Hasta La Gadget!

If camera hacks had heels, then this story would come hot on those of yesterday’s Canon DSLR video recording hack. Actually inspired by that story, ace programmer Olivier Giroux decided to try it out with his Nikon D700.

Olivier grabbed the software development kit from Nikon’s site and set to coding. A few scant hours later he had an application which would capture video using Nikon’s low-light wonder. Like the Canon hack, Olivier’s method just captures the live view stream from the camera’s sensor — you have to hook the cam up to a computer via USB and from there the software records the information sent over the wire. Olivier:

Good news: it is a viable video source. It’s fast enough, and the quality is sufficient.

Bad news: it’s a bit too low-quality to be really exciting. It’s roughly 30% below 480p resolution.  The most unfortunate thing is they create the Live-View image by decimating the sensor data rather than downsampling it – as a result it aliases, moirés and looks terrible in low light.

That’s it for the bad news though.  The feed travels over the wire at 100fps (I measured), within which maybe 30fps’ worth are unique frames.  Each frame is basically a NEF embedded thumbnail, each one is a fully-formed high quality JPEG file.  The result has the potential to look as good (or bad) as a DVD, roughly.

This isn’t going to be a replacement for a real video camera, but if Olivier gets around to releasing the software, it should certainly be fun to play around with.

D700 Shoots Video [Mutable Conclusions via Nikon Rumors]

See Also:

• Hack Adds Hi-Def Video to All Canon DSLRs
• Hands-On With the Nikon D700
• HD Video Shot With Canon 5D MKII Looks Stellar
• Nikon D90: First SLR With Hi-Def Movie Mode