Using the Menu S and M Continuous modes The R3/4/5/6 and some other Ricoh cameras
provide the Continuous modes in the menu, normally the full frame
continuous mode is used to get a sequence of action, but a
smarter way to analyse things like golf swings is to use the S-Cont or
M-Cont modes where 16 small frames are stored in the one frame. Read
the manual for more information.
The resulting image is 16 frames squeezed into the one image and those
16 frames take about 2 seconds to accumulate. Using video at 640x480 on
the R5 and R6 would yield better results possibly, but then you need a
video edit program to do frame by frame fiddles like this effort
represents.
The problem is what to do with that
S-Cont or M-Cont image? You can step through it frame by frame on the camera LCD, but a
smarter way is to split the picture into its 16 frames in the computer as separate
jpegs and take it from there. I used Noiseware first on the original
all-in-one frame to clean it up and then ran the Ricoh SV-1 program to
separate the frames, and then used Animation Shop 3 that came with my
old copy of Paint Shop Pro 8 to build an animated GIF file.
Many thanks to Prognathous on the DPReview forum for finding that SV-1 has disappeared from its usual place.
Here's the whole image (reduced to 800x600) taken with S-Cont mode, the original R3 image was 2592x1944 pixels.......
That image is split into individual jpegs using the Ricoh SV-1 program,
and then I used Animation Shop 3 included with my copy of Paint Shop
Pro 8 to create the animated GIF using the Wizard in Animation Shop to
make life easy. There are other programs out there to do this job, but
Animation Shop is the only one I have installed. The resulting animated
gif file is huge, so I reduced the frame size to yield something more
responsible for viewing.
Here's the final animated GIF file (reduced to 200x150 from 636x478 pixels)......
So it's not an essential feature on the
camera, but some fun can be had. Make sure the camera is on a tripod so
the background doesn't jiggle about
(Above images are linked from Photobucket, so if Photobucket is down you won't see a thing).
