Tuesday
Mar172009
This Now Please
Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 12:08PM
(click to embiggen)
Apple today announced that the iPhone 3.0 software will add support for external hardware devices. That means that someone could create an HMDI-to-dock connector, which would allow you to use an iPhone/iPod Touch app to monitor your video on-set. Such an app could features scopes, focusing aides, and about a million other amazing things that I haven’t thought of yet.
So, uhm, what are you waiting for, someone?
Reader Comments (22)
Overlays, grids, reference lines, for lining up fx shots (and push the shot through the viewfinder to email so your After Effects guy can have a reference to start to work with.)
yes.... now I have to quit fartin around and actually get one.
I would buy this for sure!!!!
Whats the resolution on the iphone screen again?
Too bad the iPhone's drive is too slow to turn it into one of these:
http://prolost.blogspot.com/2007/11/preliminary-and-non-committal-blah-blah.html
If the iPhone had a slot for SD or SDHC cards as well, then I really would have to get one.
Well that app would let you take instant screenshot/pictures! great for reference later
and Apple/Adobe could easily come out w/some cool stuff for this in their next Studio/Creative Suites
If a company like RED opened their camera up with an API, you could make better menus for it if you wanted, or actually control various camera functions (aperture, exposure, etc), or have a Slate app that you can hold in front of the lens and mark the footage with metadata at the same time
The possibilities really are endless...
You'd be looking at some pretty beefy processing to do a lot of what you're suggesting. It's certainly possible, I just wouldn't expect it for $50 since you'll likely need to use a decent FPGA, and dedicated hardware to handle the HDMI, and the resampling/analysis would require something speedy. I've actually been working on a custom handheld device for for focus assist, scopes, etc., and quickly realized how demanding it is to deal with such a monstrous amount of data.
Digital Focus Control , Remote Viewing , Meta Data Support app/additions remotely , ramping control remotely with sliders, its endless
The Rebel's GPS-geolocalized production notes with attached excerpt of dailies (through dock connector) for easy sorting. Anybody ever forgot where they had taken that specific shot, again?
In addition to the signal processing one would also have to take into account that the connector on the iPhone probably does not support the clock-frequencies, impedance matching, or EMI shielding necessary to support a high-speed serial bus like HDMI . . . SMPTE signals are running at 1.48Gb/s . . . you either have to have a bunch of parallel differential signal pathways (i.e., LVDS, etc.)to keep the transfer clock lower, or a very high-speed coax-based serial bus (like HD-SDI) which can support GHz+ frequencies.
I think Kevin and Eugenia's ideas point to a quasi-solution though . . . place an FPGA with a frame-sync/scaler in-between the HDMI input and the iPhone in order to reduce the data-rate to something that could adequately pass across the bus of the iPhone.
Sending high bandwidth data to the iPhone/iTouch doesn't make sense, but this will allow for hardware devices (designed to handle the media bandwidth) to have a low cost feature rich portable GUI. Building a custom touchscreen controller would cost more than just adding an iPod Touch and some software.
David Newman
CTO, CineForm
This product doesn't have to be live at full res. As long as you tapped the iPhone / iPod Touch when you wanted an updated still from the camera, you could then use the iPhone to work on a 2K/4K still for scopes, focus, etc. You could 'un-pinch' and zoom the still to 1:1 pixels resolution.
As this app will be limited by the iPhone CPU and not the bandwidth, you might as well make the link wireless, via Bluetooth.
Posted about a WiFi version a while ago http://alex4d.wordpress.com/2008/10/15/idea-using-an-iphone-as-a-wifi-viewfinder/ based on a mini web-server on a chip attached to an HDMI connector. You could then use Safari to get a live still from your camera each time you reload a special web page.
wow, the hardware can handle that?
scopes are are a really cool idea but you couldn't seriously judge a picture accurately with just the image? could u?
Phill
[twitter: http://twitter.com/phillipgibb ]
[blog: http://synapticlight.com/ ]
It would be great if it could remotely control a DSLR. Using LiveView you could actually see what the camera sees from a mile away (Wi-Fi) change exposure and fire the camera. Perhaps even review the image previews and choose a full res RAW file to download so that you could email it to your computer back at the lab.
@David - Just to follow-up on your idea, you for instance could use the iPhone as a touchscreen controller for this camera here:
http://www.easylooksystem.de/documents/49.html
It has a built-in webserver that controls the camera which could easily be run by the iPhone. The only minus (well, a big one IMHO) is that they are using an earlier model Altasens sensor that had a lot of noise issues, and I'm not sure if they ever upgraded to the latest parts like the ones used in the SI-2K (they might have, it's been two years since I've talked with them). Also last time I checked it was kinda pricey (more $$$'s than a SI-2K MINI head).
I guess the same could also work for the Elphel, but there again, those Micron sensors are not very good with skew issues at the moment, rendering them unusable IMHO for cinema-style projects that involve moving subjects.
I guess this could be a starting point:
http://www.synthe-fx.com/products/luminair
http://www.faberacoustical.com/products/iphone/
and then when apple bring out their rumoured 10" tablet then it gets interesting again
I kind of do this,
I have a MXO2, Conduit, an iphone with VNC lite. I pipe in my camera, key, and set up a wireless network. Anyone on set can use a VNC client in View Only mode, and see what a rough final Comp will look like.
Sut, every post on the blog is very informative.
Thank you and Good day.
I'll write it...do you have someone interested in investing?
A couple problems I see...
a) Can't write proprietary software and not distribute it to the world. There's no closed market for iPhone apps, you have to go through the app store. Meaning, if you're a hardware vendor and want to lock people into the software you develop to do this stuff, you would open it up to anyone who copies your hardware and undercuts your price. That might suck depending on your business model.
b) No replaceable battery in the iPhone. Without one, what do you do when your battery dies in the middle of Africa on a shoot?
c) As others have mentioned, the ARM processor in the iPhone will likely leave a lot to be desired about performance.
I guess I just have to ask, why not just go with a laptop for this need like we could today? Laptops solve all of these problems right now. Is the iPhone really that much more useful/portable when you're already lugging a lot of equipment around, or is it just the new shiny toy that people want to apply to every problem?
Related tangent: Anyone remember Shotlogger for the Newton?
any recent news on this?