Epidiascope

Nice things keep showing up in my mail, especially recently.

First there was the unexpected gift from Google as a prelude the the Summer of Code, the book Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think, from O’Reilly. I’ve not had a chance to get into it yet, but it’s organized as a series of 38 short-ish portraits of a beautiful solution by various authors. These vignettes should be easier to get through one at a time, especially given that it’s nearly 600 pages long. Thanks Google!

Next the long-backordered and much anticipated Texas Instruments MSP430 eZ430-RF2500 kit arrived. It’s basically a pair of low-power microcontroller dev boards with a built in 2.4-Ghz wireless system. The really nice thing about the TI MSP430 MCU is that (besides being really really low power) it allows low-voltage in circuit programming, bypassing the need for an expensive serial programmer with an external power supply. The kit includes a USB 4-wire programmer which is compatible with the other lower-power non-rf T2012 target boards which are available very cheaply (3 for $10).

I plan to use these in the gps data logging device I’m designing. They should speed prototyping considerably, since they provide simple breakouts and programming for devices which would otherwise be nearly impossible to hand-solder. They should also be useful for any of a hundred little things one can do with a low-power microcontroller. If anyone has any fun ideas for them, let me know…

And the last thing to (mostly) arrive in a medley of boxes is the business’s new video camera and associated bits and pieces. We purchased a Canon Vixia HF10 high-def solid state video camera, the DM-100 microphone, a Velbon DV-7000 tripod, a Pelican 1400 case, and some other odds and ends. It has not arrived yet, but I’m also excitedly looking forward to the Steadicam Merlin.

After unboxing everything, my first reaction to the camera was disbelief at how small it is. This is due in part to the fact that it records to tiny solid-state SDHC cards, getting rid of the need for bulky tapes. It is ridiculously small, small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. This should come in handy for events where we don’t want people to notice us. On the downside, since it’s so small, it won’t exactly over-awe a client the way a huge “professional” style camera would. However, the video it shoots is amazing. The 1920×1080 footage looks crisp and clean in good lighting, and far outperforms other cameras in low-light. I am very glad we did not end up purchasing a standard-definition camera. The eventual plan is (if we end up doing many video gigs) to purchase a Canon XH A1 and use this camera for mobile and backup work.

One downside is the AVCHD output format of the footage. It’s very CPU intensive to play, and there are too many software codecs to choose from for playback. I finally was happy with the playback after figuring out how to get my graphics card to help with the decoding, taking a load off the CPU. Unfortunately, this tends to crash my machine. I’ll need to see if I can figure out how to fix that. The footage itself can be recorded at up to 17 Mbps, meaning that we can fit about 2 hours of footage per 16GB SDHC card.

Another plus is the built in Optical Image Stabilizer. There’s an actual lens element moving to compensate for camera shake. In my first tests, it seems to perform reasonably well, although I’ll have to shoot a bunch more footage to really understand how it performs. The other feature I’m extremely enamored with is the “Instant AF.” This consists of a second lens to the side of the main lens which has the sole purpose of acting as a range-finder for the focus. The result is that this camera changes focus distance nearly instantly, without any of that hunting that typifies standard autofocus. It’s really amazing to see, and I’ll try to post a video at some point in the future.

Another reason we chose this camera over several competing models was the ability to shoot in 24p and 30p modes. The default shooting mode is 60i, which means that it shoots 60 interlaced frames per second, resulting in footage that is slightly less-than-ideal for computer viewing and editing. In 30p and 24p mode, it shoots 30 and 24 progressive frames per second, with each frame containing an entire image, making the footage better for computer editing, better for playback on computer screens, and better for transfer to DVD.

I’ll be taking the camera with me into the city this afternoon, in the hopes that I can gather a bit more footage to mess with. At this point, my main goal is to get comfortable with how the camera performs in various amounts of light, how the focusing and zooming work, discovering the best methods for using the Optical Image stabilizer, and general technique improvement. Obviously some of this will change when I start learning to use the Steadicam, but I want to be comfortable with the basic camera before I start learning to fly.