with cameras getting smaller and smaller has anyone seen a clip-on camera kind of like a headstock tuner? I wonder if that is possible or if the distance to picking hand would be too great.
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That’s the main issue. GoPro makes a headstock mount called “The Jam” which can mount a camera, but the GoPro cameras all have crazy wide-angle lenses. So the hand becomes a tiny low-resolution smudge in the middle of the screen.
For guitars we mostly just use the Magnet because it gives you the view you need. But for mandolin in the Andy Wood interview, because it’s a smaller instrument, we picked up a Yi 4K action camera that a third party company modifies to allow interchangeable lenses. This lets us tack on a telephoto lens so the hand is larger and closer up. You can see what this view looks like in Andy’s acoustic workshop, the mandolin section:
The company that does the mod is Back Bone:
You can buy it in a kit or as a fully-completed camera. We bought the kit, and then bought the camera separately because it’s cheaper. But it is not for the faint of heart - the assembly is similar in difficulty to replacing the screen on an iPhone, for anyone who has done small electronic repairs. Otherwise, you’re looking at 700-900 bucks for the complete camera.
And… the Yi does not have exposure lock, so the color changes all over the place and is tough to fix. I see that Back Bone does make a modified GoPro Hero7 which does have exposure lock, and also the new smooth video feature that stabilizes shaky video - which is a big plus for a headstock mount that bounces all over the place. The Magnet bounces much less because it’s on the body. If we can budget for it we may pick up one of those down the line and see if it works better than the Yi.
It adds up!
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I bought the DIY instructions and started to think is there a better cheaper way. Not that the instructions are hard but I kept going back to a headstock camera. Makes sense that it would bounce around too much and the wide angle would defeat the purpose.
I will be building the Magnet soon enough then just thought I would ask.
Troy I don’t want to derail Jazzcat’s topic, but I would love to know about the original Cracking The Code camera and the software you use used, I think you mentioned it was a customised software?
I think it would be cool to know about what the software was, the kind of camera you used and what computer you had back then.
Basler a602fc industrial / scientific Firewire camera:
https://store.unibrain.com/shop/third-party/machine-vision-cameras/basler-a602fc-kit/
Connected to a mid-2000s [sorry, edit - there was no “Macbook Pro” yet!] Powerbook 12" running an Objective-C app that I wrote using the C Quicktime legacy API. The heavy lifting was done by a third party driver which interfaces with the camera’s hardware directly to grab frames and do a fast debayer on them. I just added the UI and RAM-disk capability because no disk was fast enough for 30MB/sec at the time.
In some sense this was a better setup than we have now because I could review clips instantly as we were talking, and know for sure whether we got the shot. On the flip side, it could only record for 10-15 seconds at a time and you had to choose when you were going to hit the button. Plenty of people played unprompted awesome stuff I never got in slow motion. Some of Steve Morse’s best stuff was probably the takes I didn’t get to record.
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Thanks for the info, very interesting to read about the history of your setup. I bet you never thought you’d be using a mobile phone to record high quality video with?!? 
this very subject was THE reason I joined this forum…to get the camera thing going. I see its not quite down to a science yet.
My right hand is as much a mystery to me as Yngwies or Batios is lol
No and I’m thankful daily for this. About ten years ago we got to a point where you could load as many effects and software synths and audio input channels into any decent DAW on any decently spec’d desktop PC. Suddenly, there were no limitations but knowledge. And we’re now filming NFL-quality slow motion on a damn phone.
We’re not 100% there yet. What I could really use is a good measuring system, to know with certainly what motions or muscles are being used in certain activities. And then I could use a real-time feedback system to teach people when they are doing exactly that correctly, and when they are not - instantly, without having to repeat things for hours hoping for the best.
That’s the future of skill learning. Before we get to this of course:
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