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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

#181
post #152
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Cinemagram guys started off down that path, an Instagram clone for animated GIF cinemagraphs, then quickly pivoted toward short videos to compete with Vine and Instagram on similar territory. I'm still not convinced. :-)

Get convinced. These could be a lot of fun. You just need some help with the design/interface, but the tech is great.

Yeah, I think there is a niche for this. One of the main criticisms of vine is that there is a certain magic to pictures compared with video which comes off as more real. We don't want to save the reality of our lives, just the filtered moments.

I really think this could fill a space in between the perfect single shot and the realness of video.

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

#182
post #53

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? :-)

OMG, it works on IE 10! Congrats!

But not working on Chrome or FF :|

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

#185
post #154
post #150

Love the "we'll iMessage you a download link" feature on the web page. Are you using a service for this? Note it doesn't seem to work for me in Germany, it doesn't change the country code, it leaves it at +1 (instead of +49)...

It's a webservice I hacked together that sends iMessages from my old MacBook Pro. :-) It was my understanding that German mobile numbers are written locally starting with 01? [1] e.g. in Australia, my mobile number would be 040x-xxx-xxx. The international version is +61 40x-xxx-xxx. When you select Australia, it will show 04. (OK, I now see how this could be confusing; my apologies.) [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…

Phone numbers in Germany work the same way like you describe with Australia. Internationally you'd have +49 (area code without leading zero) (number) and within Germany you can use (area code with leading zero) (number).

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

#186

Wait, how does this work with the Apple frameworks? I assume you can't go faster than what Apple gives you. If you were to discard every photo, how fast could you theoretically go?

They simply are not using what Apple gives them. They wrote their own JPEG encoder which side-steps any limitations that Apple's own implementation has.

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

#187
It crashes for me every time I take somewhere between 60 and 75 frames with the main camera. With the front-facing camera, I can shoot forever. In the iPhone Settings (somewhere called Diagnosis & Usage), I have a bunch of LowMemory warnings. I'm using an iPhone 4S.

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

#188
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get convinced. These could be a lot of fun. You just need some help with the design/interface, but the tech is great.

Yeah, I think there is a niche for this. One of the main criticisms of vine is that there is a certain magic to pictures compared with video which comes off as more real. We don't want to save the reality of our lives, just the filtered moments. I really think this could fill a space in between the perfect single shot and the realness of video.

Glad to hear it. I feel the same on the format: it's closer to a photo on the left of the spectrum between photo and video, where vine/instagram/cinemagram are on the far right.

You've put it very nicely--there's definitely some magic about a "silent moving picture".

It requires and sparks the imagination in the viewer, evoking emotion perhaps as easily as a carefully crafted cinematic short.

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

#189
post #8

Wow, I never thought I'd see a software optimization be talked about in such breathless amazement.

"discrete cosine transform JPG science" Here's a more interesting link directly from the app developers: http://www.snappylabs.com/blog/snappycam/2013/07/31/iphone-k...

The Android bashing in that article is unfounded: http://www.eggwall.com/2011/09/android-arm-assembly-calling-...

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

#190
post #187

It crashes for me every time I take somewhere between 60 and 75 frames with the main camera. With the front-facing camera, I can shoot forever. In the iPhone Settings (somewhere called Diagnosis & Usage), I have a bunch of LowMemory warnings. I'm using an iPhone 4S.

Thanks for reporting it in!

It seems I enthusiastically chose a larger buffer size that appears to be having some issues on some devices that have a lot of memory pressure.

If you reboot your phone, as awful as that sounds, it will likely fix the issue.

EDIT: I've just submitted an update to Apple that uses a more conservative buffer size.

This aspect is hard to get right: I once used an adaptive buffer size that heeded to memory warnings, but that meant that the buffer filled to lower levels than a conservatively sized buffer.

If only iOS had an opt-in for an *alloc returning 0 instead of these warnings, or at least notifying us of how much space left before we're SIGKILL'ed.

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