Home Cascade Consulting Archives About AutoCAD History Page
10 Electronic Technologies That Changed Construction
Nice Tutorial from Down Under on Architectural Desktop

Have I Snapped? Updated 6-22-04

22 June 2004

I was inspired by a web page " LA to Oregon at Mach 9"which recorded a trip from Los Angeles to Oregon and then sped up the video.

Update 6/22/04: I again video taped my commute just yesterday the 21st of June 2004, and posted the resulting video after processing. It was a much lighter commute than normal for some odd reason.

The Windows Media video (.wmv) is 320 X 240 and is 7 minutes long. In 7 minutes, you travel from Petaluma California down highway 101 to my office (Autodesk Inc.) in San Rafael and then back for the home commute. The actual distance traveled was about 43 miles and took 40 minutes. The commute after my editing looks like it would if you had a jet engine strapped to the back of the vehicle. It took a fair but of video processing to achieve this but it was fun.

Steps in the process of making this little video, all for fun and diversion.:

  • Recorded the video from the top of my Nissan truck with a Sony DV camcorder. You get a fair amount of stares from people wondering what you are doing. Next time I will strap the camcorder to my bumper for a lower and more complete view of the road, cars, and scenery.
  • Transferred the digital video to my desktop computer at home. File size was 16gig.
  • Imported the video into a video editing application.
  • Removed the effect of the road making the video jump and shake at points. This in itself is an interesting editing process. Essentially the software tracks what are the stationary items in the view then compares the next few frames to line them up. It then computes the smallest frame size to eliminate the edges from the frame adjustments.
  • Reduced the video from full frame down to 320 X 240.
  • Increased the frame rate to little over 4 times the actual speed of the recovered video.
  • Exported an AVI file.
  • Imported the AVI file into another editing package to compress the video, and then export a .wmv file.

    So enjoy the commute at hyper-speed!

    Download The Commute Video - 11Mb

    The Route
    6-21-04commute-route

    Cheers,
    -Shaan

    • Posted on 22 June 2004 | | Comments (0)

    Comments