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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."
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 \.
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
You can find a torrent for the big video 2004Apr23_trip.torrent
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.
It ain't done teached me nothin
I've always wondered how pissed the drivers that passed me were . . . Now I can know!
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
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.
The 5 is still boring as hell.
Rank Presidents by th
Now that would be cool.
Sounds like how I drive...
"Alcohol, Tobacco, & Firearms" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
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.
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.
Video = 30fps you have to drop frames to speed it up.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
I enjoyed watching your video. Thank you for making it!
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.
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
Mirror
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.
Well the roads are a lot wider because they do have pretty much a whole continent to themselves, and only about 260 Million people to populate it with. Some people have all the luck. Try driving in India. 1/4 the area of USA, and 4 times the population, and yes, they do own cars in India.
My Favourite Meme
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.
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
.. 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
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 ;-)
Actually, LA is a state, L.A. is a city. Then again, L.A. is more like a state of mind so maybe it was appropriate after all.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
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!
Incorrect. First off, the eye doesn't see in "frames per second". Second, 60 fps is well below the maximum frame rate our eyes can see (nobody has yet proven a maximum frame rate). For example, look at a CRT monitor at 60Hz and then one at 100Hz. I bet you can tell the difference (yes, Hz and fps are different, but they're similar enough for this discussion). If you can't, or won't admit that you can, you'll still know when you have crazy eye fatigue and neck muscle strain later. The same goes for flourescent lights at 60Hz.
People make the mistake of saying that the eye can only see X frames per second (where X is 24, 30, 60, or what have you), when they mean to say, "It only takes X frames per second for the eye to discern motion," where X decreases as effects such as motion blur are added to the source media. 24 frames per second of a video game like Quake sucks horribly, but 24 frames per second for a movie is acceptable because the film camera picks up motion blur. That's also ignoring the fact that video games are measured in average frames per second (your 24fps Quake game is going to slow down horribly when you get multiple meshes and particles going). It's also horribly evident that 24fps is not nearly enough when you watch long horizontal or vertical pans in movies.
Just because movies play at 24fps, or NTSC plays at 30fps (well, 29.xxx fps, and shown in half-frames for an effective 60Hz refresh rate), or PAL is at 25fps, or your LCD monitor happens to refresh at 60Hz doesn't mean that's all the eye can see. I'm also ignoring the more motion-receptive portions of your eye (peripheral vision), which you can play around with by looking at a CRT out of the corner of your eye. I bet you can even tell that a 100Hz CRT flickers by looking at it that way.
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.
L.A. is more like a state of mind
Actually, it's more like a state of no mind.
KFG
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
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."
#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!"
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.
Do you or your partner snore? - Visit www.snoring.com.au
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...
I never said that the freight trucks weren't military in purpose.
KFG
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.
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..."
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:
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
+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!"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.
how about someone make a video of loading this site and speed it up 95x, so it appears that the site still loads fast?
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.
some guys took an eighty day trip around the world and sped it up to take about 2 hours. coming soon to a theater near you.