Future hack ideas:
1) Getting more grain texture unfortunately is fighting with the nature of long-GOP compression, and increasing the bit-rate seems to reduce the reliability. Why there are buffer over runs when it is only encoding 2fps doesn't make sense.
2) Frame control for 18 or 24, would be nice (20 is weird.)
3) Find the auto exposure, tweak that.
4) White balance controllable, rather than fixed.
5) please add more...
First, thank you to 0dan0 and the community here for all the work being done (and shared!). I truly appreciate all of it and its exciting to see how the quality of this product is being vastly improved upon, especially the speed at which you are progressing. While I don't have the experience in tinkering that many of you and others here clearly do, I am definitely a video hobbyist and so I track with
most of the technical discussion here.
Second, 0dan0 your list of future hack ideas looks great. A few bits of amateur-level feedback/ideas:
Regarding idea 1 (increased grain/texture).... if dealing with buffer over seems unsolvable, I'm curious if you've explored the alternate approach that gordonmcdowell mentioned back in December:
....The CMOS introduces noise, and that seems to be a cause of much compression artifacts... compressing the noise. Is there any way of slowing down the scanning process, so instead of 1/2 a second /frame, maybe 2 seconds are spent on every single frame? Can the physical speed of the process be adjusted? If the CMOS took longer on each frame maybe there would be less sensor noise?
The sample capture you posted earlier of the Washington monument demonstrated a similar result - where increased time or (duplicate captures of the same physical frame) allowed more detail/texture to be captured in a single frame. While this would increase the time needed to capture a film reel, the end result could be worth it.
As an aside, I feel like gordonmcdowell's comment about the CMOS noise is relevant - that some of the fine detail we're now seeing with the recent improvements you've been making is more likely sensor noise and not necessarily the photo-chemical grain (probably a mix of both). Either way, the look of that detail is nice and definitely something I would like to see in my scans.
Regarding idea 2 (frame control)... I would propose supporting the options
16, 18, and 24. 16fps is the standard for Regular 8mm film, and Super 8 is often 18fps, and occasionally 24 fps. That being said, it is a trivial task in most competent video editing software to easily adjust the source frame rate.
Finally, the "top of mind" request/suggestion (quite selfishly) is that once you've gotten to a more "finished" state, would you or others in the community here provide variations of your firmware files that support the various A/B/C models? I ended up with a version B model, and absolutely hope that at least some of your additional improvements will end up on my model.
Additionally, I don't know that I'll end up going as far as replacing the stock lens with the macro lens to truly benefit from the resolution adjustments you've made. so would it make any sense to also provide a "Stock Lens" firmware option that provides as much of the resolution/bitrate improvement as possible (due to the stock lens' need to "Zoom in")?
Thank you again!