Camcording your layout...

[Anonymous]

How many of you folks out there camcord your layout and trains while running them ?.
A friend of mine who saw one of my recordings of my layout recently asked me if I would film his layout and various trains, so I took my camera over to his place and sat it up on its tripod and away we went. He ran each train about five minutes, then I'd pause the camera and he'd change them out and away we'd go again.
We started with the oldest trains he had and graduated up to the most modern ones at the end of the filming.
So now on those days when he doesn't feel like actually running his trains, he can pop in his DVD and just watch them...

trainluver1

[ac4400fan]

good idea ,,i do the same to get a real life prospective, to areas on the layout,,to inprove realizam, close, 2 min vids are perfect

carl

[MisterBeasley]

I've got a miniature "engine cam" that I've got temporarily mounted in a gondola. Normally, I push it around ahead of an engine, but last night I put it in the middle of a work train behind a flat car. Gives an interesting perspective, plus something that is always in focus.

Right now, my scenery is all foam, tools, caulking guns and beer cans, but once things are set up I'll be recording from this angle.

[AggroJones]

I love camcording my layout. I've got this old school 1996 built, bulky camcorder that gets the job done. It captures my layout with more true-to-life colors than my digital cambra made in 2004!
I have 6 mini-cassettes (1.5 hours each) full of footage all through out my modeling career.

I got no tripod, so all the images are a little shakey.

[Anonymous]

Some of the images in my photobucket are "lifted" from my digital camcorder.

I just finished fitting firewire to my computer so that I can now record Hi 8 or digital 8 tapes to the hard drive with a better screen resolution.

I have also found several video hosting services so that people on the net can watch them at the moment I dont have any yet on line.

I enjoy camcording trainshows, I simply sweep thru the layouts onto the camcorder and then go over them in the quiet of my home slowly.

I use a Sony DCR TRV 460. I have a walmart tripod now to hold it steady, this is quite important. Part of the camera has night shots in IR availible and memory stick of about 1.5 hours on a 512 meg of capacity. I can run one hour digital tape or stream it hot to a computer.

Battery is good for over 8 hours on a charge and am planning a small flood light for both day and night use. It was not cheap at all. I think half of this years hobby budget went into the camera and the accessories.

Being free from the photo developers and able to do everything with Roxio 7 software on the home computer really is liberty from excessive fees that we used to pay in the old film days. The roxio is capable of "Lifting" one frame as a image or capturing either digital or tape images.

My next improvement will be a 200 gig external drive that will do nothing but store videos and I can easily carry it from computer to computer.

I use a PNY 1 GB memory stick "Attache" to carry videos (I hold close to 3 hours worth on it) and can communicate with Apple Computers using quicktime and also on windows machines running Windows Media Viewer. This is useful when you videotape a friends layout and dump the videos in the stick to take home or... free up the on-board memory sticks on the camcorder. I am slowly adding memory several times a year.

The entire expenditure is over a thousand dollars retail however thanks to Ebay and other local sales I was able to assemble everything to this level for about 600-

There are bigger and better cameras out there that take much better pictures. Call me a photo bug but I think the future is bright.