

Precorder for iPhone. Never miss a great video moment again - solipsist
http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/01/25/precorder-for-iphone-never-miss-a-great-video-moment-again/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheNextWeb+%28The+Next+Web+All+Stories%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

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defen
Cool idea, but it took me a while to figure it out since this blog post is a
little unclear. My simplification: let's say you know an interesting event is
going to happen, but you don't know if it's going to happen in 5 seconds or
500. Using precorder, you can "pretend" to be recording it (you're still
pointing the camera at it, but nothing is being permanently saved yet), and
then press the "record" button when the interesting event occurs. It will
start recording like a normal video recording app, and prepend the previous N
seconds of video (where N is a user-selected value from 0-10).

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evgen
The interesting detail I read somewhere else that is not mentioned in the
article is the source of the cool idea at the core of this. If you watched the
Planet Earth series (or saw any of the promos that were run 24x7 on the
various Discovery channels) there were some very, very cool shots of sharks
jumping out of the water while catching seals. To make these shots the
filmmakers had to invent a new camera technique because it was too difficult
to try to time the shot to get what they wanted. The digital cameras were
attached to what was essentially a big ring buffer and were constantly
running. When a shark breached the guy on the camera would press a button and
the buffer (which had the previous X seconds in it already) would dump and new
data would start going to disk to complete the shot.

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kamens
Thanks -- this is our side-project which we posted on HN a while back during
launch: [http://bjk5.com/post/2768063563/great-white-sharks-are-
the-b...](http://bjk5.com/post/2768063563/great-white-sharks-are-the-best-
side-project)

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solipsist
No problem. I really liked the idea of the app when I saw it. I do have a
question, though. Like _emef_ said in another comment on this post, what is
the purpose of the exact video embedded in this blog post? Where is the "pre-
recording" feature used?

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kamens
It doesn't look like the key feature was used for this video. I'm not the blog
author, but I think he was just having a good time w/ the vid. Can't exactly
speak to that ;)

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solipsist
OK, thanks for the clarification. I was under the impression that it was a
promotional video you had created, not something TheNextWeb put together.

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kamens
No, sorry. Blogger contacted and covered us.

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emef
It looks like a great app, but I don't think the example video added anything.
Why couldn't that be done with the normal photo/video app?

