Eye-Fi Card on the Way
Posted February 28th, 2011 @ 08:21am by Erik J. Barzeski
When I'd previously asked about Eye-Fi cards I was interested in them primarily from a tech, ease-of-use perspective.
Well, a few people using Analyzr have asked about "live capture" of swings. This has historically been done on a machine hooked up to two Firewire- or, occasionally, USB-driven cameras to capture swings immediately into the software. Some software will note impact, record the two seconds prior and the one second after, and import that as a swing.
The downsides are that this is only really feasible indoors, with cameras recording 30 to (at most) 60 frames per second, and every swing will be recorded while in live recording mode. Cameras simply aren't being made these days to support this, so the feature is slowly dying in cameras as well.
With the Eye-Fi, I think instructors can get you the best of both worlds. They can record the swings they want, in high-speed (120, 240, 300 FPS), and they can sync the video to their computer for easy importing.
Perhaps we'll do a screencast on this…
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Posted 09 Mar 2011 at 4:37am #
Bought one as well, hoping to get the perfect setup with my laptop.
The point of the pro model of the Eye-Fi is the "Ad-Hoc" support.
It works, but it is really too slow to be used unless you press "stop" on the camera after every swing. If only Casio cameras could support any sort or remote control system this would be perfect.
If you are alone taking video of your swing, then most likely you are going to let it roll and take 2 or 3 swings consecutively. The files get quite big and then the transfer is excruciatingly long (yes, even at 802.11n speeds) defeating the purpose because it's then faster to hook up the camera via USB and import the file that way. (which is now what I do)
The other disappointing thing about the Eye-Fi is the daemon that you have to run on the host machine. (Yes, there is an open source server written in python, but it's not perfect.)
Posted 09 Mar 2011 at 7:49pm #
Chris, while that's all true, I'm imagining more of a situation where a pro shoots video and all the while it's transferring to his machine. So just one swing at a time.
In my preliminary tests it's not the fastest transfer, that's for sure. I may have set up a slower network, though, so I'm going to check that. It might be using an 802.11b or g network or something right now.
I'm not sure why the daemon is disappointing. What's so bad about it?
Posted 09 Mar 2011 at 9:30pm #
The system is nice on paper, but real world performance is so-so.
Also, the camera will not always be "ready to transfer". It takes a while for it to wake up the wi-fi portion of the card and then the card takes a while to connect to the ad-hoc network. Or at least that's my experience with a Casio FH100. It's a bit better when both the host and the card are on a network, though, but not by much.
You can't only install the daemon, you have to have the "eye-fi center" with it, and as you know it installs Adobe Air, and requires your admin pwd. Not so cool in my book. It's all too "dummy proof" for me I guess.
I am being picky for sure, but I find the whole thing disappointing compared to what it could be. I'm interested to see if you get better speeds than me. I tried both in ad-hoc mode and on my 802.11n 5GHz network and it was too slow to be used "on the spot" during a lesson, even by doing "swing by swing", imho.