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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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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.
is there any performance hit or other reason why you wouldn't record straight to (RAM then) hard disk?
Power for one. An affordable digital video hard disk recording solution may consume more power than a VCR. Remember, at a minnimum you'd have to power a disk, a video encoder and a backplane (unless both the hd and video controllers are integrated I suppose). A professional solution would cost more than a VCR. A homebrew system is possible, but also has drawbacks. It's probably more cumbersome and complicated. VCR's require very little time to get from an unpowered state to an actively recording state since digital solutions may require a booting period. A VCR has standard and easy interface. The homebrew interface may be rougher.
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.
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
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.
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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.
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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.
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
In Virginia, failure to yield the passing lane, regardless of speed, is illegal. Unfortunately, it's not enforced as often as it should be.
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