Messages

61

Chronos User Discussion / Re: 2nd battery

« on: January 15, 2018, 03:52:32 AM »

I thought about buying some additional internal batteries, but in the end decided to adapt some larger batteries I already had. I got a DC-DC converter which takes 11-18V in and pushes out 19.5V.

Just putting it out there as an option some of you might want to think about. Not necessarily cheaper than a spare EN-EL4A, but I didn't want to have to bother swapping batteries in the field.

62

Chronos User Discussion / Re: Let's talk lighting

« on: January 10, 2018, 09:53:15 AM »

Stratus have a new driver board and I've just taken delivery of some and swapped one of the existing boards with a new one.

I've gone up to 38.57kfps with 2.830us exposure and can't see any flicker now. I'm just about to upgrade the other 3 Stratus lights I have with the new driver boards.

The new boards are clearly labelled "100W LED Driver V2" on the back so you can tell if you have the ver. 1 or ver. 2 boards.

I'd say the 4 x Stratus and 1 x Aputure 300D is going to be a good lighting kit.
There's a lot of light there and it all packs up into a couple of cases and will not stress a domestic circuit. It should all run off a 2KW generator if necessary.

63

Chronos User Discussion / Re: Let's talk lighting

« on: January 05, 2018, 08:25:23 AM »

I've just been doing some more tests with the Stratus lights and I've noticed some flicker at high frame rates I didn't see before.

I'm going to try a different power supply on one to see if that makes any difference but above 7000fps it's quite noticeable at the moment. Strange I didn't notice it before.

I've got an Aputure 300D LED light I'm comparing against the Stratus and I was surprised to find that even using a fresnel on the 300D, the Stratus holds it own against a light costing 7 times the price, but the flicker could be a problem if i can't solve it.

Incidentally, the Aputure also flickers if I set it below 100%, but I doubt I'll ever want to run it on anything other than full power with the Chronos.

Has anyone else using the Stratus seen flicker?

64

Software Dev / Re: Very ugly artifacts after upgrade to 0.2.5

« on: January 05, 2018, 03:33:44 AM »

I've just upgraded and before and after black cal and a reboot, recordings are as expected. Suggest you reboot and try again.

65

Chronos User Discussion / Re: How to achieve fastest save times.

« on: January 01, 2018, 05:15:13 AM »

Where's the bottleneck when using the USB interface? I'm getting speeds much higher than 40MB/s between my PC and storage devices using USB 3. I'm getting 200MB/s easily using a fast flash drive.

The eSata interface - what types of storage devices will it support? Could I plug in an eSata HDD and it would be powered from the camera, for instance?

66

Chronos User Discussion / Re: How to achieve fastest save times.

« on: December 31, 2017, 03:07:48 AM »

Will the USB speed increase as well as eSATA?

67

Chronos User Discussion / How to achieve fastest save times.

« on: December 28, 2017, 09:16:09 AM »

This has been discussed in another thread, but I thought it might be worth having a dedicated thread here, especially now the auto save feature is available, as we'll want to dump the full internal RAM to card/USB as quickly as possible.

In my testing, I've not managed to surpass 36MB/sec, so I'm assuming this is the fastest transfer rate currently possible with firmware 0.2.3 beta?

I can achieve this speed with a USB 3 stick, XQD card in a USB adapter and a Sandisk Extreme Pro Class 10 SD card in the slot.

I don't think there's any difference in transfer rate between the internal slot and the USB interface.

Any other observations from anyone?

68

Software Dev / Re: Software V0.3 Beta

« on: December 23, 2017, 08:38:41 AM »

I've had the out of space error when using the same SD card I usually put in the slot but put in a card reader in the USB interface. One reboot didn't fix it but a second did.

69

Software Dev / Re: Software V0.3 Beta

« on: December 15, 2017, 02:53:46 AM »

Woo-Hoo! Me too!

70

Software Dev / Re: Has this image issue been reported?

« on: November 21, 2017, 02:09:23 AM »

Great, that's a useful summary as I couldn't find the specific explanations elsewhere in the forum.

I've had another look for those dead pixels and they are there still, but TBH they will probably only show up in certain lighting conditions so I'd rather wait for a software fix than have to return the camera.

Anyway, looking forward to the new firmware and i'm sure a lot of these problems will then be in the past!

71

Software Dev / Has this image issue been reported?

« on: November 20, 2017, 09:19:21 AM »

I've looked back through the threads but can't find anything about what I'm seeing here:



This can be made more obvious by setting gain to 24dB. As I move the shutter slider from 100%, the green line appears near the top and the exposure seems to change.

ETA: after playing a bit more, it seems performing a black cal. fixes this. I must have been performing a black cal after changing resolution but not after adjusting the shutter.

Also , I had what looked like some dead pixels on all the recordings I made a couple of days ago.



It was a cold day and a lot of the recordings were affected with the horizontal colored dots/bands, but these pixels were showing up on every file in the same place. This morning, I fired up the camera and checked it with a white and black background but those pixels now seem OK. Is this another temperature-related memory problem?

 

72

Software Dev / Re: White screen when trying to save clip

« on: November 18, 2017, 10:12:55 AM »

Thanks, I had tried a GUI version of that utility but it failed.

I've just tried again with command line version and it's worked! Not too difficult to use once you've figured out how it works the first time.

73

Software Dev / Re: White screen when trying to save clip

« on: November 18, 2017, 06:44:57 AM »

Ah yes, that's exactly what's causing it. I've tightened it up and all seems well now.

Presumably, nothing will be damaged inside?

Also, for the corrupt file I had yesterday can you recommend any particular repair software I could try to recover it with?

74

Software Dev / White screen when trying to save clip

« on: November 17, 2017, 09:00:10 AM »

I had this happen to me twice today, for the first time I think. Temperature was 5 Celsius, in case that has a bearing.

I recorded a clip then in the play screen I pressed the jog dial in order to scroll through it to select in and out points but as soon as I press the jog dial, the screen turns white and the camera is locked up and needs a power cycle to recover. Obviously by then I've lost my recording.

Edited to add: I've just tried to play the clip I managed to save after those issues occurred and it's corrupt and won't play in VLC. I can't even copy it off the SD card as Windows is saying it's corrupt and won't allow me to copy. This is the same SD card I've used with the Chronos since I got it. 

So, out of three attempts to get a clip today, they all failed one way or another so I do need to understand why this is happening before I carry on using the camera.

75

Chronos User Discussion / Re: Let's talk lighting

« on: November 01, 2017, 02:04:02 AM »

If only all manufacturers of lamps adhered to a common standard, life would be so much easier, but they don't and you'd still get exaggerated claims from the Chinese who generally don't care about misrepresenting their product's specifications.