Talk: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.
• Support for a movie file-format allowing totally independent frames, and easy appending of frames. Probably MJPEG 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)