Wow, thanks for the late night reading... good stuff as always!
.... it surprises me is that a pixel step of 4 (no masks) resulted in the optimal 10 ms compare interval.
Right? 4-6 has always been my most responsive when using an "open grid", since this MDFB stuff started. So when's vitaly gonna pop up with an overclock mod?
Another thing I'd love to verify; we know on certain cameras the Live View is a helluva lot faster than others; the SX100 and S5 seem midrange, but that 870 3" screen monster seems lightning fast and realtime in your hand, panning around, I wonder if they got a faster processor or somehow more ticks dedicated to viewfinder updating?
(whereas the top-of-the-line of last year's model, the 12MP titanium body 950, seems to lag as bad as the new 450 dSLR... a 1/4s behind is not "Live"!) It would be good to know, as far as viewfinder data collection goes.
I love how random "help me!" threads always end up turning into some serious discussion around here. Lots of work to keep up with the data!
Gonna run a huge grid at pixel step 0 on an SX100, all masked but a single center zone... and see what that debug file shows. Would be great if we could get something smaller than the Spot Metering space, uber sensitive and ~95ms repeatably responsive... machine vision with pocket cameras! I have access to a web feed press, would be damn impressive to use a camera as a run counter.
How many second shoots did you got with a single lightning?
Were they worth for shooting, or only the first were the best?
This only matters with fast shutter captures. With ~1s you catch them in a "stack". But sadly the secondary are missed in fast capturing, because the script reset time is long, and it varies. With NR off, RAW off, and everything set to manual, it can still take over a second to be ready to capture again. Same with the repeatability; while it's better than it was, it is far from stable as tolerances go. Sometimes it triggers late, but those end up looking great too, because the little "starter" connection bolt establishes the path, then the BIG bolt hits, just as the camera fires. Like the one in this thread - look closely at the bolt - it's in the process of connecting from the ground up and the sky down, meets in the middle where that ball is, about 400' off the ground. (there's nothing there in the city, if you saw a daytime shot of the same view, it's just air. Pure luck to catch that, regardless of CHDK.)
I thought it was the SDHC card. But as you've probably know / found out, any Class 6 card can outrun the SX100. Transcend has this "200x" SDHC 16G card made for HD camcorders, and it can definitely write well beyond 6M/sec (more like 24M/sec) but it's got no bearing on the SX100's speed, RAW or otherwise. I swapped it out with a $50 AData 16G Class 6 and am using the speed demon as a bootable live linux on a keychain-sized reader. I guess it's just a weak processor or very unoptimized code. I mean, this is hacking. If we had their dev environment... anyone into corporate espionage?
Also chiptune, re: MDFB, I'd be happy to benchmark, this stuff matters to me. Could / Do you want to make a wikia account and manage the "MD speed results" page? Type up a standardized way of testing, explain how to turn on debug mode parameters and submit the results? (you don't have to accumulate the results, that's what wikis are for, just get it formatted so others can pop in data)
Q: Where is the source for the MD speed test app that goes with the CHDK script? Windows binaries under wine for something timing sensitive doesn't seem like a good idea, but I guess I could give it a shot before I assume it won't work correctly...
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off-topic: //rant_on - If someone knows Barney in real life, kick him in the nuts for me. He really trashed this place and is frustrating my research. Dunno why acseven leaves those deleted posts inline. Restore from a backup and DARE him to sue. Nice guy and I know the back story, but none of that matters now, and I'm really angry at him. Not that he cares.
Hell, for all I know, "fudgey" is BF back and calm... err, calmER. - //rant_off
