Beginning-of-the-week Video Madness

[MisterBeasley]

With the introduction of You-Tube to the forum, and my finally-complete installation of a video camera in my subway train, I present the following full-length motion picture. (Well, yeah, its full length is about a minute and three-quarters. You got a problem with that?) Note the stylistic Alfred Hitchcock reference - an overweight guy doing a walk-through in the second act.

This is an extreme video - not for the faint-of-bandwidth. If you have dial-up, you can ballast a hundred feet of track before this will show up. Sorry.

http://www.youtube.com/?v=dOV9NSqrQlc

Yeah, there's a lot of unfinished stuff here. Still lots of pink prairie, and places where the camera shows a lot of scenic flaws. One station is nothing more than a couple of styrene platforms, open to the sky, and the PCC car is unpainted. But, 8 months ago this was just a pile of lumber, some sheets of foam and a track plan. It's come a long way.

[howmus]

Cool! Gotta get one of those onboard camera thingies...... [:D]

[dgwinup]

That was cool! Reminds me of riding the subways in New York and Boston!

So how do you do all this? I haven't heard of YouTube. What are the details? Subscription service or what? For crying out loud, I don't even have my own WEBSITE yet. (Still trying to figure how to do that!!)

Darrell, amazed, and quiet...for now

[ereimer]

very cool , but it was so dark i thought i was in some kind of tunnel or something.... no really it was too dark for me . some video setting of mine or is it dark for everyone ?

[selector]

It IS dark, just like in a sub-terranean railway. Cool. Did I see Godzilla walking across the train's front about halfway through that video? Scary!

[MisterBeasley]

YouTube is a free service. There were a couple of postings here and on the Layouts forum yesterday. I signed up and was able to upload the video right away.

Yes, it is too dark in there for everyone. The bright circles on the outer walls of the curves are from LEDs which are mounted on the inner walls. Not enough, I fear. I also mounted a pair of LED headlights on the subway car, where the holes in the shell are in this picture showing the car. The camera lens is in the circular porthole on the door:



The LED headlights didn't help as much as I'd hoped they would. And to make matters worse, there are still some gaps in the tunnel roof, which will be covered by liftoffs for access, so it's going to get worse. Maybe some lighting in the liftoffs?

I plugged the video cable out of the receiver right into the video input of the camcorder, and just recorded the whole thing. I've got a video card for my computer, so I transferred the raw video to the computer and edited it a little bit. What you see, 1:45 of video, is just under a hundred megabytes (ouch!) which is the maximum file size allowed by YouTube, which is at http://www.youtube.com if you're interested. By the way, even with broadband it took a long time (like half-an-hour?) to upload the whole thing, and then YouTube does a bit of processing before it's ready. Broadband is generally not symmetrical - downloads are faster than uploads.

Yes, that was Mr. Zilla in the second scene. The folks in Moose Bay (my fair city) just call him God, though.

[railroadyoshi]

Very nice! I atually enjoy the darkness of the tunnels, whereas I feel light is needed is in the stations.

[csmith9474]

Thanks!! Really cool!!!!!