A Quick Drive to Houston Police Academy - Hyperlapse test

[Gibson99]

I decided to try out making a hyperlapse video using the footage from my drive to the race at the Police Academy this morning. It was drizzling but the footage turned out OK, and I learned a few things about how to make the video better for next time. Strangely, even with it sped up this much, you can still see where the A118 jumps back about a second when it starts a new file. The first one happens just as I approach the second traffic light at about 0:26.

Even though it's not perfect, some might find it interesting to watch, if for no other reason than to pretend I'm driving 400mph in the rain on public roads Some of the timing on the music just happened to coincide with certain turns or stops in the video, such as the left onto Huffmeister at 0:28 and the right onto US 290 shortly thereafter. That was not planned, but it works out pretty cool IMHO.

This is a typical drive early Sunday morning in Houston - the big empty freeways sometimes seem eerie. And this is a typical distance to have to drive for anything in Houston - nothing is close since everything's spread out. Here's the route I drove: http://goo.gl/maps/Ii4o6

It's sped up 6x for the whole thing. I'll experiment with speeding up and slowing down different sections next time, but for now I kept it simple. Probably could have run the video faster in a lot of sections, especially on beltway 8, but it's not too bad.

Music is another chiptune: daXX - Adrenochrome. Sounds pretty good considering it was probably made in the early 90s and can only have 4 samples playing at any given moment. And that it was intended to play on an 8bit computer.

The video is at 60 fps as well, so if you want to slow it down for some reason, it should still look decent.

And here's some video from a race held at the police academy (not today's race, but the same location, and wet/rainy, too!):

Miata + Turbo + Autocross + Rain - Traction Control = FUN!

 

[M---]

Registrator Viewer lets you cut out the 1-second overlap between files. Then you'll never have to see the 1-second repeat again!

I think you have to have your dashcam plugged in to adjust the settings in RV, but it does let you set the overlap. Figure out exactly how many frames are duplicated on the overlap (if you pause a video in RV, each tap of the "N" key moves ahead one frame). Divide the number of frames by 30 (assuming you're at 30 fps), and that tells you how many seconds of overlap. (or multiply this by 1000 to find out how many milliseconds).

 

[Gibson99]

Registrator Viewer lets you cut out the 1-second overlap between files. Then you'll never have to see the 1-second repeat again!

I think you have to have your dashcam plugged in to adjust the settings in RV, but it does let you set the overlap. Figure out exactly how many frames are duplicated on the overlap (if you pause a video in RV, each tap of the "N" key moves ahead one frame). Divide the number of frames by 30 (assuming you're at 30 fps), and that tells you how many seconds of overlap. (or multiply this by 1000 to find out how many milliseconds).

thanks. i need to experiment with using RV to combine files. right now it's very tedious to do it in VSDC, esp when changing properties of each clip, such as playback speed, but the benefit is that when combining and speeding up video in VSDC, i can make the output file 60fps, which i don't think RV can do. the above video is 60fps, and while watching it on youtube it isn't butter-smooth, the raw AVI i uploaded is very smooth on my pc.

I just decided to do an experiment with turning off loop recording so it'll just make one giant file, and then i won't have to worry about joins for the hyperlapse; i'll just need to keep an eye on the camera itself to see when the card gets full. so in theory that's probably better anyway, so that the beginning of the trip doesn't accidentally get overwritten. i'm already turning off the timestamp for the hyperlapse (I didn't turn it off in the above video since it wasn't planned), so what's one more settings change?

 

[Gibson99]

so here's something interesting... i turned off the loop recording instead of leaving it on 1, 3, or 5 minutes. now it simply creates 4gb files which seem to be about 35 mins long each. granted, this was with the camera sitting on my desk recording a stack of hard drives and wires that weren't moving, so with actual motion the files may be shorter. i also turned off sound since we won't want any of that in the road trip hyperlapse, so not having audio may give me a little more recording time before the card fills up. my math says 64gb /4gb = 16 files * ~30min each = 480 minutes or 8 hours of recording time. so i'll have to switch SD cards part way there... with small kids, there's no way to cover 600 miles in 8 hours. hell, even with adults it's not real plausible. google maps says 8h 47m - that's with zero stops!

 

[M---]

LOL, with my family I can barely get 1.5 hours without stops!

 

[Nigel]

thanks. i need to experiment with using RV to combine files. right now it's very tedious to do it in VSDC, esp when changing properties of each clip, such as playback speed, but the benefit is that when combining and speeding up video in VSDC, i can make the output file 60fps, which i don't think RV can do. the above video is 60fps, and while watching it on youtube it isn't butter-smooth, the raw AVI i uploaded is very smooth on my pc. ...

I always let RV find the files on the memory card and combine the files, then I select the segment I want from the combined files and save it as a single file, then drop that in VSDC so I then only have one file to manipulate which starts and finishes at the right place. Using RV to do that does not loose any quality as it doesn't actually re-encode the video, just manipulates the encoded data. and is considerably easier than using VSDC to do it all.

 

[DT MI]

LOL, with my family I can barely get 1.5 hours without stops!

Ha, my ex-wife used to travel with a LARGE thermos of coffee - 30 to 45 minutes max between stops. Traveling alone I could do almost twice the miles in the same period of time as traveling with her.