Chronos > Software Dev

Initial feedback

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Critters:
My camera arrived today, only had 20 minutes to play with it at lunch but here's my first set of feedback that is all software related so posting in this forum. Can't wait for you to open up the OS for others to tinker with, i'd love to have a play with the UI. Is that a micro SD card I spy in the bottom of the camera? Is that where the OS is hosted? Will firmware updates be done via USB or putting this card into a PC?


* I think the UI should be on the left edge of the screen. When holding the camera your thumb naturally hooks around the dial and a few times it brushed the screen and triggered one of the buttons. If the menu was on the left then it would fix that and place the menu in a nicer location to operate with the left hand when holding the camera
* The option to do the black calibration should be behind a confirmation popup that could also remind users to cover the lens, given it takes a while to process it's frustrating when you hit it by mistake then have to wait for it to finish then perform it again as the lens was more than likely not covered when it was accidentally triggered. Maybe B/W cal should be in a sub menu?
* A way to manually adjust white balance would be nice, my bad for playing with it in lower than ideal lighting but it was hard to get it to calibrate "not enough light" (or similar) error message

* The zebra exposure is perfect, the focus is confusing. It'd be super helpful to have the option to punch in (magnify the center of the sensor) to fine tune the focus

gyppor:
Great work on the UI, Kron Tech. It's not perfect but I really like using it, it's simple and you get used to it very quickly.

After a few days of using the camera, I like the UI on the right as I also like to use the jog wheel. If I used my left hand to operate touch controls on the left side, I'd have to switch hands or reach over to operate the jog wheel. I HAVE accidentally pressed some buttons, but usually the one that comes up is the record settings menu or black cal. The critical one, recording over the buffer, is protected by a confirmation dialog box. I like how this is implemented.

I also appreciate being able to do the black cal in a single touch. When you take a lot of shots at different exposures and frame rates you do a LOT of black cals. Having it in a sub-menu would get add a step to a process that is already involved, so I feel as though the current implementaion of that button is good.

Agreed on being able to magnify the center of the image. I've been lowering the resolution in order to help with focus, then once focused I bring it back up to whatever I'm shooting at. It would be nice to have a button somewhere to toggle a magnified portion of the image on and off.

Zebras are great, super useful.

I've used the focus aid, it's helpful at very low resolutions where it's hard to see detail or when it's very bright out and you have trouble seeing the screen.


I'll add a suggestion, I would like to be able to set the default encoding frame rate at 30fps. I often forget to do it and end up with 60fps clips that have to be stretched in post. Since I always work with 30fps clips this would be handy.
To go along with footage from HD cameras, it would be useful to be able to select 29.97 fps as well.

Also of note, I've found that inserting an SD card after powering the camera on will not allow it to be detected.  restarting the camera solves this, however if you realize you forgot the SD card after taking a shot, you'll lose that shot. Luckily, USB sticks seem to get successfully detected as soon as they're plugged in. You can therefore save potentially lost footage by saving to a USB stick if you have one handy.

G

Critters:
I must have extra fat thumbs ;)

The SD card thing... I've inserted a card after recording a couple of times (I keep forgetting to put it back in) and have had no issue with it recognizing it and letting me save within a few seconds of inserting with no reboot / no loss of footage

tesla500:
Thanks for the feedback, keep it coming!


* UI on left option should be easy to do.
* I've had requests to be able to enable/disable confirmation for both record over unsaved buffer and black cal, that should be easy too. Probably will have to wait until we have it remembering settings across power cycles to be useful. That's not done yet because if it's done wrong it will be a nightmare to propagate settings over software updates.
* Manual white balance is coming, in fact the whole color processing pipeline is going to be updated. Right now the color correction matrix is based on a white LED spectrum, with white balance multipliers being applied after that. Proper matrix selection will be added.
* Focus aid actually used to just zoom in, I changed it last minute to enable the focus peaking. Focus peaking admittedly isn't working that well yet, it's too sensitive yet not sensitive enough in some ways. Would you prefer me to restore that button to zooming in?
* Once we have the saving of settings done, pretty much everything you can change will be remembered, so if you change the encoding frame rate it will remember that. At the moment the API for the encoder only allows integer frame rates, in the future we'll dig into that and make it support fractional frame rates like 29.97. After all, the encoder doesn't really know the frame rate, that's just metadata that tells it how fast to play back the frames.
* If your SD card isn't being recognized when you insert it after power on, try a different card. The drivers are sometimes finicky and don't like to recognize some cards depending on the controller the card uses. Sandisk and Lexar cards seem to work fine.
* One user has reported corrupt files if you eject the card too soon after saving, I havn't been able to duplicate that so far, it may be an issue with his particular card.

gyppor:
David,

I'm not sure how complex it would be but being able to customize the camera's menus and controls (like menu right/left), switching between zoom and focus peaking, or choosing which buttons we want confirmation dialogs for would be really, really nice. Also having an option to reset each setting to default would be handy - for example, if I accidentally do a white balance calibration and don't have a white sheet with me, I like being able to reboot the camera and restore the factory white balance. An option to do this would be good as one could reset individual settings to default while shooting instead of shutting off and resetting all of them.

I'd like to re-iterate that the beta UI is really quite good, there is certainly room for tweaking but I really like it in general. It's very easy to use and quite intuitive.

Another feature that would be handy is the ability to play back clips from the SD card or USB. This would help when you end up with a full memory card in the field and want to make some room to continue shooting.

Have you had any luck adding black bands top and bottom to allow for using fewer than 96 pixels?After seeing just how sensitive the sensor is, I'm really curious to test the FPS limits of the sensor.

Great work with the camera. It's amazing.

G

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