New Easy Free Pursuit Camera: Smartphone. No rail needed.

[Chief Blur Buster]

Yes, you can treat it sort of like a video game -- It's a special game that requires a smartphone to fire lasers at the UFOs. And that you "need a steady aim" exactly matching the speed of the UFOs to win the game.

I should gamify it a little bit in the future -- with a companion app running on the smartphone that will automatically score the accuracy of the tracking by artificial-intelligence recognition of the sync track.

Then it becomes sort of like a game ("Try to handwave accurately enough to cause the smartphone to flash green + beep") to generate accurate photos.

[Chief Blur Buster]

Improvements to instructions.

The new iPhone 16 with 4K 120fps HFR video is perfect for tripodless handwave pursuits.
You can even attach an SSD thumbdrive (1GB/sec) to the iPhone 16 USB-C port, for uncompressed 4K 120fps video!

My iPhone 14 Plus outperforms most tripod-based pursuit cameras now, because of these factors, where shaky tripods, slide vibrations, and flexible rails can create error margins bigger than 5 minutes of handwave pursuits by 10,000-freezeframe bruteforce (scroll through video slider, find clearest freezeframe, save freezeframe). Good heavy rails and high-end sliders will outperform, but my handwaves outperform 90% of reviewers.

Here are improved instructions that works with many "Professional Camera" apps in Google Play and iPhone App Store. Such as "DSLRCamera" on iPhone.

Setting Up Your Smartphone For Easy Hand-Wave Video Pursuit Camera

1. Go to Google Play or iTunes on your smartphone
2. Download and install a high-rated professional SLR-like Camera App that allows you to do manual-everything during video
3. Run www.testufo.com/ghosting
4. Configure video camera app to FIXED EXPOSURE (Prefer 4 refresh cycles, i.e. 1/30sec 30fps for 120Hz)
5. Configure video camera app to FIXED COLOR TEMPERATURE (6500K)
6. Configure video camera app to FIXED FOCUS (with phone arm's length away from monitor)
7. Configure video camera app to ISO to brighten as needed. If too dark/noisy or bright/overexposed, brighten or darken monitor brightness setting if you want to save time fiddling or if your camera app has no ISO setting.
8. IMPORTANT: Do not bring camera too close to the monitor (blurry) -- back away slightly and use a little bit of zoom (sharper). Most phones don't macro very well without using the backaway-and-zoom trick. Due to phone resolution, backing to arm's length may not be practical, but please use minimum 6" or 15cm, preferably at least 12" or 30cm. Your pursuit camera will be more accurate if you use more similar camera-distance as eye-viewing distance. Focus will be about 10x+ sharper than bringing phone too close to screen.
9. Finally, configure video camera app to a BRIGHTNESS or ISO SETTING that doesn't underexpose/overexpose per frame.
   (Note: Framerate doesn't matter as much as ability to adjust camera exposure per frame, you may have to configure the camera frame rate in order for it to let you adjust the exposure settings the way you want it. Also, not all camera video recording apps lets you configure everything, so you may have to experiment with different apps until the app lets you correctly configure the video settings).
10. Start video recording. (Note if image is too bright or too dark,
11. Hand wave the video a few times just like the YouTube video embed, from about arm's length away
12. If you need more steadiness, try stiffening your arm, holding phone with both arms and swivel your computer chair instead
13. Afterwards, play the video using a good single-frame-stepping player app (if using smartphone, use a video player app that has a touchscreen jog slider, combined with PREV/NEXT framestep buttons) to find the clearest freezeframe.
14. You've found your good smartphone hand-pursuit photo (simply buy using video as an equivalent of photo-burst-shooting to maximize odds of a good pursuit photograph). Save the freeze frame as a photo. This becomes your good pursuit photo.
15. Done!

(The video file can be kept, it can be quite educational showing people how a pursuit camera works -- the video file shows self explanatory behaviours -- it instantly tells the users that camera tracking is the same thing as eye tracking -- where tickmarks looks bad until the camera goes at the same speed as the UFOs -- just as if you did WYSIWYG).

I have updated and improved the instructions.

This is the technique I used to get this OLED 480Hz freezeframe:
https://twitter.com/BlurBusters/status/ ... 5006037266

[PixelPal]

Hi all. I'm looking to gather some response time measurements at 144Hz. Is the Pursuit Camera Smart Phone method still the best way to do this? I have an iPhone 16 and have the Blackmagic Camera app. Would it be best to capture video at 48fps (1/48 shutter speed)?

[Chief Blur Buster]

Hi all. I'm looking to gather some response time measurements at 144Hz. Is the Pursuit Camera Smart Phone method still the best way to do this? I have an iPhone 16 and have the Blackmagic Camera app. Would it be best to capture video at 48fps (1/48 shutter speed)?

That's about the gist. Do some practice pursuits and see how you do.

[PixelPal]

Hi all. I'm looking to gather some response time measurements at 144Hz. Is the Pursuit Camera Smart Phone method still the best way to do this? I have an iPhone 16 and have the Blackmagic Camera app. Would it be best to capture video at 48fps (1/48 shutter speed)?

That's about the gist. Do some practice pursuits and see how you do.

Excellent, thanks for the reply! I'll update with my results when I have them.