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Electronic resurrection!

Last week, I drowned (completely immersed) a Canon A480 still-cam (which of course also takes minor videos) in Fortescue Falls while trying to take a video clip of same.

Since the water is very close to pure there, I hauled out the batteries, the SD card, then flicked it as dry as I could. Carried it open-handed back to Forrestfield, then rested it on a shelf, panel-door open, for 2 days.

Tried it. The electronics seemed to work fine but the optics were not. Massively over-bright & fuzzy.

Frowned, hauled the batteries out while it was still powered on, leaving the lens extended. Left it to dry for a few more days. Jammed it into a case which went into a coach to Albany with me.

A few days ago, without much hope, I switched it on again. Joy! It perks worfectly! (-:

So... I used it for dazzling some Yankee friends with a morning video clip of Little Beach, using a real camera stand (-: eleven minutes of peaceful bliss, set to gentle wave noises! :-) & with some stills from around the Kalgan/Lower-King area. Nice soil, nice scenery there.

Feeding a 1.2GB AVI clip from the camera through ffmpeg turned it into a 19MB MP4 file (also understood by many web publishing toolsets) with no evident loss of quality. That’s quite a change! In theory, I can fit a little under 40 minutes onto the SD card in the camera.

Comments

GregoryO said…
Man that's crazy. Most people (ok probably me too) would chuck it as soon as it gets wet. Nice work (:
Leon RJ Brooks said…
Sorry about my lagged response, Greg. Things have been (in quite a variety of ways) busy.

My attitude when I saw that it had been drowned was (shrug) nothing left to lose.

I got some excellent video clips out of it from The Gap yesterday. I processed a 2GB AVI from the camera into a 30MB MP4 using ffmpeg, posted it to a couple of social sites I use. Rave reviews. (-:

The feeling of hundreds of tons of water smashing into many thousands of tons of rock & making it shiver under my feet was awesome! (-:
GregoryO said…
Hope the majority of the busybusy ways are good ones. Besides, 9 days is lagged? Maybe in an FPS.

So where's the movie? I'm sure it'll be nothing like being there, but nice all the same.

Last night my brother showed me two photos similar to one another, and I started to come to grips with the idea that better photographers or cameras can take better photographs.

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