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LA to Oregon at Mach 9
Kallahar writes "Last April I hooked up a video camera to my front bumper and drove from Los Angeles to Oregon. The video is finally done; it's sped up 95x which makes the trip a mere 6 minutes long. To do the recording I hooked up a VCR inside the car and recorded in real time, then captured the entire thing to the hard drive and changed the framerate of the avi. The camera and VCR only cost about $50 total, which makes for a fairly affordable hobby/art project."
cool nonetheless.
Posting a link to a 65mb file on your own site is brave.
That I can prove you were speeding using this, right?
I put a digital camera on my dash that took a picture every minute and have a movie of my drive from New Orleans to Seattle. It's awesome, but you only get about 1 frame per mile.
Slashdot Eds Link Anonymous Posts With Logged Posts
They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
Wow, first post. I feel 1337. Seriously though, is there any performance hit or other reason why you wouldn't record straight to (RAM then) hard disk?
Come on, that's like actively saying "I want my site to be fucked in the ass by the Slashdot Effect".
/.
Why no freakin' BitTorrent? That seems obvious, especially if you're the one who submits your site full of absurdly large videos to
(FYI, I'm getting 22k/s, on a link that usually gets about 25. Not too bad, now watch that server burn in about 5 minutes...)
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
I'd like to see someone do this with a more interesting route (yes, I'm a Portlander). This would be cool for, say, Route 66 - and possibly at 1/50th (or a selection of several speeds/frame rates).
:)
Anyway, it's a pretty cool video and actually something I'd thought about years ago. Glad to see someone else had the same idea.
About as long as the life-expectancy of his server
I hit the link before first comment, got on the download, 100K/s and all the sudden whoosh it starts dropping.
You can find a torrent for the big video 2004Apr23_trip.torrent
Watched the vid... noticed he drives like me, always in the left lane speeding past most others. Reminds me of my at least bi-weekly drives from El Paso to Albuquerque, except I do not stop when I drive.
when's the "Extended Edition" coming out?
This is a sig. Deal with it.
I don't own a Land Speeder you Insensitive CLOD!
followed by
In Soviet Russia, the Video captures YOU!
Slashdotting yourself and posting a 65Mb AVI?
...which I'm sure you'll be getting by morning.
You must be new around here.
Or just really needing your ISPs love and attention
Anyway, it was nice knowing you and all.
in the 3 minutes it said that it was gonna take to down this initially, I went from 273 kB/s to 101.
/.!
Go
And this is news? Maybe if somebody got that scramjet working, or if somebody built a huge open-air particle accelerator between the two locations... but this isn't even remotely interesting.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
It ain't done teached me nothin
I've always wondered how pissed the drivers that passed me were . . . Now I can know!
no videos of that I suppose? ; )
65 Mb file download? Slashdot? If that works out, thumbs up to the DreamHost.
But the petrol cost $350.
I couldn't think of a sig.
Talk about a dream server, the download is going faster than the torrent. It will become a very expensive hobby if you don't have an unlimited plan on your server
Dude, I'm still laughing at this one:
Dialogue/Meme
It was going good...
..........'s wget makes. Damn lameness filter
0K (wget dots) 0% @ 372.78 KB/s
50K (wget dots) 0% @ 279.33 KB/s
100K (wget dots) 0% @ 271.74 KB/s
150K (wget dots) 0% @ 2.87 MB/s
200K (wget dots) 0% @ 1.95 MB/s
and then it fried....
34850K (wget dots) 50% @ 74.18 KB/s
34900K (wget dots) 50% @ 78.25 KB/s
34950K (wget dots) 51% @ 60.83 KB/s
35000K (wget dots) 51% @ 56.56 KB/s
35050K (wget dots) 51% @ 46.64 KB/s
Slashdot effect in action people... I'll post a BitTorrent if it ever finishes
Ugh, had to do a find replace of all the
The 5 is still boring as hell.
Rank Presidents by th
Now that would be cool.
I'm helping by downloading it over and over
LA is a city, Oregon is a state. Did he go to a city in Oregon? Or did he go to the Oregon border, turn around, and go home?
Sounds like how I drive...
"Alcohol, Tobacco, & Firearms" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
Quoth the article:
To create the video I had to capture the entire movie (25 gigs or so), extract it to single frames with VirtualDub, delete 99 out of 100 of them (left 10,000 frames), color correct and...
What's the purpose of removing so many frames? Just to reduce size further, or when speeding up something like this does dropping frames make it appear smoother or something?
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
This guy should have used "FreeCache"
1. Send thousands of people to download a huge .avi
2. Make sure your ad for a "great web host" is in plain text at the top of the page.
3. Listen to the collective gasp as your site actually manages to keep up with the downloads (as of 11:20pm pacific)
4. Profit?
Of course the whole thing goes out the window if the server actually does crap out in about 5-6 hours when the east coast get's to work and collectively hits the download link in one giant spasm of excitement at the chance of seeing the %$&%-ing highway 5.
weee?
If you are one in a million, then there are six thousand people who are just like you.
Cool thanks for the torrent link, Hopes it not a virus.
Good speed, too. I'll leave my connection up all night too, just to be nice to my fellow slashdotters, and that poor fool and his website.
However, after the server exploded due to Slashdotting and started a huge fire resulting in the destruction of his house, the neighborhood, and most of LA, the total cost of the trip was estimated at 8.5 billion USD.
You can mod your friends, you can mod your nose, but you can't mod your friend's nose.
There is nothing that would make me want to travel there at Mach 9. Take my word on this. For the love of God. Please.
The links already dead..... too bad I wantd to see it. Anyone got a torrent link to it yet?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
As pennance for taunting everyone below, I'll host it for a while as well. I still can't really host from here very well or I would have done that myself.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I enjoyed watching your video. Thank you for making it!
Hasn't school taught us anything?
In about 30 of the frames I could have sworn I saw geeks on the side of the road with "Will Code for Food" signs.
Table-ized A.I.
Again - nice and easy to do with a Laptop and webcam, and about 12x normal speed - I'd post it on my site..... but this is slashdot after all.
I'm not sure mach 9 is as watchable, it's certainly faster, but I kinda like the way I can pick out details at a simulated speed of 720mph
Fantastic work and a very creative! This taps right into the zeitgeist, next to blogging and confluence finding whilst providing an accessible glimpse into another area of the world. Imagine if someone did one for a cruise down the Nile, or the Trans Siberian Railway. Thanks for posting!
p.s. Don't listen to the nuts going on about download speeds and what not, some people can't see the forest from the trees.
Do not move the camera. Use a tripod. If you cant rig up a full size tripod in the passenger seat check best buy or similar stores for tiny desktop tripods. They work well when seated on the dash as long as you have something to keep them in place (duct tape).
Cut out moments in post when your vehicle is not moving. I forgot to do this once and my video came to a 3 second hault as I reached an intersection. Needless to say it distracted from the video greatly and was truly annoying. Just trim it out so that it looks like you ran the red light or something and the video will continue to flow. This tip also goes for bumps or swerves as they look terrible at high speed.
Do not add a blur effect in post production, or atleast not the ones that come with Vegas. They seriously distract from the video. If you need that light-speed look I suggest duplicating the video layer, moving the top one forward 2 or 3 frames and changing its opacity to 50%. This will create a cool effect especially when passing cars and changing lanes
If you are going to mount the camera inside the car (which I highly suggest) make sure:
A. Your windshield is clean
B. Its not raining. I did this once with the windshield wipers on and it looked horrible
C. Your state and county stickers are not in the picture. If the camera does move it will be much more noticable if there is a static image on the video.
If you are going to tape more than an hour of driving you may want to setup a laptop on an inverter hooked up to the camera with firewire set to take an image every X seconds. You can then drag all of these into your favoriate post video production software but in my experiences you dont get as smooth an image unless you overlap the images with opacity fades and by that time its become one helluva project
Tip for vegas: You can increase the velocity encelope up to 300% but thats not a whole lot. Do this alone with shortening the clip while holding down the CTRL key will allow for up to 12x the speed without the need to reencode.
If you need to speed up the video faster than what your post video production software can do you can always render the video no or low compression, import the now rendered video and do it again. lather, rinse, repeat.
And always:
Mix it to good techno if thats your cup of tea
I'm interested in hearing what other tips video enthusiast slashdoters have come up with. Please share.
As always I apologize for the bad spelling and horrible formatting, I'm rushing to get to sleep
BTW: This also works well for filming Ballroom Dancing. It looks hillarious and cool at the same time. Try overlaying multiple segments of the dance at different oppacities and adding a black and white or sepiatone filter and playing witht the white balance for a great ghostly look.
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
Wut iz skool Billy Ray?
Mirror
but I think I almost had a seizure around minute 5 with all the turns in the road.
As a fellow geek that does this exact drive about 4 times a year, I must say that 6 minutes is extremely appealing.
Many times during the monotony of the drive up I-5 I've wished I could teleport (even only 20 miles at a time). Mach 9 sounds just as appealing.
For those that can't see the slashdotted site, our automatic mirrors have the page itself HERE. The backup site (listed on the page) still has the video available.
:)
:)
:)
I did the same thing driving with only one sleep stop from Florida to California. It ended up being rather boring. Lots of night driving where you could only see tail lights and reflectors, and plenty of "Road Runner" desert country.
I shortened the whole 2500 mile drive down to 5 minutes, which was too much for most people to watch.
I did a web broadcast for most of the drive, losing my Internet connection while driving through most of the South West US. It picked back up in the few major cities that I passed through, and that's when I got all the voicemails on my phone saying "Hey, your feed broke!"
Most of the drive was rather quick. I got pulled over twice in Texas, where the cops were entertained to see a laptop in the passenger seat and a camera on the dash. Either of them asked why it was there, they just gave me a warning, and I went on my way. I really had the urge to tell the cops "My car can do almost 200mph, I'm doing 80mph, I want to go lots faster, there's nothing out here and no traffic!", but I held back to avoid an escort out of Texas.
I got stuck in traffic going through San Antonio, Texas, which looked wierd on the video. Scenery was flying by, suddenly you saw the same minivan I was stuck behind for several frames. You could also see every time I stopped for gas, which lasted for just a couple frames.
I made a run from LA to Salem Oregon and back, about a year ago. The drive took from Friday evening to Sunday morning. Again, it would have been a boring video. Most of Northern California was during the night, and Oregon was all under fog first thing in the morning when we arrived. I was in a rush, so we didn't get the laptop and camera set up for this one.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Is this a slow /. news da?. Sorry, but I just don't see how this justifies a story.
California 7A88404, That was me!
3:39 seconds in
Is it just me or at the 5:00 point does it looks like he started speeding like a bat out of hell?
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
...too bad you had to waste it on I-5. If you have the chance to do it again, try Route 1 and US 101. They're much more scenic!
.. are those flicks where somebody put up a camera to follow the building of a house, and then speeded the result it up by 200x or similar. That really cool to see a house 'grow' :)
If anyone remembers urls to these flicks, post 'em in, I can't remember anymore..
-el
Until you hit the Oregon border, and then the style of driving seems to be to stay in the left lane in a huge-ass motorhome going as slow as a slug, and the right lane might as well not even exist. Even though the state puts up huge green billboards advising "slow traffic keep right" you can bet your last dime you'll be stuck in the left lane behind a smoke-belching deisel-powered house-on-wheels chuffing along at 45 MPH all the way to the Columbia.
I enjoyed watching your video. Thank you for making it!
/. you are not supposed to THANK anyone for doing anything useful/creative/interesting with technology you are supposed to bitch/complain/nit pick. Now get with the program.
[sarcasm]
This is
[/sarcasm]
..instead. It would be a more interesting route as you have to climb then descent the Great Dividing Range, and it's actually shorter than the Pacific Highway. Just a thought! Oh, and stop off in Armidale while you're at it and spend some tourist dollars ;-)
Ok, now if you slow it down, you can find out exactly where he lives! Turn at the white fence!
First one there, MOBLOG IT!
GO!
Sydney -> Newcastle -> Hexham ->Raymond Terrace -> turn left off onto (Bucketts Way) -> Stroud -> Gloucester -> (Thunderbolt's Way) -> Nowendoc ->Walcha ->Uralla -> TR onto (New England highway) -> Armidale -> Guyra -> Glen Innes -> Tenterfield ->(QLD border) -> Warwick, etc, etc.
The route up from the pacific highway through Gloucester is spectacular - I'd love to see that at 95x speed! And it'll save you several hours over the other main routes because a) it's a straight line and b) there are very few cars and no cops.
...the /. effect passes away. This reminded me of that movie, The Rendezvous (http://www.chasecam.com/rendezvous/automobilerevi ew.html), which consists of mothing but a uncut shot of a speeding car traversing the city of Paris.
Time lapse video is way cool. I've captured stunning videos of clouds, sunsets, etc., with a Firewire camera, a very long cable, and the BTVPro software on OSX. It lets you specify framerate of capture, so you don't need to actually tape hours and hours. Also useful for stop-motion animation.
You made a good joke, but having watched the video, the guy does appear to be a very impatient driver. Time after time after time, he runs right up to someone's bumper in the left lane, follows very closely for some time, then winds up passing them on the right.
I spend a lot of my time doing interstate driving. As such, I realize that there are plenty of assholes out there doing 65mph in the passing lane where the speed limit is 70. But drivers who tailgate in the passing lane (or any lane, really) are IMO just as much of a risk for accidents.
When you're in the far left lane, and you're gaining quickly on the car in front of you, you should either move to the immediate right lane and complete your pass at a safe distance, or if conditions don't allow this, slow the fuck down and back it off. Riding the bumper of the person in front of you because they're driving too slowly is NOT the proper response. Nine times out of ten, the driver in front of you is not going to "get the message" and yield his position.
This is a great video, I just wish it didn't depict so many examples of poor and unsafe driving.
Hey that was cool!!
Thank god he didnt use "Born to be wild"
well kinda. 3 min 2 sec and some frames.
Cool way to make the treck less boring even if it's after the fact.
Did anyone else feel sick watching the video?
I don't normally get motion sickness at all any more, but that's what I felt when I watched this.
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
Video tape yourself sleeping for 8 hours, slow it down, and watch yourself sleep at mach 9! It couldn't be more boring than this...
p.s.
Make the file a 1 mb flash movie that loops 60 times. It will look the same and save loads of time and bandwidth.
No one's said anything, but can that possibly be a correct price? Or does he mean he picked them up at a garage sale somewhere? Actually, even at a garage sale, I'd be more than a bit surprised.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Not quite on that scale and not taken that seriously. I set up my Olympus E-10 on a tripod in my back seat and had it take a picture every five minutes during a straight 17.5 hour drive from Boston to Champaign, IL. It worked out pretty well, considering...
Steven N. Severinghaus
Yes, with the Director's Commentary track, and the Deleted Scenes and Bloopers.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Just be sure to turn your camera off when you drive past Barbra Striesand's House.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Seen here as a quicktime: Behind video
The video was made in conjunction with Oliver's brother Twist, who used to write software for him including some of the original stereographic morphing software which led to BUF Compaigne creating the first bullet time shots.
At Mach 9 I would not see anything at all....
#1:"Hey, we're getting a lot of traffic from..."
#1 & #2: "SLASHDOT!!!"
#2:"quick redirect all traffic to that goatse.cx guy's website!"
Beware of this thing... I downloaded the free (ad supported) codec from http://www.divx.com/divx/?src=toptab_divx_from_/in dex.php.
The damn silly thing has gator inside!
I can hear you all say: what do you expect from sonething that's add supported? Yes, I do feel stupid for downloading it and wanted to give it a try
One more good reason to drive round Australia! Only 16,000 kms if I ferry the car across to Tasmania as well. Alice Springs (and Ayer's Rock, the Olga's, Katherine Gorge, etc) creates a Konigsberg Bridge problem, however, since I won't be departing from either Darwin or Adelaide, but would like to do a north-south traversal as well. Darn graph theory...
Next time record it going up the 1, much nicer scenery. The 5 is probably the most boring drive in all of california. Bakersfield, Fresno, Stockton...holy god it is boring.
Last year there was a large blizzard in Colorado, we got several feet of snow. Durring the second day I decided to set up my web cam and snap pictures for 24 hours just to see what it looked like.
This is the movie I ended up with Go easy on me (Divx encoded)
I would like to just say thankyou both for the video - although I may neeed to lie down until the dizzyness stops - but for primarily seeing azureus peak at 340KB/s I knew they weren't ripping me off when I got my new line.
Offtopic me if you must, but I was reminded of this video from Britain. It's not nearly as long, but it covers a stretch of motorway that uses reversible lanes without a center divider!
My new
OK, considering that there are a number of vehicles who stayed ahead of the car for several frames, either there are a LOT of similar-looking cars on the road that just happened to be in the right place at the right time, or else there are a bunch of other cars in this video doing Mach 9 as well.
I'm impressed with those semis. That many sonic booms in their immediate vicinity all at once should have knocked them off the road.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Where's the nudity?
now stand up and smell your chair...
Slashdotted by the time I got to it; however, this has got to be one of the fastest BitTorrent recoveries that I've ever seen. I ended up with about 1 MBit down on average from BT. Very, very, impressive.
BT is simply amazing at ad-hoc file distribution tasks like this one. Only a year ago we'd have all been begging for mirrors (which invariably wouldn't keep up either).
Ah well... go ahead and mod this as off-topic.
You can also do this with a laptop and a webcam. I made loads of timelapse movies this way; driving, boating etc. Pretty cool (although useless) thing to do.
Wow, that was fast, also for me! :)
Of course, do remember to leave the client open until you've uploaded at least at much as you've downloaded.
I killed mine after 120 or so MB of upload
Support a Europe-related section on Slashdot!
Cool film. What's the soundtrack?
This programm was broadcasted at night, and was the best ever sleeping-drug I could imagine. Watching it after a busy day, it took only like 10 minutes before I fell in a deep sleep.
BTW you don't need a car and a VCR to create movies like this. If you live next to water where boats go by, or a busy road, or construction-works, it's very easy to create a timelapse-movie with only a webcam and webcam-software. Just make a pic every second, and use a tool to stitch all those pics to 1 movie afterwards. I did this a lot with cloudy skies, and it much fun to watch afterwards.
"Honey, I feel a certain distance between us..." "Really? A 31ms ping ain't that bad..."
Should not be a problem. Hook up your notebook to your car's battery and just make sure you have the 25 gig space available needed for the video (as stated on the website). You may use a USB webcam or real camera hooked to a PCMCIA video capture card. Or just place a Sony Vaio with integrated camera (e.g. C1XN ) on your dashboard ;-)
Man, it must be nice to be able to drive ten hours and not hit any bugs. This camera seems to stay spotless. I can't drive ten miles on I-4 here in the Tampa-Orlando stretch without creating a mass Lovebug grave on my hood/front of my car.
He did that, and he didn't even take the scenic route? Could someone do it again, but this time take Highway 1 up the coast? Six minutes of high-speed concrete gets pretty dull and repetitive after about a minute, but I guess he had to find something to match his techno music.
...is to see this downsampled properly. Put a low-pass filter on each pixel in the time domain before changing the framerate. Hell, I'd write the program. but I'd need some kind of framework to stick the code in.
If I actually come up with anything I'll reply to this. Otherwise, assume I learned something but never felt a need to finish the project.
Quote(from site): "To create the video I had to capture the entire movie (25 gigs or so), extract it to single frames with VirtualDub, delete 99 out of 100 of them (left 10,000 frames), color correct and deinterlace them, and then create an avi from the stills with VideoMach. Then I just had to find a song that was exactly six minutes long." What's sad is that this could have ben done in one step with AVIsynth... faster and higher quality 8(
Why would you drive around in the dessert with a really big boat?
Interesting, I thought Americans generally were not amongst the fast moving drivers, even if it were only for the speed limits.
As you probably know, in Germany we have no basic speed limit on the freeway (though there are some due to noise reduction in populated areas etc), and our average travel speed nowadays is about 160km/h (~100m/h). Maybe 25% of the cars go up to 190km/h, and there are those 5% which go at 210km/h and faster.
Still, a December trip from Zuerich, Switzerland, to the Danish border of Germany (about 1020km) took me 10.5 hours with only two short rests, which I thought was reasonably fast (OK, it was winter and snow and rain partly slowed down the whole thing, but not much).
695.3 miles on the other hand are 1120km, and doing them in 9.5 hours (including stop lights, traffic jams, rests etc) sounds pretty great to me. Is this the average travel speed in the US?
i know in after effects you have the option of changing the framerate and having it average the content of the in-between frames (instead of dropping them) so that it's smoother. i think if you wanted the effect of moving really fast, that would be better, even if a bit blurry. (hey, everything IS a blur when you're traveling at the speed of sound...)
i'd like to see what it looks like that way, anyway... (have fun spending another 8 hours rendering!)
Michel Gondry, creator of some milestone music videos (Björk, The White Stripes, Chemical Brothers, Beck, Rolling Stones, etc.) actually did exactly this in one music video. The video was pretty sophisticated because he didn't just speed up the video: he adjusted it so that every explicit event (driving out of a tunnel, streetlights when car stops, rocky mountains showing up, etc.) is directly linked to the music. When you look at the video you first think that it is just a trip from east to west-coast in 5 minutes but then you actually realize that everything you see in the movie perfectly fits the music.
Get info here: [info about all the clips]
There's a great DVD available too: [amazon]
... keep the bugs from getting squished on the lens at that speed?
Free Firefox news reader.
What would be fun is to hook up a GPS as well, and overlay a moving map on the video as well. I must try this in New Zealand, as we have some awesome highways through the Southern Alps and lovely driving road... mmmmm...
what would be really cool is if we could get a bunch of truckers from some massive trucking company to put these on their rigs and film different routes.
same thing - put cameras/VCRs on UPS delivery trucks in cities (hey UPS - would you like to make a deal?) and then collect all of the video, edit it, make it interactive... so you can direct the vehicle...
or at least create a program that allows for you to give an address and a destination and "voila" there is an automagically created video for you of a possible route.
That way you can use visual cues so as to avoid getting lost. I bet there are lots of people who can't read maps that would love something like that.
maybe if i get a gmail account and everyone emails me their video we could use up that terabyte!
Course, I haven't googled for this so if it already exists...don't crucify me.
- Grum
Well it's confirmed: In over nine hours, he kept to the right for approximately 3 minutes of the trip.
Great geek; terrible driver: http://www.mit.edu/~jfc/right.html
http://kaltoft.linux.dk/2004Apr23_trip.avi/ /kaltoft.linux.dk/2004Apr23_trip_small.avi
http:
Why not using a Notebook with a USB camera? Why not capturing one frame every N second/minute an store it directly in an AVI?
I'm glad somebody brought this up. The one thing that incites me to "road rage" is the mf'ers in the "passing lane" who aren't passing anybody, just cruising. There is a special PLACE IN HELL for ppl who drive slow in the left lane.
Where you live, is driving slow in the passing lane also a 5-point infraction, as it should be for parity's sake? If you're caught driving in the left lane and not passing anyone 20 times, do you lose your license? If not, there's no farking way right-side passing should be illegal.
geez that felt good.
fred
All I could think about when watching the video was Rad Racer
... of Cruisin' USA, the arcade game? I guess it's the scenery and the speed that reminded me of it. Wow.. I have a headache now...
-------
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
Here are the North Cicular videos; also a page of Sights of the North Circular with some historic information.
Unlike the OP, we used a webcam and stored our film directly on a laptop computer using some software called WinTLV (and a USB cable through the sunroof). We didn't do a lot of editing, though 5 seconds was snipped where we sat behind a milk lorry, and there is a join in the film where we stopped to wipe rain from the camera lens. Here are photos of filmmaking.
We discussed doing a similar video in central London but didn't get around to it. Perhaps a site hosting these videos from all around the world could be fun.
Enjoy!
You obviously have never driven I-70 from Salina, KS to just outside Denver, CO.
No hills. Few turns. Nothing but wheat fields for 300 miles.
Every time I have to take that route, I think to myself "It CAN'T be as bad as I remember." About 2 hours in, I say to myself "Yes, IT CAN BE!"
Even with 11G of stories on the MP3 player it drags.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I've never been Down Under, but I have driving in England. I found the motorways to be not much different than the interstates (other than the side of the road you are on, and on the divided highway/dual carriageway roads that isn't as much of an issue).
True, when you get OFF the motorways onto the local roads things are different (and with 20+ years of driving on the right, it is NOT something I want to do when tired).
Perhaps what needs to happen here is that somebody with good bandwidth needs to create a time-lapse road website, and folks can upload the video there.
I'd have to run US160 from Medicine Lodge to Coldwater.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Thought of doing something like this...
and then I decided that it would probably take me over a month [23 Apr->2 Jun] to get the video done, so i said naah-fuck it.
After all, my driving is not exactly role model.
Come to think about it, the video would be enough to prosecute me!
And, good thing he didn't have any accidents or incidents...
[Imagine splatting a dog at mach9]
Or did he?
you must have no life.. seriously. this is about as entertaining as watching grass grow.
+4 insightful when she lost the case and had to pay legal fees? One word: precedent
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!""Americans drive left-hand drive cars and drive on the right hand side of the road. I had to take travel sickness tablets after watching that."
:P
It's not just Americans. Most of the WORLD drives on the right. That's why driving on the left really is weird
This has to be the coolest thing I've seen in awhile!
Kudos!
This gives me an idea on how to finally use that X-10 camera I bought years ago. I chickened out on making the hidden camera in the girls locker room.
I made something like this in 1998. Unfortunately, it's in RealMedia format. [does anyone know how to decompress it back to AVI?]
I drove from Olivia, MN to Ely, MN. I had a 3com "Bigpicture" webcam on my dash, connected to an old VCR. This stuff was also powered by an inverter, as the author did.
Here is a link to the video:
If anyone flashes me (UK) in this fashion I deliberately make their task of passing as difficult as possible. The flashing is normally accompanied by excessive speed, and tailgating.
This is a profoundly Bad Idea. You're setting the stage for a deadly accident -- perhaps involving you, perhaps involving others.
Pride in road rage is the Devil's work -- you're making the world a worse place for everyone to live. The world is bad enough already, without such needless provocation. Please think about the dreadful consequences of your actions.
-kgj
-kgj
Averaging together 50 frames instead of just throwing away 99 in 100 would have made a much smoother video. While you still have all of the frames on line, it might be interesting to try. Even better (for video) would have been creating the final output on fields (60 fps)
Still, not to look a gift horse in the mouth -- it was a pretty cool video. Thanks!
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Burger and fries in Sacramento: 23 dollars
Video Camera and VCR from Fry's: 52 dollars
Watching your server melt: priceless
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
Could someone tell me what equipment was used to capture this? I know the website mentions a cheap Fry's camera, and a VCR, but could someone tell me what camera and how to mount it and connect it back to the VCR.
Hell, after about three minutes I was beginning to tire of the video. By the sixth minute I was asleep.
I'm glad I wasn't doing it in real-time!
"Big country. Very boring."
Quote from a Swedish motorcyclist who had ridden from Perth to Darwin.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
If he's discarding 99 out of 100 frames, he's losing a large amount of image data.
:-)
A MUCH better way to do this would be to digitize the video of the entire trip, then output every other frame of the sequence to a new sequence (call it "A"), starting on frame 1. Then, do this again -- output a second sequence called "B," every other frame, but start it on frame 2. You end up with two sequences of "even" and "odd" frames, each half as long (and twice as fast) as the original. Load both sequences into a compositing program or batch processor, and make one sequence ("B") 50% transparent, on top of "A." Then, render this sequence as "C." You'll get a new sequence where each frame is composed of 2 of the original frames, blended together.
Now, discard the original "A" and "B" sequences, and repeat the above process with the "C" sequence. Keep doing this until you get the final size you want. (If you start with a 10-hour sequence, after 7 "halving" iterations, you'll get a 9.375 sequence of blended/blurred frames, with dynamite motion blur that looks like warp drive.)
Yes, I'm a professional 2D/3D computer graphics artist.
P.S. 25 years ago, some friends of mine and I shot Super-8 film from inside a car, with the camera pointing out the front windshield. I took 1 frame per second, which, when projected (with the 18 fps speed of Super-8), worked out to be 1080 mph, with the original car going 60 miles per hour. What's funny is, we went driving on country roads, then went back into the city (Springfield, MO), and pulled into a driveway, whereupon I immediately switched to regular speed. It looks like an amazingly fast (and smooth) deceleration from about Mach 3 to 5 miles per hour!)
Why isn't it on freecache? This kind of thing is exactly why they exist.
On another note, will I still get carsick at Mach 9?
Does anyone have any idea what the music from the video is? It sounded like Crystal Method stuff, but its not....
Help please?
6000 mile an hour ~= 1/5,000,000 C.
Warp is the cube of light speed.
It seems that most metro areas have nicknames for the major highways in the area. It works great for the locals, but most of the time the radio traffic reports use the nicknames and the map I have doesn't.
how about someone make a video of loading this site and speed it up 95x, so it appears that the site still loads fast?
Heh, and condemn the poster for not GPLing everything they've ever done...
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
I live about 2 miles west of Interstate 5 in So. California (right near disneyland). My understanding is that, in the event of a coastal attack, the plan is to fall back to the 5 as a defense line.
Good plan, except that a couple million of us are between the 5 and the ocean...
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
Yes, thanking people in posts is wrong, because it invites posts of the "Me too!" kind.
To show appreciation, you should rather write a journal entry about it, or submit a poll:
LA to Oregon video
[/sarcasm]
P.S. Remindes me of a British TV show (maybe KYTV)
The setting was a TV anniversary:
"Here's one of the segments made in those days: London to Brighton in three minutes." [Fast film shot from a train looking forwards, showing the rail and rushing in and disappearing behind us.]
"And here's how that same train ride would look, today."
[Fast film taken from regular news footage, showing passangers being assisted over rails by British Rail workers from a train with technical difficulties, carrying luggage and getting wet from the rain.]
[Audience laughing.]
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
> "Big country. Very boring."
I've driven the Nullabor... Sydney to Perth... and, yeah.. its a challenge.
You get one fuel station every 300 clicks, that also serves as motel, restaurant, toile... and that's it. 300kms of sweet bugger all.
There are only so many dead kangaroos you can count before you get sick of the site of them.
The "Wedgies" are spectular tho. I never imagined that they were so huge! I guess its all the dead kangaroos they've been eating.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
It occurred to me that an experiment like this would be the perfect situation to work in weird frames or subliminal messages because everything's blinking by so quickly you can hardly (or not at all) make out individual frames. Remember Fight Club and family films at the movie theater? Anyhow, since I don't feel like trudging the thing frame by frame, I submit to other /.ers: closely examine the scene at some convenience store around the 5:26 - 5:28 time marks.
N.B., I'm not saying he had ulterior motives in making the film (he should get help if he did), but it's something to think about, anyhow.Don't forget Outrun on the C64. Cool music, annying game.
The Abyss Special Edition DVD has one of the coolest time lapses on it of them building the entire underwater base and filling the unused nuclear reactor that they built the set in with 7 million gallons of water. I also highly, highly, highly recommend renting/getting the special edition DVD and watching the hour long documentary Under pressure: Making The Abyss, even if your not a fan of the movie. You will be shocked and amazed at the lengths Cameron and his crew go to in order to make this film.
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
Now that the site is slashdotted, it will take longer to download and watch the movie than to drive from LA to Oregon.
Also, there's a bug in the video -- okay, a bug ON the video camera -- at the last fuel stop.
---
Get rid of everything Micro and Soft: Buy Viagra and/or Linux
On a related note, this is EXACTLY why I like some of our other rules, such as not allowing semis (tractor trailers) in the left lanes. I had forgotten just how bad it could be until I drove from San Diego to St. Petersburg, Florida. I had a very hard time controlling my anger when two semis decided to ride side-by-side for 30 miles, during "somewhat medium" congestion traffic.
mplayer -fps 0.3 -rootwin -fs 2004Apr23_trip.avi
LMAO, well duh, he was driving faster than the rest of the traffic on the road. The video would have been quite boring if all we saw the whole time was the back end of some 18-wheeler.
It's not like there were long stretches where the right lane was unused. When there WERE such stretches, he did move over. I'd say he drove about the same as I do when I'm driving a relatively long distance with somewhat crowded highways.
Anyone notice the Civic that appears rather suddenly at 1:26 and quickly disappears? It's facing the camera so I figure this is pretty weird to have happen on the highway. I thought maybe I was imagining it so I just ignored it, but then later on the Civic shot shows up at the gas station at 2:10. Pretty weird, must've been a goof? Or a subliminal Civic advertisement?
If you like this you really should see koyaanisqatsi. It's got a lot of time-lapse photography and great phillip glass music.
My dad also did a couple of movies of old, abandoned railroad grades. In these, he would move a certain number of steps before single-framing the camera. One time, there were a bunch of abandoned railroad ties still lying beside the track. Before each frame, we moved a few ties onto place on the abandoned roadbed, so it looked like the ties were being laid right in front of you as you went along. (It would have been even better to lay ties and rails, but we didn't have any rails...)
In New England, our transportation planners were mostly cows. They didn't seem to care about passing or (being passed) in any lane.
Right-side passing is "Passing on the right side of a vehice in a single lane", basically this only affects two things, motorcycles, and people who try to drive in the dirt.
Passing slow left traffic in the middle or right traffic lane, in not against any law. It's actually in CVC 21659 that slower traffic is required to get out of the far left and middle lanes if they are not overtaking other cars.
Post: Sigged, for your pleasure.
It would be much cooler if the camera were mounted on top of the car and angled to one side so you could see more of the landscape.
Okay, mach 9 or no mach 9, staring at the ass-end of an SUV is boring even at six minutes. That settles it for me--no more long-distance travel until they perfect matter transporters.
Surprising that people still think VCR when they want to record video. After all the DVD recording, hard drive recording, flash recording, the VCR is still the first recording device you think of.
...except that I did it from Austin to Santa Monica, by way of eastern Utah and Colorado, so the scenery is pretty. Here's a link to it. It requires Divx5, I think. It's set to music and all that.
:-)
The main difference in techniques, though, is that I did it the hard way, because my digital video camera did not have an intermittent record function, so I had to reach over after every song (3-5 minutes) and switch it on, record 5 seconds, then switch it back off. When the scenery was nicer, I recorded more frequently. Then I spent a week chopping it down in Premier. The result is pretty watchable, though it isn't as dramatic as taking intermittent images the whole drive. I did find out that my Canon DV45 can be turned on and off about 125 times without draining the battery completely, which is impressive.
Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental.
Hello Dreamhost Customers,
n ounce
Some of you may have noticed overall network slowness. One of our sites was hosting large video files that were being heavily accessed. This caused slowness for a portion of our network, and additionally impacted the performance of some of our mail servers.
We've disabled the site as of approximately 10am PDT. The problems began sometime during the early morning, though it's unclear exactly when.
Everything should be back to normal now. Our apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused you.
Happy DreamHost Networking Team!
---
The preceding was a Downtime announcement, sent 2004-06-02 10:51:26.
You are receiving it via email because it is level 5 and your account is set to get announcements of that level via email.
You can change that by visiting our web panel's announcement area at: https://panel.dreamhost.com/?tab=status&subtab=an
Thank you for taking the time to read this announcement,
The Happy DreamHost Announcement Team
Notepad specialist & FAT administrator, group training available
I have some client sites on Dreamhost, and this email was recently sent out - I wonder what site they're talking about?
---
Hello Dreamhost Customers,
Some of you may have noticed overall network slowness. One of our sites was hosting large video files that were being heavily accessed. This caused slowness for a portion of our network, and additionally impacted the performance of some of our mail servers.
We've disabled the site as of approximately 10am PDT. The problems began sometime during the early morning, though it's unclear exactly when.
Everything should be back to normal now. Our apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused you.
Happy DreamHost Networking Team!
I thought our I84 (i live in CT) only ran from boston to scranton - last time i was going to pittsburgh, 84 T'd into I-81 N/S, no further signs for 84 W. do the two connect?
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Another way to do this is to use your basic $29 webcam and connect it to a laptop. That gives you a bit more flexibility on frame rate and storage (assuming you've got a 12VDC adapter for your laptop, of course), and there's a fair amount of webcam software that can let you control that.
So when are we going to start seeing webcams as standard hood ornaments?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Claude LeLouche's C'etait un Rendezvous
c ts rend.html
Real time. In Paris.
There's a brief clip here -- the complete film (available on DVD) runs about 9 minutes.
http://s73322911.oneandoneshop.co.uk/site/produ
Correct. And nothing is more grating to the ears of a non-LA-area-er than to constantly hear "take the 405 to the 5 to the...". Well, except maybe the way LAers? inflect each noun phrase? to sound like a question?
Only time we use "the" for highways up here (bay area) is when using (what I call) the quaint names: The Nimitz Freeway, The East Shore Freeway, The MacArthur Freeway, The Bay Shore Freeway.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Does this remind anyone else of Crusin' USA?
(\(\
(=_=) Bani!
(")")
Wow...talk about playing with my motion sickness. Feel like when I played Descent!!!
Still--pretty cool...nice scenery here and there.
You dick! The proper way to be sarcastic is to use the Insert phrase here !!!!!
.NET sarcasm tag. Stop forcing your evil mono culture on me m$ fanboy!
You were using the Microsoft
Now get with the program!
I see that while this is sped up 95x after being captured in real time, the frame rate is still 30fps.
I would love to see the same footage but with only half as many frames discarded; ie 60fps. It would make for a much smoother 'ride'.
It would only play on a computer, since your telly probably can't do 60fps non-interlaced, but the difference in visual quality would be staggerring.
Of course, I can just re-encode the footage from this AVI to 60fps, but the resultant speed-up would be 190x, which is probably altogether too fast! I guess using MPEG motion estimation might allow me to interpolate frames, but I'm not sure how to do that in mencoder.
I suppose if you were to post a high frame rate version, there is the slight issue that the smoldering remains of your server would not thank you if the file was twice as large.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
way Way WAY too much time on his hands.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Man, if someone flashes me with headlights when they are trying to pass me, I either throw a bunch of stuff out the window at them, or, I immediately let them pass, then ride behind with my headlights on them for as long as I can, waving a pistol out the window at them. Assholes think they can push me around, wow, they gonna get shot!
This is my sig.
I get a "codec error" when I try to play it in Windows XP. Next time please use MPEG. AVI's are too buggy. I have had multiple problems with them on multiple machines.
Table-ized A.I.
I would suggest downloading a nimo codec pack.. usually the "lite" version is sufficient. nimo codec downloads