To be honest if you are doing timelapse sequences with intervals of a minute or more the NanoFlash is possibly not the most appropriate tool anyway. You would be better off with a stills camera for shoots that are going to take hours or days. You don't need massive batteries, you can shoot at very high resolution and tying up a $1000 DSLR for hours, days or weeks makes more sense than using an expensive HD camera and NanoFlash. IMHO Where the NanoFlash will be most useful is for simple things like cloud and skyscapes, traffic and other moderate speed-ups.

While your DSLR suggestion is indeed practical, it would still be useful for the Nanoflash to save uncompressed image files for time-lapse if that is possible.

Sometimes I am asked to produce images from shoots or have to use a zoomed/cropped frame in a video. Yes, a DSLR is a better tool, but I'd rather not carry and fiddle with one while I'm busy doing video.

I'd like to have a Nanoflash feature to save an uncompressed image file on command. It takes more time to search footage and grab a frame. And then, it is already compressed.
On a 3 chip camcorder taking 1920x1080p, we have the equivalent of something like a 4-8 MPixel Bayer sensor DSLR.

There is another application for frame bursts. DSLRs have peaked at 11 fps (D3 in crop mode). Imagine a device that would record a burst of 30 or 60 frames, then save them as images for you to choose. If only there were the equivalent of a DSLR RAW mode in which unprocessed sensor data were transmitted via HD-SDI.

"If only there were the equivalent of a DSLR RAW mode in which unprocessed sensor data were transmitted via HD-SDI."

....Hi Gints:
There is. It's called the Canon XL H1 with the HD-SDI output. This is the full uncompressed RAW signal of 1920 x 1080 straight off the 3 x 1/3rd inch sensors.

That's incorrect Mark. The Canon camera outputs a very processed signal via the HD-SDI. First, half the color is thrown away which makes a 4:4:4 signal into a 4:2:2 signal. It's no where near straight off the sensor. It has white balance, gamma curve, color matrix, knee, and various other processing of the signal from the sensor.

The Viper on the other hand, does deliver raw sensor data in Filmstream mode, completely unprocessed, only fitted in 10bit log 4:4:4 :-)

While a push button for an unprocessed (or even a processed full resolution) frame grab may seem like a consumer-gadget function, I'd really like to see someone cover the high speed, higher resolution 24-60 fps burst photography space at a lower cost.

As silly as it may seem, I've taken stills with my XDR. It's a real pain since it wasn't designed to do this but I had to. It's the highest quality imaging that I own. Of course a DSLR would be a much better tool to take stills with, that's a no brainer - IF I OWNED ONE!!!

I don't. My digital camera is 10 years old and is 2 megapixels and I mean a very crappy two megapixels.

It would seem that adding the ability to take stills with the XDR would be easy easy easy, but it's not likely to happen.

Even more silly, I tried to use my XDR as a portable audio recorder. Again, a $300 recorder would do a much better job but I don't own one of those either. I do own an XDR but it won't record audio without an SDI signal.

It would also seem like adding audio recording to the XDR would be simple but, since it wasn't designed to do this, I'm not holding my breath for it.

John, AVC H.264 is also a long GOP format. Does AVC-Intra uses a long GOP format as well?

Dear Aaron,

Without consulting our engineers, we could probably do both.

I feel that you can get a frame capture from our 100 Mbps or better video and get a very decent image.

We could definitely add an audio only mode to the Flash XDR, but would be be worth our time to develop it?

It may be, I for one would like this feature, but we have so many other things to do, I do not see this being developed soon.

For the Still's mode, many cameras have a great still's feature. I know the Canon XL H1's feature is just great. It does not even interfere with the video recording at any time.

I highly doubt that we could add a feature like the XL H1's, one which captures the stills while recording video. We are just too busy handling the video, processing it, and writing it to the CompactFlash cards.


Aaron, I feel that your comments were not actual feature requests, but I wanted to address them anyway. I feel that you would like for us to stay focused at the main task at hand.

"I highly doubt that we could add a feature like the XL H1's, one which captures the stills while recording video. We are just too busy handling the video, processing it, and writing it to the CompactFlash cards."

Dan, it would be great to record single or groups of "4:4:4" full color resolution image files in either time-lapse mode or when the Nanoflash is not recording video. The NanoFlash needs to have a number of unique product features. High quality burst and time-lapse photography are two. I'm interested in photo/video features that are not covered by either the Sony EX1 or Nikon D3.

.....When I say unprocessed, I am referring to the fact that the signal doesn't get crunched down into 25 Mb HDV 1440 x 1080 HD thick Raster.
The XL H1 stays at full raster HD 1920 x 1080 in uncompressed 1.485 Gigabit output via its HD-SDI.
....Uh, no its not. The Canon XL H1 is not a 4:4:4 color signal camera in the first place. The H1 is an 8 bit 4:2:2 signal processing camera
....Good. I want to be able to color the image if I want to get a specific look. I do believe you can turn off the manual presets if you don't want to alter the camera's output and go with the straight factory output, which pretty much amounts to a RAW output at that point.

...The Viper ? Are you kidding me ? You are comparing the XL H1 to the Viper ? This would be like holding a match to a 10.000 Watt DC Arri Arc light ! Man, there's no comparison possible ! The Viper is a 10 bit 4:4:4 log device far superior to even a Red camera at 4K ! You have a 27 Mega pixel sensor feeding RAW data to the output ! All I can say is your Nano clips must look sweet @ 160 Mbit Long GOP.

It uses some kind of compression :) I'm not really on top of the H264 spec. I can tell you this much: H264 is a product of the MPEG4 group. My 30 seconds of research is that it is definitely a frame by frame recording (not GOP) and that the "intra" also refers to the predictive coding scheme within a frame from macroblock to macroblock. You can read more about it here:

ftp://ftp.panasonic.com/pub/Panasoni..._AVC-Intra.pdf

HTH