none of the lights are flashing. When plugging into a computer, there was one video file created, that contains 0 bytes and cannot be played. The problems that I am encountering are:
1. Battery life is much less than expected (should be at least 50 minutes and I have only been successful in recording a 10 minute video)
2. If the battery dies in the middle of a recording session, the video file is not saved in time

I have owned several 'spy' camera devices and none of them have experienced the #2 problem I have listed above.

If this is a problem with the battery itself, then I would consider removing the good battery from the 12.5 fps poor quality camera and soldering it into the good quality 30 fps camera. Has anyone else experienced similar problems?

Thanks.

[Tom Frank]

Originally Posted by edfardos

Thanks for that image.

That confirms the 720 is a stretched image (aspect ratio is 1.5, whereas most video is 1.333 (4x3)).

r,
-edfardos

Does the video image actually looked stretched (e.g. everything looks "fat"), or is the image simply wider? The video info shows it recording 720 horizontal pixels, so if the pixels are square as would be normal, you should just get a wider, normal-looking image when displayed on a screen with square pixels.

[Tom Frank]

Originally Posted by edfardos

The flycamone2 has the exact same problem. Best i can tell, they're changing the frame rate by duplicating a frame now and then. It'd be nice to know which frame, so we could use software to remove it and get a more fluid picture.
I see the exact same issue when I convert PAL and NTSC video, there's really no good solution for that.

--edfardos

I think all these small cams use MJPEG video compression, so each frame is a full .JPG picture. That being the case, you could load the clip into an editor like Virtual Dub and step through each frame one at a time to see if there are duplicate frames. If so, you could then snip out the offending frames. But this could be a VERY tedious process to do manually. Maybe there is a very sophisticated editor or video filter with a "remove duplicate frame" function to do all the work, but I don't know of any.

[FR4-Pilot]

I noticed a really long pause in a recent video I took with the car keys cam. Upon examining the frames I noticed 14 consecutive duplicates! This happened a few more times in the video - nothing fancy, just propped it up on my dashboard and drove to lunch.

Either the data compression rate is too high and the cam can't keep up, or it can't write the frames fast enough, problems managing frame buffers, or possibly a power supply issue (mine runs VERY warm, battery capacity not sufficient for the current draw etc.).

Internally some design/performance short cuts are being taken on these cams. But again, for $15 ...

-John

[Crash One]

Originally Posted by Absolute0

I purchased two of the keychain cameras off ebay, one was the cheap 25fps (upsampled from 12.5fps) and the other was the 720x480@30fps cameras that requires an external micro SD memory cards. The good quality camera was purchased from "myzone50" from ebay for around $20USD and has been giving me some battery problems that I want to see if anyone else has encountered.

The camera is able to record video without any problems as long as it is only for a few minutes at a time, however there seem to be battery problems with the device. I have charged the camera for well over 3 hours then attempted to record as long as possible. After 25 minutes of recording, I pressed the top button to stop recording, but it seems the battery is dead as none of the lights are flashing. When plugging into a computer, there was one video file created, that contains 0 bytes and cannot be played. The problems that I am encountering are:
1. Battery life is much less than expected (should be at least 50 minutes and I have only been successful in recording a 10 minute video)
2. If the battery dies in the middle of a recording session, the video file is not saved in time

I have owned several 'spy' camera devices and none of them have experienced the #2 problem I have listed above.

If this is a problem with the battery itself, then I would consider removing the good battery from the 12.5 fps poor quality camera and soldering it into the good quality 30 fps camera. Has anyone else experienced similar problems?

Thanks.

That's who I got mine from. Try a different USB cable. Mine was useless and had me thinking it was the battery.

[FR4-Pilot]

Originally Posted by Tom Frank

Does the video image actually looked stretched (e.g. everything looks "fat"), or is the image simply wider? The video info shows it recording 720 horizontal pixels, so if the pixels are square as would be normal, you should just get a wider, normal-looking image when displayed on a screen with square pixels.

NTSC Cameras (what these cams are*) that record 720x480 video targeted for DV or DVD will actually use non-square pixels so when the video is displayed on (now outdated 4:3 aspect ratio) televisions the resulting aspect ratio is correct (the televisions would compress slightly in the horizontal axis). However, those exact same videos displayed on a computer will appear horizontally stretched because computer monitors display the videos as-is, without any horizontal compression.

If you were to burn the footage as-is from these cams onto a DVD and watch it on an older NTSC format TV & DVD player (or on an older non-wide screen computer monitor in "full screen mode"), everything would look fine (no stretching). If you're just watching on a computer or uploading to youtube then an adjustment can be made if the stretching bothers you (of course it does!).

It's even more confusing because some computer apps automatically adjust for you while displaying - others don't, so sometimes it looks fine and sometimes it looks stretched, depending on what tool you're using to display/view your video.

I've found two solutions you can do in a video editor:

1. Leave the frame size alone but change the aspect ratio to 4:3 (makes the pixels taller than wider).

2. Leave the aspect ratio alone (1:1) and re-size the frame to 640x480 (reduces the number of horizontal pixels).

Then export your video using these settings. Now when that video is displayed "normally" on a computer it should look fine.

-John

* Actually, they're almost NTSC cameras. A frame rate of 29.97 along with the 720x480 resolution would seal the deal. These cams are actually running at a non-standard frame rate - 30.99? so they're close but out of spec.

[ronaldf]

Originally Posted by Crash One

Is that skip causing the time/date stamp flashing?

No, I don't think so. As I watch the original AVI file, the "skip" appears to be unrelated to the date stamp flash.
My key chain cam was listed as a 640 x 480 30 fps and has no internal memory. The memory slot had a spec of 8GB. I'm using an A-data 8GB micro SDHC class 6 card.