Bringing back the Autographer

I’m thinking of taking my Autographer to emf camp. I bought it a while back when the idea of wearing an automatic camera to record my so-called life seemed quite attractive. Since then the product has been withdrawn and the company behind it has vanished along with all the software support. You can go onto GitHub and find someone hosting all the apps and documentation but the program flatly refuses to work on the Mac. On the PC the application runs OK until you try to press buttons and do stuff, at which point nothing happens. It’s all rather sad.

The good news is that the device itself does work and you can get the pictures off it after you’ve taken it somewhere interesting. The date and times on the pictures are all wrong though, which is surprising given that the Autographer is supposed to have a GPS system built in.

The thing about the Autographer is that it decides when to take the picture. It has a bunch of sensors that help it do this. You can trigger it to take a some pictures if you like, but you’ve no idea precisely when they will be taken. This not the kind of camera you can say “cheese” for. However, it does come up with the occasional gem, like this one of me coming down the stairs. I’d left the camera lying on the floor of the hall and it has captured a very interesting angle that I probably couldn’t have got any other way. The ultra-wide angle also captures a good view of what’s around.

Importing Autographer Videos into Adobe Premiere Pro

The title says it all really. If you don't want to know how to import time lapse videos you made with your Autographer into Adobe Premiere Pro then just admire the picture above and move on with your life. 

If you do want to know this, then your'e in luck. Turns out that the Adobe importer is a bit fussy about file formats and it decides a lot of things from the file extension. The Autographer writes files with an extension of mp4, which are rejected. If you just rename your file, from blah.mp4 to blah.mpg then the files are accepted. I used the command prompt to do this.