Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Bertha Cam

Hi all
We plan to document our road trip from London to La Palma using time lapse movies. We have built a system to do this, it consists of a web-cam mounted behind the rear view mirror (so that it does not obstruct the drivers view of the road) and a laptop running Active WebCam from pysoft.
A few weeks ago we did a test run from London to Worthing. The software took 1 image every 5 seconds. The 1 hour 15 minute journey resulted in a 7.3Mb file. This file was then processed using VirtualDub By Avery Lee to convert it into an avi file running at 15 frames per second of 6.3Mb and lasting approximately 55 seconds.

London To Worthing Test Run

Launch in external player


This video is a bit jumpy so for the actual road trip, a setting of 1 image every 1 to 2 seconds will be used and the final avi will be at 30 frames per second this should result in files that are approximately. 126 Mb for each 5 hours of motoring (a days driving) and take approximately 10 minutes to run.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You guys are crazy but for some strange reason I can't wait to see the BerthaCam (TM) journey to the canaries :)

All the best to you two - and I will certainly be plugging your RSS feed into feedreader to keep up to date.

All the best,

Andy.