Author Topic: Chronos V0.3.1 Beta - Updated Oct 15 2018 with beta-9  (Read 50620 times)

foobar

  • Jr. Member
  • **
  • Posts: 65
    • View Profile
Re: Chronos V0.3.1 Beta
« Reply #15 on: October 05, 2018, 12:05:15 PM »
getting erratic behavior with the hdmi, usually doesnt work(just black feed) until i record a clip then go to playback, then it starts giving a video feed other than black pixels
Stoked to have it and see if it can get more reliable, using 502 bright small hd monitor, great to have this option thanks!

getting freezing about 6 times so far when saving in playback, with monitor plugged in, havent tried with out monitor, both in h264 but more in cinema dng, seemed like i only got sucesssful save in super short raw cinema dng clips,  camera becomes frozen and requires restart power cycle,
thats it so far will test more

Thanks for the bug report, unfortunately we are not having much luck in attempting to replicate the issue. We suspect that it might have something to do with your SmallHD monitor. It would be interesting to know if you get the same problem when you have the camera connected via HDMI to a different monitor (or TV).
« Last Edit: October 05, 2018, 06:23:48 PM by foobar »

NiNeff

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Posts: 169
    • View Profile
Re: Chronos V0.3.1 Beta
« Reply #16 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 ;D

ExperimentalPerception

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 32
    • View Profile
Re: Chronos V0.3.1 Beta
« Reply #17 on: October 07, 2018, 10:18:56 PM »
Any plans to support Touch Screen HDMI Monitors?


NiNeff

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Posts: 169
    • View Profile
Re: Chronos V0.3.1 Beta
« Reply #18 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 ;D
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!

ptrautne

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 7
    • View Profile
Re: Chronos V0.3.1 Beta
« Reply #19 on: October 09, 2018, 06:15:01 AM »
I am trying to update one of my cameras and I can't get the update to be found on the USB drive. I have the USB formatted to FAT32 and I am able to save videos to the USB but if I try to eject the USB I get an error and every time I try to update it gives me a message saying can't find


Serial number 00146
Application rev 0.2
FPGA rev 2

Do I need to upgrade to a different rev first? I was able to get the update to work on one of our newer cameras

foobar

  • Jr. Member
  • **
  • Posts: 65
    • View Profile
Re: Chronos V0.3.1 Beta
« Reply #20 on: October 09, 2018, 10:28:37 AM »
I am trying to update one of my cameras and I can't get the update to be found on the USB drive. I have the USB formatted to FAT32 and I am able to save videos to the USB but if I try to eject the USB I get an error and every time I try to update it gives me a message saying can't find


Serial number 00146
Application rev 0.2
FPGA rev 2

Do I need to upgrade to a different rev first? I was able to get the update to work on one of our newer cameras

You should be able to upgrade from any version from 0.2 and newer using  the update package. However the application can sometimes be rather finicky of where it expects to find the update. It is looking for a folder at /media/sda1/camUpdate, but depending on the formatting of your USB drive it might sometimes be mounted at /media/sda/camUpdate if you formatted the USB drive without a partition table.

One way to check is to record some footage, insert the USB drive and go to the Save Settings menu on the Playback screen. If the USB drive appears in the dropdown menu as '/media/sda' then it hasn't been formatted correctly.

A.Angelov

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 9
    • View Profile
Re: Chronos V0.3.1 Beta
« Reply #21 on: October 10, 2018, 10:46:28 AM »
This is AWESOME!

Three crazy questions for you:

1. On your next camera can you have the main ram be based on intel Optane... Look how cheap these are:
https://amzn.to/2QlmOJ5

2. What can I do to speed up saving exports ? like will it be faster to save over Gig-E? Is ESATA working ?

3. I'm getting arouns 1fps saving to a USB 3.0 stick... does that sound right?

Hey Dan,

Right now the fastest saving method is via the eSATA port, which can typically sustain write speeds of about 60MB/s before the CPU runs out of speed, or about 25fps when saving raw at 1280x1024. To use this method you will need a 5V SATA drive (this includes almost all 2.5" drives), and an eSATA+power cable such as these available from Monoprice or Amazon

As for USB flash drives, I have quite a few cheap USB drives that exhibit absolutely terrible write performance (as low as 1fps as you have commented), as far as I can tell it seems to vary quite widely as to how well they perform under heavy write loads.


I have a question Foobar. I tried to do everything that you specified in order to save raw files to SSD via eSata, but I can not manage to make the chronos camera detect the SSD.

I bought 120GB kingston SSD, esata+power cable (exactly as in the amazon link you sent) and I have the 0.3.1 beta version installed.

Can someone point me out how can I make the Chronos recognize the SSD?

Thanks!

BiduleOhm

  • Jr. Member
  • **
  • Posts: 85
    • View Profile
Re: Chronos V0.3.1 Beta
« Reply #22 on: October 10, 2018, 11:01:40 AM »
Did you format the drive?

If yes, which file system did you chose?

Bernard Rousset

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 8
    • View Profile
Re: Chronos V0.3.1 Beta
« Reply #23 on: October 10, 2018, 11:51:09 AM »
Hi,
I agree with BiduleOhm. I got a similar problem both on USB key of large capacity and on a SD card of large capacity also. They were exFAT formatted which is the current format for windows. To be recognized you need to use either FAT32 format if you get a PC computer (you can find a freeware able to do this as current PC with windows 7 and higher only use exFAT for large capacity support) or format in ext2 or ext3 if you are a Linux user.

Hope this help
Bernard
« Last Edit: October 10, 2018, 11:52:55 AM by Bernard Rousset »

A.Angelov

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 9
    • View Profile
Re: Chronos V0.3.1 Beta
« Reply #24 on: October 10, 2018, 12:31:00 PM »
Did you format the drive?

If yes, which file system did you chose?


Oh I forgot to mention that. I formatted it in Ext3 as was suggested before. I also tried the Ntfs, Fat32 and Exfat without success.


A.Angelov

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 9
    • View Profile
Re: Chronos V0.3.1 Beta
« Reply #25 on: October 10, 2018, 12:38:06 PM »
By the way, big thank to David and his team. The last improvements in the software are really amazing and being able to shoot RAW almost converts Chronos 1.4 in another camera (much better one). Keep the great work!

NiNeff

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Posts: 169
    • View Profile
Re: Chronos V0.3.1 Beta
« Reply #26 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 ;)

Nikon1

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 983
    • View Profile
Re: Chronos V0.3.1 Beta
« Reply #27 on: October 11, 2018, 10:02:02 AM »
Very glad, that we finaly made it happen, will post some of that soon here.
Thanks

foobar

  • Jr. Member
  • **
  • Posts: 65
    • View Profile
Re: Chronos V0.3.1 Beta
« Reply #28 on: October 11, 2018, 03:33:44 PM »
I have a question Foobar. I tried to do everything that you specified in order to save raw files to SSD via eSata, but I can not manage to make the chronos camera detect the SSD.

I bought 120GB kingston SSD, esata+power cable (exactly as in the amazon link you sent) and I have the 0.3.1 beta version installed.

Can someone point me out how can I make the Chronos recognize the SSD?

Unfortunately it's a little hard to diagnose why the Chronos isn't recognizing your SSD remotely. If you can open an SSH connection to the camera there are some useful diagnostics that we can run. But first, here are some details of what has worked well for me in the past. The Chronos should accept either a DOS or a GPT partition table, and my SSDs have a partition table as follows:

Code: [Select]
root@dm814x-evm:~# fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1        9729    78148161   83  Linux

Then we can unmount, and reformat the drive as FAT32, and then remount it as follows:
Code: [Select]
root@dm814x-evm:~# umount /dev/sda1
root@dm814x-evm:~# mkfs.vfat -n TESTSSD /dev/sda1
mkfs.vfat 2.11 (12 Mar 2005)
root@dm814x-evm:~# mount -t auto /dev/sda1 /media/sda1

To do the same with an Ext3 filesystem, we would instead use the following commands:
Code: [Select]
root@dm814x-evm:~# umount /dev/sda1
root@dm814x-evm:~# mkfs.ext3 -L TESTSSD /dev/sda1
mke2fs 1.41.14 (22-Dec-2010)
Filesystem label=TESTSSD
OS type: Linux
Block size=4096 (log=2)
Fragment size=4096 (log=2)
Stride=0 blocks, Stripe width=0 blocks
4890624 inodes, 19537040 blocks
976852 blocks (5.00%) reserved for the super user
First data block=0
Maximum filesystem blocks=0
597 block groups
32768 blocks per group, 32768 fragments per group
8192 inodes per group
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
        32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208,
        4096000, 7962624, 11239424

Writing inode tables: done                           
Creating journal (32768 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done

This filesystem will be automatically checked every 26 mounts or
180 days, whichever comes first.  Use tune2fs -c or -i to override.
root@dm814x-evm:~# mount -t auto /dev/sda1 /media/sda1

NiNeff

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Posts: 169
    • View Profile
Re: Chronos V0.3.1 Beta
« Reply #29 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
« Last Edit: October 12, 2018, 09:24:34 AM by NiNeff »