Messages

91

Chronos User Discussion / Re: Moonlit stills, Chronos suitable?

« on: October 17, 2018, 09:31:00 AM »

The noise you're seeing here is actually just dark noise. Black cal won't work below about 60fps, so what you're seeing is an uncalibrated image. Try doing a black cal at 60fps then changing to 10fps.

That's actually what it did. I first did a blackcal an then changed the FPS. as it was very bad, I did a second black cal at 10fps with no improvement, obviously.

@nikon 1: I don't remember the f-stop settings, but it was very closed. the exposure time was also way down to about 1% The moon is indeed very bright.

@Sael: that mars video is actually really good, I guess you're using a magnification of about 250x to 300? Now I'll definitively need to hook up my telescope to the Chronos just for the fun of it

92

Software Dev / Re: Chronos V0.3.1 Beta

« on: October 16, 2018, 11:54:14 AM »

Is there something else missing from the CinemaDNG tags? Even Photoshop cannot open the files. No previews in macOS.

I'm having no trouble with the new beta 9 and Photoshop CS5 now.

93

Chronos User Discussion / Re: Moonlit stills, Chronos suitable?

« on: October 16, 2018, 11:32:41 AM »

I did some tests now using 10 fps as the "long" exposure which is still really short compared to the usual seconds or minutes normally used for astrophotography or videos.
The Chronos is not suitable at all for this task.
See the attached still of the moon. The noise is not some sort of JPEG-artifact but inherent to the camera. I tried my best to let the cam warm up and did a black cal just before this shot.
Also, here's a really blurry video of mars taken also at 10 fps:
https://youtu.be/g-L_JynwLPc

94

Software Dev / Re: Chronos V0.3.1 Beta

« on: October 15, 2018, 01:01:14 PM »

Thanks so much for the excellent feedback! We've tried to fix the reported issues with an updated the beta, please see the first post for a link to the updated camUpdate-v0.3.1-beta-9-geb319ea.zip installer package. To give a brief description of what has changed since the beta-4 package:

Notable Features:
  - Redesign of the white balance window, including a new dialog to edit the color matrix.

Minutiae:
  - Add crosshairs to the white balance window.
  - Add Qt stylesheet to improve focus visibility.
  - Main window exposure now shown in microseconds and shutter angle.
  - Jog wheel now adjusts exposure logarithmically, or by degrees when pressed.
  - The 'close' button on the soft keyboard now applies the entered text.
  - Reorganization of the soft keyboard to include a negative key.

Fixed Bugs:
  - Black ares of the UI become transparent after an HDMI hotplug.
  - HDMI hotplug while on the playback window would revert to live display.
  - Add missing ColorMatrix1 and CalibrationIlluminant1 tags to CinemaDNG files.
  - Fix possible crash of the video system when aborting a file save.
  - Fix possible carsh of the UI when rapidly aborting and re-starting a file save.
  - Fix color correction math so that saturating the image sensor tends towards white.

Also, some bugs that were introduced in beta-4 but now fixed (not mentioned in changelog.txt):
  - Monochrome TIFF now pads the pixel values with least-significant zeroes.
  - H.264 bitrate setting was being ignored and defaulting to 0.25 bpp.

Nice! I did a really quick test. the updateprocess went smooth,  the new features are there and the colored highlight really helps to select stuff with the jogwheel.
Will test it thoroughly sometime this week, especially the color stuff.

95

Software Dev / Re: Chronos V0.3.1 Beta

« on: October 12, 2018, 09:15:36 AM »

Ok now the "new" issues I found:

• The FPS and Frame Time input fields in the Record settings behave erratically. If you enter any FPS and leave with "close", the field remains at that entered value, but does not update the "Sec" field. When then recording the old FPS value is used. If you instead change the lower "Sec" field and leave with close, the recording actually uses that corresponding framerate without updating the FPS field in the UI.
• If you use the (kind of hidden) "Apply" button on either input field, the other one changes correctly. However it sometimes changes the order of magnitude (for example 1000 FPS to 1000000 mFPS) which is not only confusing, but also inconvenient since the magnitude "letter" is not selected for new inputs if you click on the field and has to be deleted manually.
• If you lower the FPS rate below the current one, exposure time also gets lowered in the same rate. For example 1500 FPS to 1000 FPS lowers the exposure from 1000 µS to 660 µS. This is is done "quietly" and therefore easy to miss.
• Not really something changeable, but the red "Low Battery" indication looks a lot like the "recording" light, especially in the dark. We lost one shot that way but luckily the experiment was easy to redo. And you can argue it was user error
• This might not actually be a camera/sw bug, but the produced DNGs can't be opened by my Photoshop (CS5 with CameraRaw 6.7.1). As far as I can tell it basically complains (understandably) that it is has now idea about the used Camera Model – I was however able to open the DNGs with UFRaw, so maybe there are just a few settings missing in the files or Photoshop can't actually display DNGS from "unknown" cameras at all. Probably related to the Error mentioned by JamesB

Some general improvement ideas for a possible future hardware version which surfaced during the last testing:

• a hinged display which can be "detached" and swiveled around would be really handy
• the recording indicator could also be useful on the front in addition to the top and back
• while the cs mount is a great choice for size and available lenses, changing lenses via screwing is not nearly as nice (or quick) as using some form of bayonet-coupling

96

Software Dev / Re: Chronos V0.3.1 Beta

« on: October 10, 2018, 02:46:46 PM »

Nikon1 and I did quite a bit of testing together today and I think we found some more bugs. I'm going to try again sometime this week and post details then.
We also shot some amazing footage, expect some of it to show up on the forums here

97

Chronos User Discussion / Re: Chronos 1.4 Footage Thread

« on: October 09, 2018, 08:52:20 AM »

What is that overlay on the Clip?
Is that done in post or can you add it in Camera already?

It can be done on the Chronos directly using the last beta software.

98

Software Dev / Re: Chronos V0.3.1 Beta

« on: October 08, 2018, 09:14:22 AM »

The offending tag in this case is in the EXIF image metadata, and should be the BodySerialNumber as defined by the EXIF 2.3 standard. It looks like the version of libtiff being used by ImageMagick only supports tags up to EXIF 2.2. I guess I should make a note to remove that tag from the TIFF format if it's not widely supported by image processing software.

The standard is now more than 2 years old, so it's not a really cutting edge feature. I therefore looked around and imagemagick indeed does not support the "new" tags yet. I therefore created an initial pull-request to add those tags. I have now idea if it will work or if it will be accepted, but at least I tried

My pull-request actually got accepted and merged, so the next imagemagick version might support the "new" Tags. I'd say keep them for now!

99

Chronos User Discussion / Re: My external monitor for Chronos

« on: October 07, 2018, 07:19:16 AM »

Ahhhh thank you!

100

Chronos User Discussion / Re: My external monitor for Chronos

« on: October 07, 2018, 06:04:09 AM »

This looks quite promising. What is shown on the last pic? I can't figure it out...

Maybe this last image should just show off production Quality i guess. Details you normaly wont find on an Selling Website. To get an better idea what you get when you buy that exact same monitor.

Yeah but WHAT is ist? does not look like any part of the monitor to me

101

Chronos User Discussion / Re: My external monitor for Chronos

« on: October 07, 2018, 12:35:27 AM »

This looks quite promising. What is shown on the last pic? I can't figure it out...

102

Software Dev / Re: Chronos V0.3.1 Beta

« on: October 05, 2018, 02:53:01 PM »

The offending tag in this case is in the EXIF image metadata, and should be the BodySerialNumber as defined by the EXIF 2.3 standard. It looks like the version of libtiff being used by ImageMagick only supports tags up to EXIF 2.2. I guess I should make a note to remove that tag from the TIFF format if it's not widely supported by image processing software.

The standard is now more than 2 years old, so it's not a really cutting edge feature. I therefore looked around and imagemagick indeed does not support the "new" tags yet. I therefore created an initial pull-request to add those tags. I have now idea if it will work or if it will be accepted, but at least I tried

103

Software Dev / Re: Chronos V0.3.1 Beta

« on: September 29, 2018, 02:53:38 AM »

Here's a video of the translucent UI: https://youtu.be/CraeQdpt9ck
Also: the Demo mode could be enabled by default and just always add the "Play" button to the "Play" Screen, but rename it to "Loop". I had to fiddle around quite a bit to realize how the demo mode works and where to find it

104

Software Dev / Re: Chronos V0.3.1 Beta

« on: September 29, 2018, 02:35:40 AM »

I've now had a chance to test the beta quickly.
Here are my first impresions:

 - Gernerally smooth updateprocess and it feels great to use.
 - YAY! HDMI!  Had no issues at all, recoring in different resolutions and playing back works fine!
 - maybe display the "saving" info also on the HDMI output if possible instead of a black screen
 - The Jog-Wheel select is a great addition, but it is really hard to see what is currently selected. Please make the highlight more pronounced, especially if a text-enty field is selected instead of a button, you can barely make it out.
 - The direction in which the UI elements are scrolled through with the Jog-Wheel differ from screen to screen and just feel inconsistent. If I turn the wheel to the right I'm expecting the "cursor" to go to the right in general.
 - Frame Overlay is a great addition!
 - The Preset-Resolutions are wierdly offset to the top
 - The font in the UI screens is not acually black but you can see the videofeed throuh them. I tried to take a picture of it but it really only is visible in motion. Maybe you set the alpha channel to zero by accident? It is very prominent on the Radioboxes, as they are a larger "hole" throuh the UI.
 - The Focus Aid almost always has as a solid line to the left of the screen. I guess this is inherent to it's design as the line dissapears if you're filming darker colors. This might be avoidable if you copy the left most lines to an invisible bufferzone bevore running the edge-detection. Probably not worth the hassle.
 - The whitebalace should not be set to Tungsten as default. Maybe use Average Daylight?
 - add a quit/canel button to all tabs of the Utils menu...
 - It would be really great to be able to click the wheel in the main menu to start/stop the recording!

105

Software Dev / Re: Software Roadmap - 0.3.1, 0.4.x, etc.

« on: September 28, 2018, 04:03:00 AM »

I miss the web. It would have been onscroll="whatever()" there. But of course, the web has other issues. 😜

That's why an increasingly high number of devices just use HTML/CSS/JS for their UI and slap a basic webengine on there to display it. not as fast as natively coded ui's but allso much less hassle and the same tech on all platforms.