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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."
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.
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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?
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.
As a former Oregonian, I'll bite and seed it for a while too :) I will say though that only a masochist would pimp a file that big on Slashdot... of course, you knew that from the 50 other comments here!
Way to go - fun experiment!
You Yanks have all the fun. I loved the vid! The sun was shining, there were lots of cars, hills, and fun things to see. This was a really nice slice of life from another part of the world. I would love to see videos from Hong Kong traffic, or races around other parts of the GINORMOUS United States.
Video = 30fps you have to drop frames to speed it up.
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.
Having never been to America, I now have an insight to what the scenery from LA to Oregon is like.
The roads are a lot wider? Is that because the US has bigger cars?
I think I shall drive from Sydney to the Gold Coast in Brisbane and do the same thing to compare and contrast with that video. Although I doubt the scenery would be as interesting as the route follows the coastline.
.. 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
It's at dreamhost.com? Damn, I didn't even traceroute it. I know their equipment! Small world. Ya, they have plenty of bandwidth, and their servers are pretty good. It's probably maxing out the connectivity for that one machine (or cluster, I don't know their stuff that well).
For anyone interested, they do have a really sweet setup. I've talked to their techs a few times, who gave me the tour.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
yep, as a European I also appreciate this movie.. gives you a better idea how it looks like somewhere else.
/. post last week of a truck driving through the USA to take pictures of every street. Would be cool if it got online so everyone could access it.
Same thing with the other
Some people I email with have sent me links to sites of local newspapers and things like that
so at least I have an idea of how their town looks like and what's going on.
Because if you live in a city or in a heavily populated country in Europe, it's easy to think everyone lives in a city..
Quite difficult to understand that someone lives in the middle of nowhere or in a very small town..
Learn about pinball machines on www.flippers.be
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
I didn't study it as closely as you did, but I've seen more of these time-lapse driving things, and it ALWAYS looks like the driver is a speeding maniac, brakes too late, makes erratic turns etc.
I think it's the same effect you get when driving as a passenger: when you cannot control the vehicle, a distance you would judge as safe when driving yourself, suddenly seems a bit close.
Add the (seemingly) extreme decelleration (sp?) and erratic steering, and it looks a lot more extreme than it really is.
You make a good point about safety though. Anyway, it seems to be human nature to respond to people pushing from behind by slowing down.
What I usually do, is use the turn signal to indicate I want to pass, and if that doesn't work, a brief flash of the headlights usually does the trick. There is a difference in road behaviour in different countries though: In Germany, this works great, in France or The Netherlands, not as good. Germans are used to people passing at 190km/h.
Of course, our situation in Europe is a bit worse, because it's illegal to overtake on the right.
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
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.
Um, nice thought, but they're built that way because the folks at the pentagon set the standard. City roads (Detroir in my case), can be tiny, hazardous little lanes, but interstates have to be able to move certain equipment in times of emergency. Blame it on WWII, the Cold War, or terrorism. Interstate lane sizes (and those state roads that want bases nearby) are determined by the largest equipment the military is willing to move in a hurry. Obviously, having one 30 ft wide lane wouldn't appeal to the citizens, but having 3-4 M1A1*s cruising at highway speeds is a reasonable alternative.
:)
Not that we'll ever need it, but hey, they might end up a legacy like those old roman roads you European folks are so proud of.
Microsoft has just released their much anticipated hands-free cordless mouse. Warning, it may hurt a little at first.
There's something really cool about driving at 160kmh, seeing a highway patrol car and freaking out that you are busted until he overtakes you at 180kmh and waves...
The bad news is that if you are a long way from somewhere when your car overheats and breaks down, you will probably die.
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For fun I do time-lapse of relatively stationary stuff - like plants growing, where the speed-up really brings out patterns that you don't see at normal speed.
Maybe that's why I actually liked the part in this video where he's parked at a gas station and you see some plants blowing in the wind, for a change of pace.
Some issues are different when you're doing a time-lapse over 1 hour versus multiple days. But one thing that I've found useful for slow-changing stuff is if you're taking say 1 frame per hour of a macro subject outdoors that can easily blow in and out of focus, take two frames in rapid succession so you can throw the worst one away.
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
I didn't say that. I said they're comparable. If you want to be technically correct, frame rate and refresh rate are linked by vsync (ie, a monitor that can only do 60Hz will risk image tearing if you push your frame rate beyond 60fps. That's why any good game allows you to lock to vsync for a consistent frame rate, or take your chances and disable vsync waiting and just go for broke). In terms of what the eye can see, refresh rate and frame rate are similar in that you can still see jerky motion even at 60+ fps, and you can still see flicker at 60+ Hz.
You're correct that there's a CPU component to video card performance. You certainly can put a $500 video card in a P3, though you won't use much of its potential. However, you are buying yourself a bit of breathing room so that you don't have to upgrade your video card next time you want to upgrade your CPU (why would you buy a $500 video card and not get a $100 CPU upgrade, though?).
All else being equal (meaning a modern CPU, modern memory architecture like DDR or RDRAM (guh!), etc), a higher frame rate is better. If you have the money, go for the best out there. If you're on a budget, get the best card you can afford. If you want to play modern games, you're not really saving much by buying a $100 video card each year versus buying a $300-500 card every 2-3 years. Be my guest, go out and buy that GeForce4 MX card you've had your eyes on. Even my lowly original GeForce3 will beat that, and I paid less than $300 for that 2+ years ago.
What entire episode would that be? I mean.. so you get /.ed.. that means that you have < (x) bandwidth and/or serving capacity in machine power needed to serve your contents to (y) the demographic among slashdotters who care about the topic material.
:)
Assuming the site was hosted in a colocation facility and the user even *had* 24/7 access to his cage or rack, more than likely all that would happen is the server begins chunking out, he tries to get into it to remove some content if he is paying attention, otherwise it just sucks till the demand drops (or if running older IIS, gets "set" by a "temporary stealth administrator" to display goatsepr0n.) If he cant get in, he triggers a remote power supply to reset the machine, it comes back up, he gets in... Crisis averted.
Unfortunately that rarely happens though on here it seems.. In my experiences, a good site slashdotting to the point of no return i'd say for links that I click maybe one in fifteen slowed down sites have content adjusted on the fly to compensate, most site admins don't appear to be paying the attention to notice that they're crawling to a halt. It is in itself an interesting phenomenon, a frequent reminder on how spontanteous and enormous the internet is.
But back to the point, no, I don't think that video would be any fun. If anything at all, itd be some kid in his 20s with a toolbox and a laptop sitting on a hard raised-tile floor for 20 minutes behind a wall of rackmounted crap.
Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves? -Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Cool film. What's the soundtrack?
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
In Virginia, failure to yield the passing lane, regardless of speed, is illegal. Unfortunately, it's not enforced as often as it should be.
LordBodak's journal.
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.
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.
If you are on the Canning Stock Route or something, maybe you would die. On the major roads in NT and WA there is enough traffic that someone would stop for you.
I rode my bicycle around the circumfrence of Australia (20,000 km) in 2002-2003 and never once did I feel like I was alone. Even on the Gulf Track across the top from Normanton->Burketown->Borroloola I was seeing a car once every hour. I had these reserverations intially about biking for days on end and not seeing a car, but I found this to not be the case.
My travel website is here:
http://www.lunky.com
I had an argument with a friend about this a while ago and each state has their own rules. Some say you can pass on the right.
--------- Steve Martin once said, "Sex is the most natural, most beautiful, most wonderful thing that money can buy."
It probably only seems faster at 5m00s because the road becomes more twisty, and there are suddenly trees on both sides of the road. With more visual cues to reference, the eye believes it's going faster.
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!