Category Archives: United States

Posts about our travels around the US

Cross Country Video is available

I’ve moved time compressed video of day 2 through 7 and day 9 of our cross country road trip from Connecticut to California to our website. Day 8, 10, and 11 are still in process.

Somewhere in my video processing stream, the sharpness of the H.264 stream has been compromised and the video is just OK. In some instances a rough road creates camera jitter that’s apparent in the video. The problem is quite obvious in the trees along the highways. Keeping the windshield clean was not a priority, and that shows in some of the clips as does dashboard reflection if/when we put paper or maps on the dash.

Quality aside, this is a quick video summary of a cross country trip from Bristol Ct to the S.F. Bay area. Weather forced us to drop all the way down to interstate 10 to avoid snow, sleet, freezing rain, and a cold front that dropped to 8 degrees.

 

Ron

Dash Cam Video, try try again

Well that didn’t work!  Simply speeding up a video to compress time is terrible.  It might work for a humorous video of people working, but not for dash cam video.

Enter PowerDirector and the ability to compress time to fit a sound track.  I’m not trying to boost PowerDirector sales, but this is one of the fastest editing and rendering programs I’ve used.  It has some extreme limitations in its editing features.  I suppose that’s the trade-off, speed and ease of use for functionality.  The software is also quite inexpensive for what you get.  It does crash if overwhelmed; loading too many AVI files at once challenges its memory/cache for example.  Loading the same set of files converted to MP4, works.

I will remove the dash cam videos at 16x and I’ll be uploading our entire trip from Connecticut to California.  Well almost the entire trip, Day 1 starts at night south of Baltimore, Md, I’ll skip that and start with Day 2 which should be available in a few hours.  These videos are much smoother and more fun to watch.

I’ll be experimenting with these videos to make them more fun; adding still shots, inserting google map shots, changing up the music.

Ron

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