missing camera

[fsoudiere]

hey I noticed a lot of people have issues with a camera missing or just out of battery.

Depending on the rig used, there may be different solutions to recovering or recreating the missing pixels. @making360/m360.

Should a chapter be added?

[KCizugar]

Recovering missing pixel from a missing cam in a rig shall usually impossible as the overlapping zone was too thin in most rigs. For critical jobs that won't be able to shoot it again, we shot with 4x194 lens on 4:3 mode with the Z4X mount. Just two opposite working cam will allow you to have all pixel covered, while 4 cam can provide better color gradient as well as stitching.

I may suggest adding another page for checking the stability of GoPro before taking it for production.

Indeed the QC of GoPro is so-so, and with our experience of testing over 400 units H4B, we found 1 out of 20 GoPro may be in (deep) trouble. Here is our usual internal test before sending back the cam for exchange (they don't have repair service)

• insert a fully charged battery, not the one freshly out of the package, as we want to test in a reasonable length
• insert a sandisk extreme card (90m/s read, 40m/s write). Many less-than-perfect GoPro are very picky to the sd card. We have many H4B can use the Samsung Evo plus cards for lower working temperature, however some H4B simply show card error but working well with the fast Sandisk. According to our experience It won't be an excuse to get it exchanged, as the GoPro already warn about the card issue.
• set it to 4K mode and shoot for 20 mins. If the cam do not freeze and still have two blocks of power, this cam shall be good for production or ready for lens change. If the cam consume too much power or it stop itself before 20mins, I'd suggest selling it on eBay. If the cam didn't survive in a minute, get it exchanged from the seller or the GoPro service center. Some cam will have the LCD display gone black after the 20 mins test. It'll return to normal after cool down, but it's saying the cam is hotter than usual. I personally will mark these cam as backup and it won't be my priority cam.

Remarks:

• be sure do NOT put many H4B too close during your test as they'll cook up each other and affect the test result. We set them at least 10cm apart on a table in a room temperature.
• there are Some repair center with the after market parts. However just changing the main board may cost 150+, may worth the money to teams with many faulty cams.

Cheers,
KC

On 10 Jan 2016, at 7:12 AM, Fabien Soudiere notifications@github.com wrote:

hey I noticed a lot of people have issues with a camera missing or just out of battery

Depending on the rig used, there may be different solutions to recovering or recreating the missing pixels @making360/m360

Should a chapter be added?

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

[nuclearsugar]

That is a very good QC checklist. Nicely done.

It should also be noted that upgrading the firmware is ricky business. A while back I upgraded the firmware on all 10 of my cameras and one of them is now bricked (it was working just fine previously). And It was out of the 1 year warranty time period. Ah well.

Possible solutions for fixing a channel that end before all the others
--- If it’s a still shot, then there is the possibility of grabbing the last frame for that channel and using it as a patch in Autopano Video.
--- But for moving shots, I can’t imagine a fix for a missing channel.