S3 IS stills while in shooting video

[MaxZoom]

Can anyone help please.

I'm planning to buy S3 IS so I have a friends S3 IS for the day to try it out.

Everything is as I expected but I'm surprised to see the video blacks out when a still is being taken. The camera has a 1GB x66 memory card, will a faster memory card minimise this effect?

Are there any hints on how to stop or minimise this effect?

My children are all swimmers and I've been videoing them with a camcorder in one handwith a stills camera in the other hand to get the finish, the blackout would mean I still need to juggle video and still camera even with the superb S3 :cry:

[dale500]

The S3, as good as it is, simply cannot do two things at once. The skip in the video when you take a picture cannot be eliminated to my knowledge. You can minimize the effect by turning all the volume settings to their lowest setting so that you don't here the shutter sound in your video. I thought this was a cool feature when I read it in the advertising for the camera but they left out the part about the skip in the video when you take the picture. The same feature is on my S2 and I tried it a few times. Now I only shoot video or pictures, but not both at the same time.

Dale

[MaxZoom]

Not the news I wanted to hear but thanks for the info.

The shutter sound is pretty stupid if you want to get the best video and sound. Thanks for the tip on turning down the sound.

Do you know if the speed of the SD card has any effect on the size of the chunk of video which is lost?

[bndaidbob]

Not the news I wanted to hear but thanks for the info.

The shutter sound is pretty stupid if you want to get the best video and sound. Thanks for the tip on turning down the sound.

Do you know if the speed of the SD card has any effect on the size of the chunk of video which is lost?

I have the S2Is and the speed of the card has no effect.

[dhbailey]

To Canon's credit, they at least tell us in the manuals that there will be a very short blackout if we decide to take a still in the middle of a video. It's a camera thing, not a memory card thing, so speed won't affect it at all.

it's about a 1-second blackout.

I turned all my sounds off the very first thing, I don't want to draw attention to the fact that I'm taking a candid. :-)

[MaxZoom]

I checked out a few test video clips I took yesterday. At 640x480 30fps the blackout was 0.25 of a second followed by 0.25 of a still frame so a total of 0.5 seconds (15 frames).

Thanks everyone for the feedback. This is a great forum, you guys rock.

[283CID]

Well... if you put the knob to the VIDEO mode, all you can shoot is video. If you have the camera in ... say.... Tv... you can be snapping pictures, get 'in the mood', press the RED button.. and take .avi video until you run out of memory, or press the Red Button again, to stop it. Go back to taking pictures...

[MaxZoom]

Go back to taking pictures...
I think you missed what I want to do.
I have once-off real time events (example - finish of a race). With an S3, I can capture the whole race (if it fits in 1GB) at 640x480 30fps until it comes to the big finish, then I have to abandon taking video if I want some 6MP stills.

The S3 allows for quick changeover from movie to stills, its still the best out there.

I wanted it all :D the whole race in an uninterrupted movie plus a 6MP still of my child coming 1st.
I'll just have to continue my video camera in one hand, stills camera (S3) in the other hand and giving encouraging waves with the third hand.

I thought Canon cameras were so good there was no such thing as limits. :lol:

[dhbailey]

Of course, in any decent video editing program, you can save single frames as pictures, so you could just keep on taking the video and then use a single frame as a still shot.

[283CID]

Yup... and even the Free Photoshop Elements Two that came with my EPSON scanner does that !!! And well, I might add...

[MaxZoom]

If I wanted low res (300k pixels) stills I'd just use my digital camcorder and forget about a 6MP (6,000k pixel) camera!

The advertising copy on Canon Powershot S3 IS reads...

Extensive movie functions
Shoot smooth 30fps VGA quality movies with full audio, or record QVGA movies at 60fps and analyse in sharp slow motion. Make full resolution stills while recording with the Photo in Movie feature.

My idea of 'while recording' means at the same time not switching from one to the other quickly, I can do just about anything anyone else can do with a camcorder except make 720x576 (PAL version of 640x480) equal quality to 2816x2112, maybe I need to be a better mathematician. :lol:

Maybe you guys know some secret you are not sharing?

[Fureinku]

its still a wonderful camera, i wish i still had mine, it would sit nicely in my bag next to my other things

[glenindy]

I have an S2 and I think the video capabilities are the same. In my S2 manual on pages 70, 71 72, it tells how to edit. It says you can remove video frames in 1 second segments and then save the new video. That should remove the black screen when you take a still shot. Try it out. Nothing is changed or destroyed until you save the new, edited segment. Also, if you have any sort of video editor, you can get rid of blank frames as well as the shutter snap sound.

[2Shiny]

I haven't examined this feature yet, but I'm pretty sure you can reinsert the missing frames into the video. So with a little fooling around on the computer, you can end up with your uninterrupted video and your still shot(s) intact.