Everyone knows time-lapse recordings of stuff like sunset, birth, flower blossom opening and plant growth/decay. RNS::’s Rapid Movie plans to bring this capability to your Treo…can it stack up?
Rapid Movie’s GUI is very simple. You get a preview of the camera image where the black rectangle is in the image(due to LCDOverlay). The toggle at the bottom left let’s you set up the recording frequency.
Once running, the program displays each captured frame on-screen:
Rapid Movie can create single shots, Quicktime MOV’s and ‘bunches of jpg’ files:
A variety of prefs settings exist to customize the program to ideally match your needs. For example, the program can stop recording automatically after a preset time or when card space runs low:
Last but not least, here are is a sample of what the program does:
MOV file of a subway train closing in(Treo 680)
This review looked at version 1.0 of Rapid Movie on a Treo 680. The program needs 120k of RAM or memory card space for itself. It also needs a memory card for the files - I recommend a decently fast card with at least 50MB free….
Overall, Rapid Movie delivers what it promised…time-lapse recordings for Treo. If the resolution/quality of your Treo’s camera is good enough for your needs, the 15$ can be a great investment…especially if you use thje discount code CHEAPERMOVIE to get 20% off at the TamsShop(valid forever, btw)!
I’m actually pretty impressed by the quality of the movies it can do.
Now if it only could do them a lot faster (like at least 20 per second) and it were able to record audio.. you’d have a pretty good camcorder app for high quality video. I suppose the codec is probably something pretty big like MJPEG though..
That’s kinda what Live from Toysoft does, but I’ve found it kinda clunky.
Hi,
IMHO, this is a problem of CCD speed mostly.
The exposure times could be too long…add in the processing times and … . 3 to 4 fps is IMHO the max that a Treo could achieve..
Best regards
Tam Hanna
That may be correct, depending on the quality and resolution, that is. The 3G2 files at CIF or QVGA resolution are not good for much aside from video messaging and such. The quality is pretty crappy.
I realize you need a decent amount of processing power to compress video on the fly and do it well. I just wish there were some option for a compression/quality “compromise.”
I wish I could record at a quality of, say 480×360 or even 640×480 (that would rock), even if it meant resorting to a less effecient method of encoding, such as mpeg-2 or DV or MJPEG
Hi,
IMHO, this is where memory card speed comes in to bite you hard. All cards I tested so far were very slow when writing was concerned => limiting data transfer rate…
Best regards
Tam Hanna