Talk:Record

Implementation Discussion

And the final name of this activity is?

Activity's NAME? the candidates are 

Photograph

Record

Capture

or ??? add-here:>record

Feature Requests

Stop-Motion Support

This would be a really nice feature, enabling kids to shoot both time-lapse movies and stop-motion animation. A few examples of what this would enable:

• Time-lapse movies of plants growing, and of their daily cycle
• Time-lapse movies showing the weather over the course of a year
• Time-lapse movies of a kids face over the course of a year.
• Creative stop-motion animations

Key features:

• The ability to shoot and append frames to an existing sequence.
• Ghosting: The last 1-5 frames in the movie should be transparently overlaid over the current camera view to provide a guide for aligning the camera consistent with previous exposures. This would also be very helpful to stop-motion animators.

This would only really be helpful if you can view this from another computer. Standing in front of the camera and screen probably isn't going to be ideal. Specialization is for Insects 19:48, 2 October 2007 (EDT)

• Support for a movie file-format allowing totally independent frames, and easy appending of frames. Probably M-JPEG or MNG would be suitable. Additionally, support for storing the exposure time/date of each frame would be desirable.

Other desirable features:

• Auto time-lapse: The laptop would wake at a preset interval (eg. every 5 minutes), take an exposure and then go back to sleep. Since the camera and subject would both presumably be very still, very long exposure times could be used to deal with low-light conditions (eg. nighttime sequences). The backlight could even be activated as a form of illumination in ultra-low light conditions.
• Editing: Kids would be able to insert, remove and shuffle frames around within a sequence. Additionally, they should be able to manually align frames to compensate for jittery camera positioning.
• Auto-alignment: It might be workable to use motion-estimation to correct a jittering camera-position between frames.
• Smooth low-fps playback: A 10 frame movie would need to be played back at a low framerate to last a satisfying length of time. In order for this to look good, playback could cross-blend between frames rather than flicking from one frame to the next.

Mike260 09:52, 24 July 2007 (EDT)

• Line-in playback: It may be useful if the laptop is able to act as a speaker for another device, like a microphone, CD player, VCR, or musical instrument. This wouldn't require recording -- just routing the audio from the line-in jack directly to the speakers. I'm not sure if the Record activity is the best place for this -- it seems too small a feature for its own activity -- but I can't think of a better one. —Joe 01:01, 26 October 2007 (EDT)

• Filters: Kids may enjoy simple audio/video filters, as commonly found in commodity camcorders (black-and-white, sepia, or psychadelic filters) or recorder toys (pitch shift, flange, robot, or echo filters). —Joe 13:40, 26 October 2007 (EDT)

• Photo/audio link: Tag an audio recording to a photo from the same Record session. This could be a Journal function, but it would be valuable to have Record do it.-Robby 17:23, 16 February 2008 (EST)

• Longer recording of audio: As Flash memory prices continue to fall, Record (or another audio-only activity) should be able to preserve longer conversations. This would be wonderful for oral-history (our-story) or journalism projects for children, especially if they could play back the audio "notes" while using Write to transcribe them or write their stories. -Robby 17:23, 16 February 2008 (EST)

• Longer recording of video: As Flash memory prices continue to fall... -Robby 17:23, 16 February 2008 (EST)

• I'd like to take audio samples at intervals, for example I'd like to be able to capture one minute of audio every hour for a 24 hour period. Also, I'd like to be able to set the sample size and the sampling frequency and duration. -Linton 23 February 2008 (EST)

Keep it Simple, PLEASE

There are (I assume, er, hope) some simple things that could be done, and others that sound like enormous work. First, I would divide and conquer. I disagree with integrating the recorder (in between processing) and player into one application, but that is just my opinion. Perhaps I would like to write some code in the terminal window and stay away from sugar, but I am getting sidetracked here. The Record activity it isn't, it is take/view photo; record/play video-audio combo; record/play audio only. A lot of processing must have to take place "real time", hence the poor picture quality for video. Maybe you can share with other users if they are on your mesh, but I have not figured how to share with other applications, er activities.

I would like a simple audio recorder, with options regarding quality and others features others have mentioned along with VOR (? I think that is the acronym, voice operated recorder, but I seem to think voice operated control VOC). If I could have time stamps that would be extra nice, but wait:) Then I would like to play the audio in my choice of player, er, "activity".

I would like a video recorder, kind of like the current one, except a few things. It doesn't need to record audio, that should be optional. I don't know what the frame rate is, but I would like that to be variable and user defined, say 10 per second, 5, 1 per second, then 1 per 10 seconds, per 20 seconds ... 1 per minute, per hour, etc...and manual - only when button is pressed.

Another application could do processing, morphing intermediate frames ...possibly take it to a Mac for serious video editing, but don't bog down data capture with editing code.

And then the player could... No Need. Aren't plenty of open source photo viewers, audio and video player already available? Standard is better than better.

BobUgh 00:39, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

Feedback from children The-User's

Shutter release is hard to operate as configured 

OLPC Thailand/Ban Samkha/trial-200705#Some Older Issues

--Chief Mike 07:15, 1 October 2007 (EDT)

Cursor pop-up menus (OLPC India, Meerut)

If the cursor is on a pic & you click, the menus don’t appear. I think if the cursor is on the picture for more than a second, the menu should appear, regardless of click. If you don’t like the menu there, then you move the cursor away. This trips up the kids a lot.

--Hbonwit 00:18, 26 April 2008 (EDT)

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Stop Motion

Animation, IMO is a killer app for the OLPC. Great stop motion animation did wonders for political expression behind the cold wall, still remains a valid art medium, and is a great introduction to visual media production. I've read elsewhere that there are plans to do remote shutter for the microscope app. From what I've seen there is only the suggestion. But for true or even decent stop motion you *Have* to have a hands-off way of activating a shutter. I'll be glad to make an activity or at least content how-to once this is a possibility. Specialization is for Insects 19:46, 2 October 2007 (EDT)

Source availability?

hello Record team, the git source link seem to be broken? what's the best way to get a hold of the source? thanks! -johnhuang

The source is not in git. It is at [1] That is now noted in the main page.