dk

In the end of nineties, I was a demoscene coder. “Demoscene” word won’t tell a lot to the people nowadays, so I should refer to it as “video art”. So, all that “demoscene” was about writing programs, which combined beautiful computer-generated images with the music. Also, there was a music and art parts, but I am not talking about this. Not so long ago, I have downloaded a “Processing” programming/scripting language, which is dedicated to people like me - it has a simple editor and bunch of graphic functions, which allows you to build any graphical “proof of concept” software. It works well in realtime and also it has a very simple to understand code.

So, most recent application I’ve done in Processing is a “Kaleidoscope”. It works well on any Macintosh computer with camera attached, you can get OSX version here. It also changes the image basing on the sound it gets from the microphone.

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Today I had a chance to test a Sony HDR-HC3E camera. It looks similar to usual point-and-click DV camera with one major difference: it can record HDV video. HDV is rather new format, and even if it has “HD” in the name it has nothing to do with HD. And, clearly, HDV is way better than DV - if you take computer screen resolution, it would be 1440×1080 for HDV.

The interesting thing I’ve noticed in it is a smooth slow motion mode. In this mode camera shoots 3 seconds of real-time into 12 seconds of HDV video, which is almost 120 frames per second! The camera itself can record slow-mo video in two modes: after you press a button (regular) or in the 3 seconds before you press the button (in this case camera uses some kind of looped buffer). A rough estimate of 1440 x 1080 x 120 frames x 3 seconds gives us half gigabyte of raw data, which explains, why the camera itself is limited to three seconds of slow-motion only.

The slowmotion itself takes 3 seconds to record into the buffer and 15 seconds to save all the data to DV tape and become ready for next slow-motion shooting. Not bad, Sony!

For those, who’s wondering on how does it look like, I’ve compressed some samples into Mpeg4 format, which all of you guys should be able to see (or download Quicktime player, it does the job good).

Birds at the street.
I am trying to do a yo-yo trick, unsuccesseful as you can see.
Water running from faucet.

As far as you can see, slow-mo video is recorded best in daylight - otherwise it’s badly focused, at least with this camera.