Re: Nokia N900 Video Recording and Auto-focus
 

I actually had an idea to use accelerometers as a ring replacement (focus by turning, tap to finalize), but I don't know enough about the details of the focusing 'engine' (yet) to make it happen :)
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Re: Nokia N900 Video Recording and Auto-focus
 

What about this video?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_j2nX1Gc4Q

It looks really good and it should work with N900, too! The autofocus noise isn'is really quiet and if there are other louder noises like speech you won't hear it. AND, N900 has USB and an open source OS, so you could use an USB micro with some effort, so you could prevent recording the noise anyway...

I really hope video autofocus could be done by software and N900 is powerfull enough to do it.

Re: Nokia N900 Video Recording and Auto-focus
 

mhm... right. i usually take very short video clips and edit them to a longer video when finished (at least i used to do that on my S60 phone - can the N900 edit videos?), so continuous autofocus has less value for me personally.

but video stabilization would be great. - would the accelerometer be good enough to do this? you know... realize when you tremble and adjust the image accordingly. if it works it could be better than trying to guess from the video information itself.

Re: Nokia N900 Video Recording and Auto-focus
 

well what about the option for autofocus by pressing a button or tapping the screen?

While it is recording if you want it to adjust the focus you simply tap the screen and it autofocuses. That would be a nice implementation, and would avoid unwanted noises if you don't want it to autofocus costantly.

Re: Nokia N900 Video Recording and Auto-focus
 

Good idea. Let us hope it's just a software problem! :)

Re: Nokia N900 Video Recording and Auto-focus
 

i believe that's will do ..
i would call it (Tap2focus)

Re: Nokia N900 Video Recording and Auto-focus
 

I like the screen tapping idea - you can use this to indicate what to focus on.

Re: Nokia N900 Video Recording and Auto-focus
 

This question has two parts - first, the sampling rate and second, the linking of the accelerometer data to the actual frame - which is not as easy as it may seem at first sight (you have to account for component lags, the 'empty' space between the actual frame exposures, etc, etc). It might be possible, but it's not an easy task without dedicated hardware.

Re: Nokia N900 Video Recording and Auto-focus
 

After doing a bit of playing around, focusing the camera manually while recording a video is really easy. It shouldn't be too hard to bind the appropriate commands to the volume keys, giving you manual focus while recording. Autofocus on the other hand would need something a bit more intelligent, but the hardware is definitely capable. Maybe gst-opencv could be of some help. If not for autofocus, then at least for cool things like face detection and face blurring.

See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5TqbtXwLpQ for a horrible quality video of it.

Re: Nokia N900 Video Recording and Auto-focus
 

Greetings guys,
I'm waiting impatiently for the autofocus feature on the N900 to get implemented ASAP. It's very important to me because I use the phone to record the lab assistants' explanations in my anatomy class (for later reference). So it's very important to keep clear focus on the structure that's being explained, especially on the smaller and more complex ones. The recordings really help to understand anatomy, and help me get good grades on practicums.
Please, smart people out there, make it work on the N900.