minimalistic camcorder?

[mooy 0]

I have just bought a digitalcamera(cheap 80$, not jumpable) and the idea when they made this camera probably was to create a camera that is small(its about as big as a creditcard but thicker 0.09Ibs) and can take digital pictures and some videoclips. That is just all it can. No display or extra memoryslots. When i opend it up I saw just a circutboard,battery and a lens.

Just think, if you could build a minimalistic videocamera an put it on your head. It would just be able to do the needy stuff. Record some video and be light and cheap. Not having moveable parts just a memory where you store your clips. No autofocus, No nightvision or any other crap that you dont use when you skydive. A minimalistic videocamera.

What stuff do you think we need to build that kind of camera?
Memory: Of some kind, where we store the videoclips
USBport: To be able to download the clips to a computer.
ON/OFF switch: As it says.
Battery: So it all work.
Lens and sensor: The little thing that makes the circutboard see.
Circutboard: Were everything is mounted. Not nesserary the lens and sensor.

How big is this gona be? Not to big I think. Can it fit into my helmet?

Later on when we look in to the futures future I think we could make it transmit video down to the ground in real time. (I know that this equipment exist but Im not a billionare)

And some questions to ask ourself:
Does it need any more stuff?
What problems do we face?
And as a last question, Does this thing already exist on the market to a low price?

Think about it!

[PhreeZone 20]

A few of us just had this discussion wednesday in the pub. Solid state cameras would only be applicabe to someone that does'nt want to change lens, is happy with having to download all their video to a computer and not being able to view it on a TV. They also have to be happy not having an archive of their jumps. It has to be firewire or USB 2.0 unless you only want to shoot about 3 frames a second at a tiny resolution. The person that buys this type of camera could never use it in comps. They have to be willing to record with a huge compression and therefor lossy codec. DV footage is about 70 megs a second in raw form. To record a skydive you'd need a gig of flash (not cheap... $450+ right now) to do just one. Even MPEG2 is still 40+ megs a second. Unles you are willing to find a format that records at about 10 meg a second the price of the flash memory will be more expensive them a whole libary of DV tapes.

I've used night shot on skydives, I've used autofocus, zoom has got me many great shots and I've used about every fuction on my PC110. There is no way you could get me to give up the versitility of it for something that just sits there to record.

We also talked about the wireless transmission but I think Scoby can cover why thats just not practicle.

Yesterday is history
And tomorrow is a mystery

Parachutemanuals.com

[Zlew 0]

Ditto
Memory is going to be the biggest problem. Even if you had some sort of encoder that compressed it for you down to streaming size.... that has to ad bulk and $ to get it there. It would be fun to have a credit card you could glue flush to a protec face plate and shoot POV on every jump (as a fun jumper). If you could pull it off so that it compressed itslef to something like 780K/sec or even 2 M/sec it would be cool. I've rendered some video in Premiere at 2 meg that looks great blown all the way up on the screen of a 19 inch mon..

SO: for that you would need a lense (wide angle I assume).
CCD and encoder, memory
and a way to get it into a computer or other camera.

I bet in the next year or two something like this exists.

Z

[Casch 0]

It would be nice if a new helmet could be designed with a build in camera with all the options that the newer Sony's have. I think it would be pretty do-able. Maybe have A/V ports on the back of the helmet so you can plug it right into mixing equipment or a tv. And have the camera incorporated into the helmet so well that you would hardly be able to tell it was there...no snag points

[PhreeZone 20]

Next item to thinl about is do you want to spend 1200 on an intergrated helmet cam or 1600 on a system that you can use to record Christmas, holidays, and general video stuff? I've got 3 complete DV tapes this year for just family stuff that i would have never thought about holding a helmet up to record it. Then you hit the oh... now I want to start filiming 4 way or tandems... now I have to go buy a full camera at 1600 in addition to the 1200 set up I already.

Most people that want a system like this have never jumped video before and therefore have never experienced the Gotta get the perfect shot issues like most camera people have ended up with at some point. Freeflying it is extremely easy to go low and if you are just hanging out just to get that perfect shot... your very shortly going to have a cypres fire. Learn to fly, learn to land, then learn to really fly, then think about a camera. Don't think that just since you only want your POV recorded your immune to the gotta get the shot issues.

Yesterday is history
And tomorrow is a mystery

Parachutemanuals.com

[MarBrock 0]

Solid state cameras seem impractical for freefall video at this point, but the technology is borderline and improving rapidly, so I expect to see practical solid state cameras in a year or two. Miniaturization of the camera and optics also suggests interesting possibilities. You can buy a video camera the size of a quarter (but thicker), without any recording device, with decent resolution (500 lines, TV quality) and a 6x zoom, for less than $500. You must attach this camera by wire to a separate camcorder or other recording device, but a wireless connection is also possible.

I've seen an even smaller camera (with lower resolution, 380 lines) with a built-in 2.4 ghz wireless transmitter. This camera and receiver (which you must attach to a camcorder or other recording device) is even less expensive. The camera and transmitter operate on 4 AA batteries or an equivalent rechargable. The transmitter's range (2000 feet) is not sufficient for sky-to-ground transmission, but the camera has many interesting possibilities for skydiving regardless. You could actually put this camera in a skyball and transmit video to a recorder worn on your body. You'd then have an automated camera flyer. Obviously, you shouldn't try it without a lot of experience, since you could easily lose the camera.

[Cajones 0]

I'm seeing some good thoughts on some things here. I like the path of a helmet without snag points. The Sky Pimp helmet is the closest thing going right now. More useable than the factory diver.

I've done some experimenting with the 2.4GHz micro-cameras (ala X10) including an enclosure to mount on the wing, looking back at the door. The resolution is sub-par for anything better than VHS. The claimed 380 lines of these cameras is not there, and the color is comparable to a picasso.

I've also built a very successful air-to-ground camera setup. It was also based on 2.4GHz, but the results were very respectable. The transmitter was based on a military audio/video transmitter, so the power may have been a bit more than the FCC would like to see flying around above any cities. The key factors for wireless live cams most overlooked are the antennas and cabling/connectors. I lost my wireless rig when my house burned down, or I would have been using it during the Freefall Convention.

I have considered solid-state recording for a few years now. The biggest attraction comes in the form of edits. Much of the time spent with non-linear edits (i.e. computer editing) is the actual capture of footage. With a solid-state recording, the process could become nearly automated. My vision is to land after filming a standard tandem video, walk over to the "video shack" where my footage is wirelessly transmitted in a matter of seconds to the editing computer. The computer breaks the footage apart, selecting scenes that I have recorded "script style" (recording follows a specific timeline such as student dressing, interview, walk to the plane, take off, student on ride to altitude/hooking up, skydive, landing, interview) and lays them on a timeline, adds music in the proper places, and encodes to a SVCD/DVD. This could potentially produce a final product in less time than it would take to watch the actual footage. Non-linear edits, that take less time than linear-edits!

We've seen the video industry poking at this sort of technology. Sony did produce a mini disc based camcorder that never really took off. The image was a bit lower in quality than miniDV, and each minidisc was limited to about 12 minutes of video. Fine for skydiving video, but it didn't record in a format that could be fed into any existing editing software. The "built-in" non-linear editing was difficult to use and too time-consuming. With the introduction of the IP family of Sony cameras we are seeing a move to MPEG compressors integrated with the cameras and the potential for use of pre-compressed footage. The IP line, however, shares a difficult barrier with the minidisc camera. It still does not have a good way of sending the footage to a computer, where it can be edited. They have addressed the issues of "lossy" MPEG cmpression by introducing higher resolutions, so the final product is closer to miniDV quality, but still no easy way to go to non-linear.

Development of tighter compression is an emerging science. Fractals have become so complex they only exist in computers. The goal of any compression is to produce the smallest file without stepping on the initial file. Realistically, we are still not producing the quality we want, at the bit rates we can store economically. We are seeing this as an issue with larger file sizes in digital still photography. This may be the caveat we need to make video solid state.

There is much discussion of term costs with solid-state and emulsion film. If you take enough pictures with a $5000 camera that does not use film, the camera will pay for itself when compared to a camera that consumes $5 in film every 24 pictures. Sounds like a stretch with miniDV, since we can reuse the film (I don't, and I recommend that you don't reuse tapes, also), but the more devices that are hungry for huge amounts of solid-state memory, the cheaper it will become. We saw this with SDRAM, DDR, and especially RIMMS - higher demand = higher production = cheaper cost-per-unit.

It can be done. It can be done with existing technology. It can be done with off-the-shelf components. If I had the financial resources, I'd have already done it. We will just have to wait until Sony or some other company takes the leap, or we'll have to do it ourselves. Anyone want to make a donation?

The laws of physics are strictly enforced.

[mooy 0]

Its me again.
And Yes I don't jump with a camera yet. The thing is that I have seen too many people with bad necks from videoskydiving.

I saw a product just now. Its not great or even good but the ide is there. http://www.aiptek.de/produkte/pocket_dv.html
http://www.provantage.com/scripts/go.dll/-s/fp_70042

/Robin

[mooy 0]

And just when you hit the reply button you find the big broter.
http://www.aiptek.com/products/digital/dv2.htm

Ok, and I should add that this camera isn't the solution either. But its gettning better.

Its only the begning!
/Robin

[diverds 0]

Did you see that it can only hold 2 minutes of video and that is at 10 frames per second. I think the real dv cameras are at just under 30 frames per second. I would guess that 10 fps would be pretty shotty video.

Skydive Radio

[PhreeZone 20]

For that size.. the IP series from Sony does all that and about anything else you need out of a camera (minus the firewire, computer editing, and LANC ports).

Yesterday is history
And tomorrow is a mystery

Parachutemanuals.com

[mooy 0]

You are right about that. But my guess is that this camera weight about half as a ip camera and cost just a 1/10 of a ip. And yes it lack of memory.
Yes The IP is MUCH better but try to see where I want to go.
-Not expensive
-Light weight
-Find the products that can give sony PC/IP a match


No question about it. I like the IP camera. But I think you could go one step further.

/Robin