The Latest - Better Performance, New Cameras, Android Pano

Hey Everyone,

2024 is set to be an exciting year. We've got some really interesting new things planned for Arsenal 2. First though, it's time the Android app got some love (see below). We have also added support for the Canon R8 and Canon R10, with more cameras in the works.

Panorama on Android is finally out of Beta!

Thanks to everyone who helped test and get it out the door. Be sure to check out the Getting Started guide for Panorama on Android.

We'll continue to make improvements to Panorama over the next few months as we get more real world feedback. Let us know how pano is working for you and send us some panos you take (help@witharsenal.com)!

Faster Android Live View Renderer

This one has been in the works for a while. High frame rate live view doesn't sound that complicated, but under the hood a lot has to happen to make it work. If you just want the tl;dr, Android can now hit 30 frames per second, and sometimes higher, on most cameras and phones with very little lag. This took a total rewrite of the rendering pipeline and networking pipeline. Thanks to the team for their hard work getting this out the door.

Faster Smart Mode Triggering

When you switch to the smart screen, we start a process that continuously monitors the speed of objects across the frame and the vibration from camera shake. This process needs to be started before you take the photo to get good results. We did quite a bit of work in this release to decrease the time each loop of this process takes. We were able to get some pretty big performance gains (10x in some cases). As an expected side effect, this leaves a lot more compute for smart mode, meaning it's able to get through it's computations much faster (200ms in most cases).

Once we had improved this speed, we went back and started looking at trigger times on the various cameras. We were able to improve trigger times from smart mode on Sony and Canon's. Though there's a bit more work to be done in future releases for Sony.

Longer Battery Life

While we were working on Smart mode, we made a few performance improvements in areas that used quite a bit of Arsenal battery power. Expect longer battery life if you're sitting on the smart screen quite a bit.