I felt good this afternoon, after the injections this morning. It was a beautiful day, and I'd been forbidden to work. I went to the range for some camera time. Had a great time. Learned a lot about the camera ... learned a bunch this evening about one of my movie programs. It's not perfect ... but it should get better.



Gary

The clips actually appear in reverse order to how they were shot. I've fiddled with the speed of play a bit. That will get better. Actually, the green ones that appear fast, should be slower. Not sure what I did wrong. And, maybe someone knows ... when I play them here, I can't find a way to just advance one frame at a time with the arrow buttons (after pause). Would another export format be better? Am I overlooking something obvious?

All were shot at 50 yards. You'll see the placement was not too shabby.

That was the 186 grain Spitzer @



That's about 235 foot pounds measured 10 yards from the muzzle. The slugs are .315" diameter.

Gary

Actually, here's another method of posting thje movie. Might allow more frame control if viewing it at Photobucket itself.

[s434.photobucket.com]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/02/2010 02:55AM by barnespneumatic.

Well - that's the same. I could play it frame by frame on the laptop ... hoped to do that with the clips. Not yet though.

The writing on the paddles says "1,000 Frames Per Second" ... I put it there to give the auto focus something to grab onto. It's still less than crisp ... but a bunch of that is the speed, and some is the flourscent colors. Camera lenses don't really like them.

Gary

There's a learning curve.

Then, there's this one ... Quicktime. What works best for ya?



Gary



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/02/2010 03:43AM by barnespneumatic.

Moving it back to the top.

BTW ... Those target spots are the size of a nickle. Shooting @ 50 yrds, and "holding off" 'cause I didn't want to mess up my 150 yard hold until I get back out there. The slugs are working really well.

Gary

Hope everyone is having a nice Easter weekend. God Bless.

Happy Easter to you too Gary! That is some mighty fine shooting (those spitzers seem to fly very nicely!) and nicely captured on video. The Switchblade is still holding up well and the colours will leave you in no doubt as to a hit, that's for sure!
The version in your first post worked best for me.
Cheers
Neil

Neil,

Funny thing. I picked up a few of the "splat" bases that come off the Switchblade Target paddles.



The slugs start out @ 186 grains. I had 2 of the splats here in the office. I weighed them. 18.14 grains .... BOTH of them! haha. Pretty consistent ... haha.

Gary

Gary,

I like the first video best, the second video seems to be blurry. The different export file types have different types of compression and/or file size reduction by stripping out pixels.

Looks like the self resetting target works exactly as planned.

Lon

Nice videos Gary. The first version looks better to me. I found the same problem with frame view way back when. I've still not found a player that will let the viewer step through frame by frame like you can with the source video. That's why I had to start inserting frame captures into the movies.

Yeah - I looked pretty hard, can't find any frame capture options on my programs. Probably there somewhere.

I also found that when the camera was closer to the topic, the action seemed faster, no matter how I tried to alter the play speed.

Gary

I was thinking, perhaps it's because the movie is being streamed, or at least - being watched while it's being downloaded - with the player just a bit behind the download. Might be if you download the movie, then you can fiddle with it more - frame to frame.

Gary

I thought you were using Adobe Premiere? That has frame capture and makes it pretty easy to insert the frames in the action or repeat them after the motion shot.

I do have that ... and - I'd be grateful if you'd point out where it is. Thanks.

Gary

OK ... I've found the area. I'll study it Jerry.

Hey Guys ...

There's been nearly no chatter on this thread at all. Only Neil and Jerry. Are you guys totally bored with high speed video now? What's that ... 60-70 views already ... the "no time" excuse doesn't hold ... the numbers already counted the views ... pretty minimal return on effort. And that's exactly why more people don't make entertaining videos for us to view ...

Gary

Sorry Gary, I was hoping it would clear up.. I'm getting " Invalid file structure unable to load video" message even with quicktime and my MAC?

Kent

Hi Kent,

Happy Easter!

Are you normally able to access Photobucket? One of the above is just a link. One embedded. At least two are Windows format ... and a couple Quicktime. That's what I'm trying to figure out. So; sorry you can't access it.

Might be something to do with the fact that the movie was "first" exported in a Windows format. I went back to the orig. clips as altered in the movie program, and exported a new copy in Quicktime. Seemed that should be clean ... but it wasn't clear ... and you can't access it at all. That's odd.

Have you tried hosting any high speed videos with your camera? Just for testing. I fear Cedric is still sitting there, in front of his screen, with the CD drawer spinning wildly ... and him in a trance. hehe. Don't think we've seen him since he got his. These things are just plain dangerous. ;?) None of us may survive to learn all that's needed.

I just tried all day to get my camera into a mode/function where I could take some family snaps of the Easter gathering. If I'd have had a hammer handy, it would have all been over. Could NOT get it out of Best Shot. Could NOT get auto focus to work. Could not get the side lens button to show anything at all on the screen. Could take a couple of flash pics (because it would demand "Open Flash" and refuse to do anything else until you did ... then it would have a banner on the screen saying "Flash Cooling" for about ten minutes. Great, great fun. Sometimes the "menu" you want is accessed by hitting the "menu" button. Sometimes the menu you need is accessed by hitting the "up" arrow. Sometimes the menu you need is accessed by hitting "set". And, I never have any idea when is when. Pretty much it's never set so that you can take the pic you wish to take. So long as you have ten minutes to set it up ... and remember absolutely everything you've forgotten ... then it's just fine. Of course, by then, the roon has cleared of all people, the sun has set, and the mood is definitely broken. It's for someone far more intellegent than myself.

But ... I got it for the high speed video. All I have to do is devote my entire life to every button and combination of buttons. It's simple!

Gary

Cool video Gary! It's nice to see the slug in super slow motion, you can almost feel the power of the impact.

Someday, someone will invent a digital camera that can figure out by itself what the heck you're trying to do. The problem with them now is that they're all apparently designed by the same team that figures out how to make "phone trees". You know...phone trees: the automated telephone answering systems that make it completely impossible to speak to a real, live person when you call any company larger than a mall kiosk?

Maybe someday you'll be able to merely curse at your camera in a variety of different languages and it'll figure out what you want to do through advanced voice recognition. Or more likely, it'll just sense the intensity and frequency of a limited number of swear words and just revert to whatever mode seems to be the most useful at the moment.

Ain't technology wonderful sometimes?

As I see it Sean ...

The thing is, every designer now, feels that you have made a "religious conversion" to his or her companies' product. You're now willing to study the manual ... daily, and in depth ... as one would his or her religious manuscripts. Nothing else in life matters anymore. You can relearn everything you knew up the your point of conversion. Anything that has become natural, over the past decade of electronic usage, is out the window. I especially like the three "different" menu access methods. And, the functions that can be performed in multiple ways - often accidently.

If you find the right buttons, and can recall the sequence for a week or more ... you can become quite amazed with the results. I like this camera very much. It it far, far more complicated than I imagined. And, taking a simple picture is often impossible. Easter was a complete bust for pictures, for me. I'd view a screen that looked wonderful. Bright and cheerful ... plenty of light. However; the camera would REFUSE to take the picture - demanding the flash be opened. And - upon doing that ... the flash was still "COOLING DOWN". Thus ... is should have just posted a banner saying "YOU'RE SCREWED". I went back to the pocket Sony with the bent retractable lens and pocket lint.

Gary

IMO, and many other critics(straw men), the best products traits are power, features and ease of use.

I usually leave my camera set on auto and that gets me 90% of my pictures but it does get fiddley when I want to take good macros for instance. Makes you long for the days when you unloaded the Super 8 in a dark closet.

Lon

I think the main problem is that camera geeks have WAY too much input in the design process. If you check out some of the internet-based evaluation sites, it's virtually all gibberish. Some of the comments MIGHT make sense to professional photographers, or perhaps optical physics professors and such, but they're almost all uber-picky tech-head stuff that the average snapshot user would use...well...never.

If nothing else, there ought to be a button that resets all the setting to a basic default that's suitable for taking snapshots at a moments notice. Digital cameras lose enough great shots with their agonizingly slow start-up time (Microsoft influence, maybe?), it's not like they need any help in that respect by having byzantine menus and overly complex, non-intuitive controls.

My $.02, anyway.

Good video Gary. I'm also still figuring mine out too. Got tons of video with it so far and only some of it is worth sharing. The rest is garbage. Everything looks great in the field but when i get home to view them, the camera is usually too far from the target and very grainy or when the picture is great, non of the shots were captured on video. It's mostly my error though and not the cameras. Got the bright idea to bring my wifes laptop with me on my next shoot with the camera so i can actually VIEW THE SHOT in the field and make corrections then as apposed to when i get home and its too late.

Definitely know the camera need to be closer to the target....lol.

Hi Cedric,

Yeah - I need to screen the camera. I sat it at 22 1/2 degrees from the target. Figuring that was safe from the lead splash. And, it was. However; I can't count on it.

I found one thing though ... and it was odd ... as you get closer and closer to the action, the action seems to speed up in the video. It's a "field of view" related thingie. The sections of video I took that were the green paddles, were closer. I could not seem to slow them down enough. The field of view was smaller. The bullet was only on screen for a shorter distance. Think about it.

Gary

We'll never get the images we want. We (and everybody else) is used to seeing footage from $50,000 cameras. Ours look like crap in comparison. Therefore; few comments ... few raves.

Yeah, thats true GB. I first started testing the camera in the garage while using my Crosman 2240 pistol shooting around 460 FPE. I soon discovered as some1 mentioned here.......YOU NEED A LOT OF PURE WHITE LIGHT. And like you, i had the camera pretty close to the action and i had the zoom up. When doing that, like you said, the action happens too fast. Then i discovered that you get a better video when the camera is further away from the action. When i did that, i could see the pellets moving along pretty good. I have even used my GLOCK 35 pistol which was shooting .40 caliber/165 gr bullets at 1150 FPS and i could capture the bullet in flight at 420 Frames Per Second.

So far the best videos have been the ones like what Jerry always post. The camera next to me, zoomed downrange at the target (no more than 50 yards), the target to the left in the viewfinder screen (my choice, as the camera is always to my left and i am shooting to the right of the camera), and i'm shooting to the right of the camera, this way, the camera can track the bullet flight all the way to the target and it can clearly be seen in the video. The bullets in my videos track Right to Left. Hope that makes sense. The bigger the projectile the better and the slower the projectile the better. And yeah, 420 and 210 FPS are my MAJORITY settings. Its just too rough with 1000 FPS

Hey Cedric,

So; where are these mystery videos Dude? haha. Do we have to pay per view?

Common, give.

Gary

ok ok ok, i'll post a couple of them.

I was just wanting to save up and show you guys the really cool stuff. Thats all.

I knew i should have posted what i had so far.....lol. I'm in trouble huh?

That's right! Big trouble, bring on the video mister!

Yeah ... I steamed the stamps off the crate, and put the Bison back in the closet ...