Showing posts with label Samsung. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Samsung. Show all posts

Sunday 1 October 2017

Pushing 360° Video Quality on a Motorcycle

I've been messing around with 360° immersive video at work.  One of the best ways to quickly get familiar with the technology is to use it in a difficult circumstance so you can find its limitations.  At work we're building immersive video to show a virtual walk-through of our school.  If the gimbal and camera we have will work on a motorbike, it'll work stuck to a kid's head as they walk through the school.

There are a number of barriers to admission with 4k video and image stabilization.  Fortunately, the 360Fly4k windshield mount I have is so over engineered that it easily handles the weight and motion of the gimbal and camera rig.

I've previously done 4k video with the 360Fly4k, but it has a big blind spot on it, so this would be my first true 360 4k video.  The Fly is a tough thing that takes great footage, but I'd describe it more as a 300° camera than a true 360 one.

This 4k 360 camera is the Samsung Gear 360.  I'm running it off the camera because the app won't run on my Android non-Samsung phone because I guess Samsung don't want to sell many of these cameras - it's kind of a jerk move on their part so if these things don't sell (because you have to have a Samsung phone to access it remotely), then they're getting what they deserve.

The Gear 360 has a small screen so you can see settings and using the buttons is fairly straightforward, though you'll find yourself constantly accidentally pressing buttons while you're handling it.  The Ricoh Theta 360 is still my ergonomic favourite in terms of control and handling, and they just came out with a 4k version of the Theta - perhaps they'll lend me one to test.

The gimbal is a Moza Guru 360°Camera stabilizer.  The typical gimbal design has weights to the left or right of the camera to keep things balanced, but on a 360 camera that means you're blocking all sorts of sight lines.  The Moza gimbal is vertically stacked with the weights hanging below, mostly out of sight.  It has a power button and a push button joystick that lets you set shooting modes and centre your camera so it's looking where you're going rather that looking down the 'seams' between the two cameras.

Most 360 cameras are actually two or more cameras working together.  The resulting footage is then stitched together in software to make an every direction video.  The raw footage from the Samsung looks like this (on left).  A front and back facing fish-eye camera capturing separate footage.

Because both cameras are capturing different scenes, you can often see where they are stitched together because of a difference in ISO which shows up as a clear line of brightness difference (on the right).  They all tend to be identical, fixed-lens cameras, so the aperture and shutter speed tend to be identical.

The first test video has the Samsung camera set at highest resolution (4096x2048 pixels in video) and 24FPS.  The gimbal is in locked mode, so it's always looking in the same direction even if I go around the corner.  The gimbal provides smooth video by taking the bike's motion out of the video (it's always looking in the same direction as the bike and I rotate around the shot), but a bike's motion is one of the best parts of riding, so for the second shot I set it in tracking mode so it followed the bike's motions.


Uploading it to YouTube out of the Gear 360 Action Director resulted in a flattened video that doesn't allow you to pan.  In order to produce that kind of video in the G360-AD (what a ridiculous name), you need to PRODUCE the video in the software and then share it to YouTube from within the program.  My issue with this is that when you bring the program in it takes an Intel i7 VR ready laptop the better part of twenty minutes (for less than ten minutes of footage) to process it before you can do anything with it.  When you produce it (again) for YouTube you end up waiting another twenty minutes.  The Ricoh Theta saves the video (albeit 1080p equivalent) in a fraction of the time and the resulting saved version is 360 ready for YouTube; the 360Fly software is likewise efficient at 4k.  I'm not sure why I have to wait forty minutes to produce less than ten minutes of footage on the Samsung.  I know it's a lot of data to work through, but it isn't a very streamlined process.

So, after a lot of post processing, the 4096x2048 360° video out of the camera shows up on YouTube at 1440s (s stands for spherical rather than p - pixels - spherical footage is stretched across a wider area and tends to look less sharp).  I'm not sure where my 2048s footage went - I imagine part of that big post processing was to shrink the footage to fit on YouTube more easily?

 If you click on the YouTube logo you can watch it in YouTube and adjust the resolution (bottom right) to see how it looks (make sure to do it full screen to use all your pixels).  If you're lucky enough to be watching it on a 4k display, this will come close to filling it.

The quality is excellent, the microphone remarkably good (they get beaten up pretty badly on motorcycles), but the awkwardness of post processing and the ergonomics of the thing don't make it my first choice.  Trying to manage it with gloves on would be even more frustrating.  What you've got here is a good piece of hardware let down by some weak product design and software.

The software does offer some interesting post processing options in terms of wacky arts filters, but if you're shooting at 4k all this does is drastically reduce the quality of your video.  If you're going to use those filters film at way lower resolution so you don't have to wait for hours while they process.

I'm aiming to go for a ride tomorrow to look at the fall colours after our first frost.  I'll bring the Samsung along and see how well it photographs.  It's promising 15 megapixel 360 images and high dynamic range landscapes, so I'm optimistic.  Photography is timeless and my preferred visual medium anyway, I find video too trapped by the continuity of time.  Maybe the Samsung will be a good photography tool.  Of course, I won't be able to fire the thing remotely because I don't have a Samsung phone...




Follow up:

The next morning I set up the camera on the gimbal for the ride to work.  The camera epically failed to catch any of the magic of the morning mist.  The video I got was starting and stopping every minute and the footage was a mess, full or artifacts and unusable.  

Compared to the robust Ricoh Theta (which I've had out in light rain with no problems) or the bullet proof 360Fly4k, which I've left filming through full on storms, the Samsung gave up the ghost at a bit of fog on an otherwise sunny morning.

This is not a tough camera by any stretch.  Dainty might be a better way to describe it.  For something that's supposed to catch the world around you, it's best used indoors.  Yes, I'm bitter that I couldn't catch anything of that glorious morning ground fog.

Simulated image indeed - this camera wouldn't work that close to an ocean!  If you're looking for a resilient, tough, outdoor camera, this ain't it.

Sunday 14 June 2015

Around The Bay: Part 5, motorcycle media from the trip

The story told in a photo is told as much by the viewer as it is
by the photographer, and it's non-linear.
Since I was solo on the circumnavigation of Georgian Bay I brought along some gear to capture the moment.  I prefer photography.  I think a good photo is an entire world you can get lost in, and unlike video it isn't forcing you to follow along frame by frame.  In a photo you're free to wander with your eyes in a non-linear way.

Having said all that, I brought along some video gear to try out on this trip.  I'd love a GoPro, but since they cost almost as much as my bike did, I got a cheap Chinese knock-off instead (and a cheap knockoff it is!)  The Foscam AC1080 takes fantastic video (full 1080p) and decent photos (up to 12 megapixels), and at only about $140 taxes in, it's less than 1/3 the price of a GoPro.  Where it falls apart is in the fit and finish.  In a week of what I'd describe as gentle use for an 'action camera' the buttons never lined up right with the unit inside the waterproof case (I ended up having to remove the camera to start and stop it), the case itself was so rickety it would just blow over in the wind (the GoPro has a ratchet in the stand that locks in position, the Foscam is just a plastic screw), and the case itself snapped at the base after only a few uses.  It also gets uncomfortably hot when it recharges.  I have some concerns about the physical capabilities of this 'action' camera.

The Foscam takes nice stills too, when it takes them.
The other shaky part of the Foscam is its operation.  You can start it up and it'll stop again for no apparent reason (though this might have to do with convoluted options buried in menus).

You might think the GoPro lacking in options, but it has very streamlined operation and always gets what you're filming (which is vital in action video), and it does it without an LCD or menu options buried three deep.

The Foscam also saves in a .mov file format which Sony Vegas seems determined not to render properly.  If you can get past all that frustration you can get some very nice video out of the Foscam:
... and you can find you've got nothing because it shut off just when you were about to do a one time thing:
A quick video of the boarding of the Chicheemaun ferry in Tobermory - why did I take it from the Olympus Camera around my neck?  Because the Foscam shut off for no apparent reason just as we were about to board.  But hey, when it works it makes nice pictures.

The go-to camera was my trusty Olympus Pen.  This is the best camera I've ever owned - a micro SLR with swappable lenses and full manual control.  It also takes video in a pinch.  This camera punches well above its weight.  If I were to pony up for something better, it would be an Olympus OM-D that takes the same size lenses, and then go on a lens hunt for some macro and telephoto madness.

Also on this trip I brought along a Samsung S5, which takes nice pics and decent video.  Smartphone cameras have gotten so good that I don't think about point and shoot cameras any more, they are redundant.  My only regret is not picking up the bonkers Nokia Lumia 1020 with it's massive camera built in, but then Telus didn't have it.


I'm not really through with the Foscam yet.  Once I've got it worked out, hopefully I can still use it to get some quality video off the bike.  The other day we were out for a ride so I decided to focus on getting some audio instead.  Yes, riding a bike really is as fun as this sounds.  I'm going to look into making some finer audio recordings to catch the sound of riding, it's a different angle on motorbike media.

Over the summer I plan to look into more advanced 3d modelling and micro-photography as well as maybe some drone work.  I'm looking forward to pushing the limits with motorbike media creation.

LINKS

Google Album: photos from the trip
Google made a story: Google Photos auto-arranged pictures from the trip into scrapbook.