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Scientific Breakthrough Lets SnappyCam App Take 20 Full-Res Photos Per Second

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Re: Scientific Breakthrough Lets SnappyCam App Take 20 Full-Res Photos Per Second

#161

Post by josh2600 »

jpap wrote: post #91
seldo wrote: post #88

This is neat tech and works pretty much as advertised, but man, this UI is pretty rough. The blue background and curvy borders are strangely superfluous; tapping the left-bottom corner controls pops up an intermediate selector but the right-bottom controls work in-place; taking a shot produces a big "infinity" symbol that fades in and out of view -- I don't know what it means. Good work on tech, please hire a UX spec…

Fair comments, and much appreciated. I did all of the graphics design myself, in the app and on the web. :-) The infinite sign you see does require an explanation. I'll take your advice and think about how it can be done more simply. It's basically telling you, the user, that the capture buffer has filled, and you're now dropping (some) shots.

Have you thought about displaying a semi-transparent bar to show the buffer? Or maybe a one or 2 px white mark creeping up the side of the screen (turning to red as it get towards the top)?

Just some thoughts. If you have a buffer, and I'm gonna get fubarr'd if I hit the limit, you should probably show me the buffer (not just a warning that it's too late).

Re: Scientific Breakthrough Lets SnappyCam App Take 20 Full-Res Photos Per Second

#162

Post by asmosoinio »

jpap wrote: post #98
wingspan wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also doesn't work for me in Chrome on Win8. It does work in IE10, though.

It shudders me to think that IE won over Chrome. :( I saw an issue also reported on here earlier today a few days ago. Sounds to me like a (new) canvas bug in Chrome. There are unfortunately several workarounds for browser bugs in the HTML5 viewer. The AS3 Flash port was surprisingly very solid. I can't wait to share more info on that when it's time for another major release.

Chrome on Mac here. I was also worried it might not work, as after 100% it still took a long time (didn't measure, but maybe 10 seconds?) to actually show anything. Almost closed the tab, lucky I did non.

Cool app + site, congrats! Would love to use this to analyze my disc golf throws, and share with my fellow disc golfers.

Re: Scientific Breakthrough Lets SnappyCam App Take 20 Full-Res Photos Per Second

#163

Post by dlsym »

jpap wrote: post #53
marcamillion wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do these work for you? When I load the site, I see the photo scrub on the right hand side of the screen - and the slider moves up and down...but I don't see the big image loaded in the center of the screen where I expect the image to be. Unless it takes a while to load - in which case I was just being uber impatient.

I saw this a couple of days ago. Are you using Chrome? It might be yet another Chrome canvas bug. :-( Try Safari and let me know if you can? :-)

Does not work in FF 22.0, neither in Chrome: 28.0.1500.71 or Opera. (OS: Linux Mint)

Re: Scientific Breakthrough Lets SnappyCam App Take 20 Full-Res Photos Per Second

#164

Post by jpap »

andrewf wrote: post #160

I think it's fantastic that you've managed to turn a long, hard optimisation slog into a real product win. Add me to the list of Australians willing to buy you a beer - but not back home, I live in SF at the moment :) I'm curious about the low-quality preview you get when scrolling through all the shots. Are you storing low-quality data separately or do you also have a fast, low-qual JPEG decoder? (Is the Huffman enc…

Hey Andrew, would love to catch up over a beer. :-) Drop me a note via email: jpap {at} snappylabs.com

You've got a good eye: as part of the JPEG image compress, I also generate a low-resolution thumbnail that's embedded into each file as Exif metadata (along with geotagging, and other camera settings that define the shot, like exposure).

They are used as a "first-in" placeholder for an image.

The full image is then downsampled and decompressed simultaneously [1] exploiting the fact that the (Retina) screen resolution is often much lower than the full JPEG resolution.

As soon as you start zooming, the image is decompressed yet again at the full resolution and replaced in-place as quickly as possible so hopefully you won't see it. :-)

[1] As outlined in http://jpegclub.org/djpeg/ the technique relies on the fact that the top NxN DCT block of MxM coefficients, N In fact, N == 1 is a trivial inversion and it might be tempting to use it as the low-resolution image instead of a thumbnail, but you still have to unpack all of the DCT coefficients to get to it, which can be expensive (Huffman).

Re: Scientific Breakthrough Lets SnappyCam App Take 20 Full-Res Photos Per Second

#165

Post by marze »

Some questions:

Instead of doing full resolution at 20 fps, can you do a smaller resolution at, say, 160 fps?

If the next generation iPhone processor is faster (a safe bet), do you think your software would allow at least 24 fps, and you could use the iPhone to shoot a 10+ megapixel movie?

Shouldn't Apple have hired you already?

Re: Scientific Breakthrough Lets SnappyCam App Take 20 Full-Res Photos Per Second

#166

Post by jpap »

josh2600 wrote: post #161
jpap wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair comments, and much appreciated. I did all of the graphics design myself, in the app and on the web. :-) The infinite sign you see does require an explanation. I'll take your advice and think about how it can be done more simply. It's basically telling you, the user, that the capture buffer has filled, and you're now dropping (some) shots.

Have you thought about displaying a semi-transparent bar to show the buffer? Or maybe a one or 2 px white mark creeping up the side of the screen (turning to red as it get towards the top)? Just some thoughts. If you have a buffer, and I'm gonna get fubarr'd if I hit the limit, you should probably show me the buffer (not just a warning that it's too late).

Versions 1.x.x of SnappyCam had a linear buffer [1] but I felt it was distracting.

I generally can see the "end" of the circular buffer around the shutter button, so it doesn't seem to be an issue for me. Perhaps I tend to touch it on the lower-right instead of dead-center.

I made an effort to support lefties in the UI (see Advanced Settings), but the buffer doesn't spin the other way just yet. (To be honest, I've had to deprioritise that in favour of other features.)

Are you left handed?

[1] Yes, that's me jumping near the GG bridge. I'm quite good at it now, as you can imagine: http://a3.mzstatic.com/us/r1000/085/Purple/v4/c5/06/d5/c506d...

Re: Scientific Breakthrough Lets SnappyCam App Take 20 Full-Res Photos Per Second

#167

Post by ianb »

I take a fair number of casual action shots – mostly of the kids. To get something to come out I often take a handful of pictures in a row; even that's often not enough, or the "right" scene happens in between these slowish frames. This could be cool for those cases.

Except... I also get annoyed sorting through those pictures afterwards. It would be interesting if with some post-processing it could sort through the pictures some for me, identifying distinct pictures, or filtering out ones that are clearly bad (mostly too blurry), or if fancier maybe doing eye or smile detection. I want to capture the moment a person looks up, before they think about the camera.

Another cool case would be taking photos of movement. If I can track the movement with the camera the picture can come out surprisingly well. But tracking movement is hard. If I had several seconds of pictures, over the course of that time probably I'd track the movement well enough for a few of the photos to come out.

Re: Scientific Breakthrough Lets SnappyCam App Take 20 Full-Res Photos Per Second

#168

Post by Martijn »

ianb wrote: post #167

I take a fair number of casual action shots – mostly of the kids. To get something to come out I often take a handful of pictures in a row; even that's often not enough, or the "right" scene happens in between these slowish frames. This could be cool for those cases. Except... I also get annoyed sorting through those pictures afterwards. It would be interesting if with some post-processing it could sort through the p…

If I remember correctly the automatically sorting through your pictures and picking the best is exactly what Google announced for Google+ at their last I/O keynote.

Re: Scientific Breakthrough Lets SnappyCam App Take 20 Full-Res Photos Per Second

#169

Post by jpap »

marze wrote: post #165

Some questions: Instead of doing full resolution at 20 fps, can you do a smaller resolution at, say, 160 fps? If the next generation iPhone processor is faster (a safe bet), do you think your software would allow at least 24 fps, and you could use the iPhone to shoot a 10+ megapixel movie? Shouldn't Apple have hired you already?

It all comes down to what the hardware supports, ultimately.

I'm not performing any true miracles here: I'm just making best use of the hardware resources available, with some clever software tricks and algorithms.

The iPhone 5 actually supports 60 pictures/sec capture, for example, but Apple has decided for whatever reason, to disable it on iOS 6. If the iPhone 5 ran on iOS 5 (surprise?!) then it would likely run at 60 pictures/sec.

On iOS 7 that all changes: so you'll soon be able to capture at 60 pictures/sec, which is rad.

The rollerblader shown on the TC article was shot at Sunday Streets in the SF Mission District on my iPhone 4S at 60 pictures/sec. The photo quality is somewhat degraded for the web, but it still looks awesome full screen (from the SnappyCam website; the TC embed is in a restricted iframe and can't go full-screen).

I know a couple of great engineers that work at Apple, but haven't spoken with them for one or more years. Sounds like a cool place to work, but so can be working for yourself.

It's been a hard slog--I quit my last full-time job in March 2011--but I'd love to see SnappyCam through and bring to life another startup idea I have in mind. (Some of the YC partners have already seen me pitch it; SnappyCam has been a rather good distraction of late.)

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