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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'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
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.
Er, not necessarily the case. Check your /. just fine.
trace up to dreamhost.com. They've got pipe.
Also, check out the session management they've
set up in Apache. They'll survive
It's the idiots who run videos off a small
pipe or dumb default-apache setup that have probs.
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
.. 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
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.
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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