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George Tsai

2019

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Thursday, 28 November 2019 00:00

Control RED DSMC Cameras with my Android App

First crack at developing an Android app for release in Google Play store. Google's documentation is a lot of hit and misses. Particularly if you are developing with the new Androidx apis, searching in general for it is annoyingly difficult. AndroidX was a horrible name to give their new version, even their own search engine constantly returns "Did you mean Android?". Layout and themes is horribly documented, made even worse since Google removed the Theme Editor. I've never had the chance to use the editor, and from what I can gather is that it wasn't very reliable. However I would imagin at the very least it could give you an idea of what values you are looking for to modify. Instead I'll spend all day trying to figure out what the element I want to customize from the theme is named. Searching would be great if there was a efficient way to filter the api version you are working with, instead it is all over the place. If anything, the one thing they've documented well with examples, unsurprisingly is the AdMob and monitization libraries. As for rest of Android development, it more often than not feels like none of the Google departments talk to each other.

Granted, RED's own documentation isn't any better. There is zero documentation on the data you receive from the camera. You have to do plenty of trial and error and pretty much output to log everything sent by the camera and figure it out yourself. On top of that the camera is very inconsisstant in it's ability to communicate, as if sometimes it just doesn't want to listen. Setting some parameters and values is also a lot of guess work since the documentation does not quantify what the parameters and values actually represent.

<p">Control Red DSMC cameras from an Android phone. Early alpha release, basic controls are functional. To get access first join the Google group at:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/fuze-rcc

Once approved you will find a link inside the group to the Google Play store listing to download. The app is free to use and supported by ads only on the connect screen or if you would like to give some support with paid ad-free subscription it could help speed up the development pace.

The app is built directly up from the RED provided SDK and will be adding more controls to it over time. 

Minimum Android Lollipop.

Published in Digital Cinema

A little about me

profile.largeGeorge Tsai attended California State University, Long Beach and graduated in 2010 with BS in Electrical Engineering, Audio Engineering, and an Entrepreneurship Minor. He is also a United States Marine with combat deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan. He concluded his service with an honorable discharge as a Sergeant. Today, he freelances in the film industry with his Red Epic-X camera package and production audio equipment. He is also the founder of FUZE Ti.  Read more...

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