An addendum to the older article, New Easy Rail-Free Pursuit Camera Technique, that some hobbyists are doing at home and sharing pursuit images.
Handwave Smartphones Now Outperform Rails for Field Testing
After collecting data for 5 years, we have discovered that amazingly, handwave pursuit camera can sometimes outperform “less-than-high-end” field rail setups.
An expert permanent headquarters rail will always outperform hand-waves, but field testing often use tripods that are shaky and too lightweight, e.g. capturing pursuit photos of a display at a convention or at a store (like Best Buy).
Pursuit Camera Rail Problems For Rapid Field Testing
- Shaky light tripods
- Carpets at convention floors
- Heavy camera that flexes cheap travel-friendly camera rails
- Some conventions won't let you enter with large metal objects (security).
- Rail vibrations while camera slides on cheap lightweight rails
- Only few photo attempts are possible in 5 minutes
- You have to "fight" the camera settings sometimes.
Handwave Smartphone Advantages For Rapid Field Testing
- 4K Video as burstshoot substitute (1000+ photographs in 30 seconds)
- Custom apps can be downloaded
- Brute-force thousands of photographs compensates for error of hand-shaky
- Easy to jog-shuttle forward/back in video players to find the good photos
- TestUFO "Sync Track" invention is almost as good as a defacto a cryptographic certificate of hand tracking accuracy
- Much less setup/teardown required
Why good practiced iPhone/Galaxy handwaves now outperform rapidly-setup field rail builds
- Field testing requires rapid setup and teardown.
- Sometimes tripods have to be put into a carpet in a convention.
- Sometimes a SLR camera is too heavy for a lightweight mobile camera rail.
- Cheap lightweight camera rail flexes and vibrates a lot.
- Cheap tripods flexes too much.
- Easier media management of originals; one video file instead of a pollution of unusable burstshoot JPGs
- No time to validate a field build of a camera rail (convention, TV store, prototype)
- Handwave smartphone means no airline baggage, no carryons needed! Travel to conventions like CES/DisplayWeek/Computex/CEDIA/etc via ultra low fare airlines like RyanAir, Swoop, AlaskaAir, etc!
New 8K Phones Do Excellent 4K Video Almost SLR Quality Per Freezeframe
- 30fps video burst-shoots 1800 photographs per minute (brute-force your way out of shaky hand error margin)
- 60fps video burst-shoots 3600 photographs per minute (brute-force your way out of shaky hand error margin)
- Phone technology has now improved massively as of year 2022
- Some phones have amazing excellent image stabilization that does not affect freezeframe quality
- Camera apps on iPhone such as DSLRCamera or ProCam that turns video into a manual burst-shoot emulator
- Some new phones can do ProRes video, at better quality per freezframe than JPG files of a 3-year-old phone.
Many TestUFO tests have Dual Pursuit Tracks!
Make sure both the top/bottom pursuit sync tracks are perfect, when doing handwaves.
Sometimes the hand rotates when pursuiting, so that means either the top/bottom sync tracks will go "bad" because one edge of the photo went at a different speed. That's exactly why I use multiple sync tracks; for compatibility with handwave pursuits.
IMPORTANT: If you do the computer-chair-spin technique, make sure you back up enough that the smartphone is roughly the same distance from the monitor, as your original pursuit camera rail or your viewing distance. This is important because a camera too close to the screen will amplify viewing angle problems (e.g. TN and VA viewing angle gamma problem). There's enough brute resolution in a 50 megapixel sensor to use a light amount of zoom, from a further viewing distance instead; that is what I recommend. Use a LOT of zoom initially during practicing so you can watch the screen while you're holding the phone landscape with two stiff shoulders + stiff outstretched hands from your spinning computer chair. Most get fairly good after about 15 minutes of practice with a modern 4K optically-stabilized smartphone with lots of megapixels + good light capability. That's very little training time for a human, even if confusing at first.
Handwave Professionals Now Reporting 0.1 Pixel Error Margins Now!
A few years ago, handwaved smartphones were achieving 0.25 pixel error margins.
Two years ago, cheaper phones did this:
This already finally matched the rail quality of a mid-range field test rail-based pursuit camera rig with its cons listed above.
Today, with newer 8K optical-stabilized smartphones (iPhone 13) but using downconverted high-bitrate 4K settings to its high speed SSD-quality flash memory...
It is now possible to get 0.1 pixel error margin with handwaves, perhaps less, on some newer 8K-capable smartphones running at its conservative 4K settings for near-SLR-quality per freezeframe. Apparently, its optical image stabilization responds fast enough to sometimes do a near-perfect pursuit greatly compensating for the error margins of a shaky hands.
This exceeds rail-quality for field rigs!
