Custom functions on the 400D

2008-09-28 23:05:00 0 Comments

This is a camera-geek post, so if you're not one of those, feel free to skip. I've just been having a bit more of a play with the custom functions available to change how the 400D operates. There are a couple of things that I've found that I can't believe I didn't know about - they look like they'll make things a lot easier. I'm making a note here so that if I lose them, I can find them again.

I now have set:

Now I just need to get out and do some more shooting. Not done very much of late that hasn't been with my N95, which is disappointing.

Setting name

Value

Effect

CF01 - Set button/cross keys function

4: Cross keys - AF Frame select

Makes the arrow keys choose the autofocus point when shooting, rather than selecting the picture "style", which is something I've never used beyond setting it on "neutral"

CF04 - Shutter/AE lock button

1: AE Lock/AF

This makes the "*" button cause the camera to autofocus, and have pressing the shutter button half way set the exposure (in non-manual modes). This might well drive me nuts, but I like the idea, in theory.

CF05 - AF-assist beam

2: Only external flash emits

This should stop it flashing like mad when trying to focus in low light, when I'm not using my 430EX. I don't use the on-camera flash that much anyway, so it won't make a lot of difference, but it is an irritating feature when I am using it.

CF09 - Shutter curtain sync

1: Second curtain sync

This makes the flash fire just before the shutter closes, rather than when the shutter opens. This might not seem to make a lot of sense at first glance, but it means that if I take a photo with a relatively long exposure with the intention of getting some motion blur, the shutter will fire at the end of the exposure, so that the object is "frozen" with the trail behind it, rather than seeming to go ahead of it.

CF11 - LCD display when power ON

1: Retain power OFF status

This stops the display coming on when I switch the camera on. I don't use the display much so I have it turned off most of the time to save battery power.

Making timelapses with Linux

2008-07-28 13:18:00 0 Comments , , and

In other news, I've been spending far too much time recently with my camera. One thing I quite like doing is timelapse photography, which my camera (a Canon 400D) can't do by itself, however I did acquire a cheap intervalometer from eBay, which together with my new tripod (a Velbon Sherpa 250, highly recommended) is quite for this kind of work.

I can't, however, ever remember the command to create the timelapses. So, here's a note to myself and anyone else who's interested. If you have a folder full of .JPG files, with a sequential numbering scheme like most cameras have
by default, you can run this command to create a video file using each JPEG image as a frame:

 mencoder "mf://*.JPG" -mf fps=25 -vf scale -zoom -xy 1024 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4 -o output.avi

This will output an MPEG4 file in the file output.avi. It will scale the images so that the video ends up being 1024 pixels wide, and set the height to keep the aspect ratio. It will also run at 25 frames per second. These values can be tweaked, depending on the effect you want.

I'll update this post once I've figured out a few more things - I'd like to be able to do panning and zooming as well, and I know it's possible, though perhaps a bit fiddly.

 1

About

User