Playing with the 808 #16 Camera

[BobDiaz]

I know that this is not a Mobius issue, but I thought that because there's no 808 subsection and the fact that Mobius is made by the same company, I hope you won't mind if I post this here.

I purchased the 808 #16 because I needed a camera that's smaller and lighter than the Mobius. This is mostly for my smaller RC Aircraft; however putting it on my cap is also another use. The results are very interesting.

The camera does offer a 70 minute clip limit, so last Saturday I tried this with an external battery pack. IF the camera recorded at the 7Mbps rate and I selected, a 70 minute 1280x720 file, it would fit within the FAT32 limit of 2^32 - 1 or roughly 4.29GB. For reasons unknown the camera decided to increase the rate to 8.5Mbps and 9 Mbps. In both cases the final file exceeded the FAT32 limit. Rather than write the file at whatever the number of minutes, the camera goes past that point and produces a file considerably smaller, that shows only the last part of the video.

I'm so glad I tested this out now, because at the New Year's Day Parade in Pasadena, I get a Press Pass. Not that I'm anyone important, I'm just a volunteer photographer for the city of Torrance. Because we always have a float in the Parade, I get a press pass and I get access the the spot on Colorado Blvd near the corner where the floats turn.

I like the idea of putting it all onto two 70 minute video clips, but that won't work at 1280x720 at 30P. I could reduce the data rate by lowering the resolution to 848x480 OR reducing the frame rate to 15P. It might even work at full resolution at 20P, but I have to play with that to be 100% sure.

I thought it might be fun to document my tests here....

 

[Isoprop]

I know that this is not a Mobius issue, but I thought that because there's no 808 subsection and the fact that Mobius is made by the same company, I hope you won't mind if I post this here.

I purchased the 808 #16 because I needed a camera that's smaller and lighter than the Mobius. This is mostly for my smaller RC Aircraft; however putting it on my cap is also another use. The results are very interesting.
......
The camera does offer a 70 minute clip limit, so last Saturday I tried this with an external battery pack. IF the camera recorded at the 7Mbps rate and I selected, a 70 minute 1280x720 file, it would fit within the FAT32 limit of 2^32 - 1 or roughly 4.29GB. For reasons unknown the camera decided to increase the rate to 8.5Mbps and 9 Mbps. In both cases the final file exceeded the FAT32 limit. Rather than write the file at whatever the number of minutes, the camera goes past that point and produces a file considerably smaller, that shows only the last part of the video.

I'm so glad I tested this out now, because at the New Year's Day Parade in Pasadena, I get a Press Pass. Not that I'm anyone important, I'm just a volunteer photographer for the city of Torrance. Because we always have a float in the Parade, I get a press pass and I get access the the spot on Colorado Blvd near the corner where the floats turn.

I like the idea of putting it all onto two 70 minute video clips, but that won't work at 1280x720 at 30P. I could reduce the data rate by lowering the resolution to 848x480 OR reducing the frame rate to 15P. It might even work at full resolution at 20P, but I have to play with that to be 100% sure.

I thought it might be fun to document my tests here....

VERY, VERY strange! I have made hundreds of clips using the 7 Mbps setting together with 720p and 70 mins. clip length and have never seen the problem you describe.
Below is a screen capture of some recent clips I made. All made with standard settings. The file size never gets near the critical 4GB limit. I always use Kingston 32GB class 4 cards.

Are you using mSetup.exe (or Nr16Setup.exe) to set the parameters? There is a very slight possibility of messing something up if you edit the parameters by hand. If this is the case, I suggest you install an old firmware version and then update to the latest version. This should ensure you have a clean install.

 

[BobDiaz]

I'm using the mSetup.exe to set the parameters. It's odd, because the camera seems to behave at times, then out of nowhere it selects some higher data rate. I have no idea why.

With 1280x720, using a lower frame rate like 15FPS and 20FPS seems to lower the data rate. The worse case for 15FPS was 3.79Mbps and for 20FPS 4.87Mbps. The 848x480 worse case was 4.61Mbps.

 

[BobDiaz]

I know that this thread is getting old, but I encountered something interesting with the camera...

I went to record a segment at our trains and the camera failed completely, even with external power connected. After three days of being pissed off about a new camera failure, I looked into it closely. Apply power and nothing, I let it fully charge and it worked. Then I connect it to the computer running the mSetup.exe program to reset the parameters and reset the date and time.

In looking at the video files, the camera became fully discharged and lost the date and time. I assumed that by plugging it into external power it has to work, but maybe the battery was too low to operate.

It may be that if the power drops too much, even with external power, the camera might do some funny things recording. My next test will be to fully charge the camera, reset all parameters, and then use it the next day recording at 1280x720@ 30P. I'll see if that makes a difference. .....