Cool idea, but it took me a while to figure it out since this blog post is a little unclear. My simplification: let's say you know an interesting event is going to happen, but you don't know if it's going to happen in 5 seconds or 500. Using precorder, you can "pretend" to be recording it (you're still pointing the camera at it, but nothing is being permanently saved yet), and then press the "record" button when the interesting event occurs. It will start recording like a normal video recording app, and prepend the previous N seconds of video (where N is a user-selected value from 0-10).
The interesting detail I read somewhere else that is not mentioned in the article is the source of the cool idea at the core of this. If you watched the Planet Earth series (or saw any of the promos that were run 24x7 on the various Discovery channels) there were some very, very cool shots of sharks jumping out of the water while catching seals. To make these shots the filmmakers had to invent a new camera technique because it was too difficult to try to time the shot to get what they wanted. The digital cameras were attached to what was essentially a big ring buffer and were constantly running. When a shark breached the guy on the camera would press a button and the buffer (which had the previous X seconds in it already) would dump and new data would start going to disk to complete the shot.
No problem. I really liked the idea of the app when I saw it. I do have a question, though. Like emef said in another comment on this post, what is the purpose of the exact video embedded in this blog post? Where is the "pre-recording" feature used?
It doesn't look like the key feature was used for this video. I'm not the blog author, but I think he was just having a good time w/ the vid. Can't exactly speak to that ;)
OK, thanks for the clarification. I was under the impression that it was a promotional video you had created, not something TheNextWeb put together.
No, sorry. Blogger contacted and covered us.
It looks like a great app, but I don't think the example video added anything. Why couldn't that be done with the normal photo/video app?