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Questions on Video Recording

lightp2

Gawd
Joined
Oct 28, 2009
Messages
672
Thanks for the information

1. When you use video recording function on SmartPhone with microSD card, can you ask the program to save the video directly on the SD card? (not save to internal storage, then moving to SD card?)

2. If using smartphone for video recording, how long will it last? I understand it depends on battery, will it reach 20minutes, for example?

3. Smart Phone video recording in low light condition, say internal office, restaurant, misc, relative to still digital camera with good low light reputation. Any good?
 
1) I think it depends on the phone/OS, but Android typically will to my knowledge/experience

2) It will probably go atleast an hour of video recording ....

3) That is entirely hardware dependent, some phones will be decent, no where near a dedicated/real cameras performance
 
Yeah, all of these questions totally depend on the phone and its hardware, but..

1) I've only had 2 phones that support Micro SD cards; the OG Droid and (currently) the Note 2, both of which support saving pics and recorded vid to external storage (SD Card). So I assume most, if not all Android phones support it (that's usually the point of having expandable storage; more room to save media to). I'm pretty sure you're going to be restricted to Android phones if you want to take lots of video and save it to external storage for long run times. Even though I've read that Windows Phone 8 supports SD cards, none of the higher-end WP8 devices (Lumia 920 or 8X) actually have SD card slots. Which kind of sucks because the Lumia 920 has one of the, if not the best camera of any smart phone.

2) Pretty sure any phone with a full charge will 20-30 mins straight with no problem. I'd say most should do at least an hour or two before dying. I'll bet my Note 2 could record for 3-4 hours on a full charge. It would probably fill a 64 GB SD Card with 1080p video before dying.

3) You'll really have to do your homework on this. A lot of phones are horrible in any low/indoors lighting scenarios. My OG Droid was pretty much unusable without flash (though not really relavent today since pretty much any newer phone will have a better camera than that) and my Galaxy Nexus was mediocre at best. My Note 2 has been pretty good in low lighting and indoors though. Out of the Android phones, the Galaxy S 2, 3, Note, Note 2, the HTC One S, X, X+ DNA and the LG Optiumus G and Nexus 4 are probably the only phones that have decent enough cameras to take legible or decent pictures in these conditions. If you can swing a 32-64GB iPhone 5 or deal with a 16 GB (only size available) Lumia 920, they will probably be a bit better quality for taking pictures. Esp. the Lumia 920, the iPhone 5 is only slightly better than most of the Android phones I mentioned.

Hope this help :)

Edit: Now that I think about it; you may not be able to even shoot one really long video in Android. I can't find much info on it doing a quick search, but I know Android natively formats external storage to the FAT32 file system, which only supports files sizes up to 4 GBs. So if you're restricted to FAT32 for the cards file system, then you will only be able to shoot vids that don't exceed 4GBs at a time. I see that some devices can use ext4 and NTFS, which don't have this limitation, but (from what I'm seeing in searches) it seems to only be supported on rooted devices and I saw one thread where the phone won't record to the SD card if it's not using FAT32. So maybe someone else here can clarify on this. I've never had an issue with FAT32 on my SD cards, but I've never needed to have files that large on my phone. You may want to research this yourself too.
 
Last edited:
Dear all,

I appreciate the information. They have been extremely helpful. Not only that, I guess the 4GB size scenario is a completely new understanding to me.

If I go for one unit, I do not intend to root the device.

I already have one existing still digital camera. I guess SmartPhone with so many integrated capabilities has certain attraction, including the convenient of pocket video recording. In a way, I am trying to learn basic video recording, for a start. Easy to carry around does have certain consideration for me. I ask about the low-light scenario because those seem like most common everyday scenes for learning.

Again, I appreciate the help.

Cheers
 
Yeah, all of these questions totally depend on the phone and its hardware, but..

1) I've only had 2 phones that support Micro SD cards; the OG Droid and (currently) the Note 2, both of which support saving pics and recorded vid to external storage (SD Card). So I assume most, if not all Android phones support it (that's usually the point of having expandable storage; more room to save media to). I'm pretty sure you're going to be restricted to Android phones if you want to take lots of video and save it to external storage for long run times. Even though I've read that Windows Phone 8 supports SD cards, none of the higher-end WP8 devices (Lumia 920 or 8X) actually have SD card slots. Which kind of sucks because the Lumia 920 has one of the, if not the best camera of any smart phone.

2) Pretty sure any phone with a full charge will 20-30 mins straight with no problem. I'd say most should do at least an hour or two before dying. I'll bet my Note 2 could record for 3-4 hours on a full charge. It would probably fill a 64 GB SD Card with 1080p video before dying.

3) You'll really have to do your homework on this. A lot of phones are horrible in any low/indoors lighting scenarios. My OG Droid was pretty much unusable without flash (though not really relavent today since pretty much any newer phone will have a better camera than that) and my Galaxy Nexus was mediocre at best. My Note 2 has been pretty good in low lighting and indoors though. Out of the Android phones, the Galaxy S 2, 3, Note, Note 2, the HTC One S, X, X+ DNA and the LG Optiumus G and Nexus 4 are probably the only phones that have decent enough cameras to take legible or decent pictures in these conditions. If you can swing a 32-64GB iPhone 5 or deal with a 16 GB (only size available) Lumia 920, they will probably be a bit better quality for taking pictures. Esp. the Lumia 920, the iPhone 5 is only slightly better than most of the Android phones I mentioned.

Hope this help :)

Edit: Now that I think about it; you may not be able to even shoot one really long video in Android. I can't find much info on it doing a quick search, but I know Android natively formats external storage to the FAT32 file system, which only supports files sizes up to 4 GBs. So if you're restricted to FAT32 for the cards file system, then you will only be able to shoot vids that don't exceed 4GBs at a time. I see that some devices can use ext4 and NTFS, which don't have this limitation, but (from what I'm seeing in searches) it seems to only be supported on rooted devices and I saw one thread where the phone won't record to the SD card if it's not using FAT32. So maybe someone else here can clarify on this. I've never had an issue with FAT32 on my SD cards, but I've never needed to have files that large on my phone. You may want to research this yourself too.

Great info here, just a couple points to add:

1 - AFAIK, cell phones are limited to the same 29 minute maximum recording length that any other device not deemed a "camcorder" are limited to. That's not to say you can't make a 29 minute video, then instantly kick off another, but you can't do anything over 30 minutes in one shot.

2 - Lumia 920 is 32GB, not 16 as stated above :)
 
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