Driving video from the weekend trip to Lake Mountain.
This is the drive home… this time coming via the back road via Warburton through Yarra Junction. (Where the police pull me over… his question… what was the thing on the windscreen in my car. The R2H setup I have didn’t look like a GPS. Poor officer he asked me what it was… didn’t take long for his eyes to glaze over and for him to let me on my way :-). (The standard clip format… R2H video via a webcam under the passengers front visor)
And don’t say I didn’t warn you about the road. It has the advantage of little or no traffic and is a fun drive and is about the same time and distance as the Black Spur trip as well.
175K from home to the Bendigo Art Gallery… Video c/o Logitech Webcam and Asus R2H running at 640×480 10fps
The Route as KMZ File
The KMZ File is made via Sports Tracker on the Nokia 95-8gb exported as KML then quick edit it google earth then uploaded to wolfcat.com.au…. you will also find it on the KML Page
Went up to St Andrews market today… and like my previous trip into bushfire affected areas this was another pleasant surprise and a shock all bundled into one trip.
The market and St Andrews township itself survived with the wind change arriving barely in the nick of time to save the area. Like Marysville the market was busier than I had ever seen it and bustling with life and the markets usual crowd of eccentrics and hippies. I spent way to much at the market on the lovely fresh food, something clothing and a nice bottle of wine as well. Then we did the drive up the Mountain to King Lake. (I will put photos up later on Flickr)
St Andrews to Healesville Via King Lake (48min compressed to 6min)
I finally managed to get up to Lake Mountain yesterday 12 months since I’d last got up that way and 5 months after the Black Saturday fires.
As people are most probably aware I did a bit of work on covering the fires at the time due in part to my understanding of the area and interest in weather, yet 5 months later I will still left with a sinking feeling as I drove through the region. The grass has all grown back in the valley and the Black Spur has a lot of regrowth already but that doesn’t prepare you for what you see from Narbethong onwards. The devastation is complete. The forest is nothing more than barren sticks stretching skywards and the smell of ash still lingers in the air.
Stopping at Marysville there is both hope and despair. The town was virtually wiped of the map. Yet with only a few buildings remaining the spirit of the town has survived. Never have I see the town so busy with people coming and going. The long lines at the bakery and the overflowing CFA donation bucket show that people are returning and are helping the community. Yes, and even I was one of them, the vast majority of people I saw had cameras around their necks taking happy snaps of the destruction. I only took a few photos in town, stopping as it felt wrong for me to take photos of the misery and destruction for no real purpose.
Perhaps I am being overly sensitive as well, but letting your 10y/o kid run around a town that has had so much tragedy and suffering with a toy gun that screamed “fire fire” which could be heard a block away is bad form of the utmost as well. Not one resident of Marysville wouldn’t be deeply impacted on by those events and yet his kid with a toy gun were more important to him.
On leaving Marysville I then did the drive to Lake Mountain. A road I have travelled many times, yet this road was different. The enclosed feeling of driving through the forest was gone replaced with landscape that looked not to dissimilar to photos from the Tunguska Event. The devastation was complete. The obvious heat of the fire that consumed everything in its path is awe inspiring and humbling at the same time.
Lake Mountain is still there, and like Marysville I’ve never seen it so busy. And like Marysville it doesn’t look like the same place such as the destruction. The wombat I saw showed that life survived, I am sure however that the wombat must be living on food drops and there was no regrowth on the top of the mountain at all. Most of the walking trails are still closed and the contrast of the white snow and blacken stumps is striking both in its beauty and it is fullness.
It was both a very sad experience and an empowering one seeing this first hand. I do recommend that people return to these places… but don’t just go and take happy snaps. Stop and buy some food at the Bakery, put your change in the donation bin. Take the kids to Lake Mountain to play in the snow, but remind them what happened in these places. It is too important to forget.
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Here is the Drive from Healesville to Lake Mountain… Approx 50 minutes of drive compressed to 6min, 50k distance.
Or I could have called this what can go wrong will go wrong.
I thought I would outline some of the details of how I made the Sketch of a cup video.
Gear:
Nikon D90
18-55mm VR lens kit lens.
Asus R2h Umpc
Nikon Camera Control 2.3.0
Spare Battery
The Nikon D90 does not have an interval timer function (D300/D700 do) so the only accurate way to do this is to run the camera from the computer. The software was setup to take a shot every 2 seconds.
Selected Exif Data:
Model – NIKON D90
Software – Camera Control Pro 2.3.0 W
ExposureTime – 1/20 seconds
FNumber – 4.50
ISOSpeedRatings – 400
ExposureBiasValue – 0.00
MaxApertureValue – F 4.00
MeteringMode – Multi-segment
LightSource – Auto
Flash – Flash not fired, auto mode
FocalLength – 24 mm
ColorSpace – sRGB
ExposureMode – Auto
White Balance – Auto
FocalLengthIn35mmFilm – 36 mm
Lens type – 234881024
Lens – 840
Noise Reduction – OFF
Now the what went wrong….
The first two drawings the camera was all set up and still managed to get to much of Cat in the drawing so you couldn’t see it. The Software crashed everytime I stopped the shooting process. I put this more down to the R2H being a bit long in the tooth these days.
Then there is the final drawing the one that features in the video…
Halfway through the shot the main light we had set up for the shot blew. (you can see this on the video) which meant I had to stop the camera. Which lead to another software crash and me touching the camera. (To swap battery) You will notice that after the light blub change the angle changes just slightly. And that angle change also introduced a bounce into the shots. The camera was at the very extent of the tripod meaning that I had now introduced a small bounce between frames.
Post processing was done as a batch conversion in Irfanview to down-sample the jpg’s (1194 of them) from 2144×1424 300dpi to 720×478 72dpi
Then I used AnimatorDV Simple+ to compile the Jpg’s into an AVI format. This was then set to encode at 10fps so that the video was long enough.
However you can see the end result is still pretty good. Next time we do this these lessons will be taken into account and I will write another post about what goes wrong with that shot.
Here are all the videos… with a couple of caveats.. firstly I have had to kill some of the post sunset footage.. specifically the stuff when I stopped after dark and then restarted (but in those cases it was still less than 100k of driving for each video). For some reason they have just come out way to dark.
And it is missing the Sunday drive home from Adelaide to Melbourne. It was just to broken and missed a big chunk when my 320gig WD hd was totally full of hours and hours of driving video…. So taking out the 800k for the trip home and a few smaller trips this is around 3000k’s of driving around Australia.
The video was recorded video a logitech webcam mounted under the passenger visor on to a 320gig WD Portable HD via the Asus R2H. The video was 320×240 at 15fps and simply top and tailed in Windows Movie Maker then speed up double until it was under 10min each.
this time the drive from Coober Pedy to Adelaide… (I forgot to hit go on one part of the drive in Sports tracker so about 10k are missing from the start of the trip in the KMZ file…)
The Start of the Journey
Here is a small panorama I made the morning we were leaving..
Finally got around last night to encoding the video of the drive home from Adelaide to Melbourne Last night… and here it is… compressed down to 6min and 13 Seconds… yes the video is a bit rough in places as the camera moved during the trip and I forgot to hit pause on a couple of side stops to get photos… but hey it adds to the interestingness I think.
For those are wondering the video is captured on a webcam hanging of the sunvisor in the car plugged into my Asus R2H and recorded to a WD Passport HD.
Sourced from 148Gig worth of 320×240 Video and approx 17 hours of driving and stopping to take photos 🙂
So this is Adelaide to Furner in one day.. stop at a friends place then 2 days later drive to Melbourne…
Here is the kml of the trip… so you can see what the video covers…
Firstly, I must say that I am going to remember yesterday as a defining moment of my life. Obama’s victory in the US Election is something that I never thought would happen. For once the smart guy has come out on top. His victory speech is one of the best speeches I have ever heard in my life. It is the “dream speech” for my generation.
But I couldn’t help myself with this… A little mashup between footage from ID4 one of my fav movies and the Obama Speech.
I have a real job, but the opinions expressed here are my own and do not reflect the views of my past present or future employers (not that I am unhappy with my current position, but then not to say that if a job offer came along in say Hawaii as Magnum P'I's side kick I wouldn't take it.)
Oh you get the idea. This is my personal blog.
