The live view is the one place where the look is chosen before the picture
exists, so the columns that hold it have to stay in reach while the camera is
open. The viewfinder was a fixed black sheet over the whole app: the rail and
every slider were behind it, and the only way to change the look was to close
the camera, grade the file, and open it again. It now covers the stage and
nothing else — the stage and the view share a slot (`.stage-slot`, position
relative) and the view is absolutely placed inside it, z-index 5, black in
either theme. Measured at 1600px: the rail and the columns are on screen, the
feed takes 1347px of the 1600 and the stage's own 253px rail the rest. A slider
moved with the camera open reaches the very next frame (the render loop reads
the recipe per frame, so nothing had to be wired), a monochrome sim takes the
live feed from sat 42.1 to 0, and the shutter hands the studio that same frame
with the sim already on it.
The preview render is skipped while the viewfinder is up (`|| shooting` in the
guard, and in the effect's deps): it would run the same recipe through the same
renderer as the frames the user is actually watching, and the live one wins.
Opening it is PRO, like the HSL chips and the geotag — the frames are the paid
ones. The button stays on the page for everyone and carries the badge, and the
click runs the app's own `promptPro`: the account dialog for a guest, the
verification panel for a signed-in account, `/api/auth/me` being what says
which. A verified account gets the camera; a guest gets `.modal-backdrop` and no
`camera-view` at all.
Probes: cam-pro-gate (guest sees the badge, the click opens the dialog, no
viewfinder; verified opens it), cam-live-edit (rail and columns survive the
live view, feed covers the stage, the recipe reaches the live frames and the
shot), cam-smoke, cam-renegotiate, cam-close-flip.
The one path where the look is chosen before the picture exists: OPEN CAMERA
grades the camera's own feed with the recipe in force, many times a second, and
the shutter hands the studio the sensor's still under that same recipe. Preview
and file differ in resolution only — the still is `takePhoto`'s own frame, not a
copy of the small preview video, with `grabFrame` and a 2d copy of the element
behind it for the browsers that ship no ImageCapture.
The renderer gains two inputs for it: `sourceImage`, a picture the caller
already decoded (re-encoding the camera's frame to JPEG only to decode it again
would cost more than the whole render), and `drawTo`, which paints the finished
picture instead of encoding it. One render is in flight at a time; a frame that
arrives during one is dropped, so a slow device shows a lower frame rate rather
than a queue of moments that have passed.
The view flashed black on a phone. Setting width/height on a canvas resets its
bitmap: measured on the preview, a resize leaves mean 0 until the next render
lands, which on this box is 0.5s and on a phone more. The buffer was sized from
every incoming frame, and a capture that renegotiates its resolution — which
Chromium does when the page is too slow to consume its frames, and this pipeline
runs ~2 fps at 720p under software GL — strobed black/picture at every switch.
The buffer is now sized on the first frame and after that only when the frame's
aspect changes: a same-aspect frame is scaled into it. Swapping a 1280x720
stream for a 640x360 one mid-view now leaves the buffer at 1280x720 with no
black frame, and 640x360 renders at 6-13 fps instead of 2.
The frames are read from a <video>, which is now IN the document (1px, behind
the black backdrop) rather than detached: Safari draws blank frames from a
detached video, which is the same black-between-pictures. It leaves the document
with the view, and the tracks are stopped, so the camera light goes out.
Probes: cam-smoke (feed painted, resolution, frame rate, a monochrome sim
reaching the live frames, shutter into the studio, close, console clean),
cam-renegotiate (no resize, no blank frame, status line on the frames),
cam-close-flip (flip returns a picture; video gone on close).
3dtours