Sunday, June 24, 2012

Your ride challenge

Martha (Living among Tourists) proposed a blog challenge earlier this month.  It's an interesting challenge: post images of your commute.

I wanted to use my GoPro to record and upload a timelapse sequence of my commute.  Since timelapse can show things at a frenzied pace, it seemed to me that the best route to show in that way would be the bee-line route I take at the end of the day when I've had enough and I just want to get home.

On those days, I take the expressway.  Even with heavy-ish traffic, it's usually the shortest distance and fastest way home from the office.

It took a while to get this done.  The actual shooting was easy enough.  Getting the timelapse sequence from my GoPro to YouTube via my Mac took far longer than I would have liked.  But as with most tricky things, the good news is now I know how to do rudimentary timelapse video.

How cool is that?  Knowing how to do timelapse is important, because, while it's not appropriate for many things, it's often the only practical way of showing things that normally take too much time to  see in a short period of time.  Like my commute.

So here it is.  My timelapse directorial debut.

6 comments:

Martha said...

Whaaaa! What a ride! And a spectacular gorgeous sky as your backdrop! You who ride these dangerous routes, I salute you. It looks like battle to me, but you are no doubt used to it and feel confident.

Thank you so much for sharing this and using my challenge for your debut! And nice to meet you!

SonjaM said...

Well done. I love timelaps vids.
The route looks a bit dangerous for a lil' scoot. Shouldn't you have a mighty 250cc for these kind of roads? Just sayin'...

Trobairitz said...

Pretty cool the way you sped up the film/did time lapse.

It looks like a fine commute but I don't think I'd like the expressway.

Dar said...

Wow David that is quite the commute! Great video! How long is your commute?

Canajun said...

Great idea. I've been trying to capture my "commute" but have had technical difficculties with my GoPro. Hopefully those will be resolved today when I get a couple of new SD cards and I can try again. But I do like the time lapse format so will have to try and figure out how to do that. Any hints?

David Masse said...

Martha, Sonja, and Trobrairitz, the route looks worse than it is in reality I think. I have become very used to traveling at the LX150's speed limit. for two-thirds of the way I am maxed out with the throttle wide open. Depending on the wind, the speedometer reads at most 73 mph, and with a stiff headwind, 60-62 mph. The GPS speed likely varies between 55 and 65 mph. At those speeds, as you can see in the video, I am mostly being passed, but am also sometimes passing traffic. So it averages out to a fairly comfortable situation. A Vespa GT or GTS would be perfectly suited to that traffic. I think that people are surprised when they get passed on the expressway by a Vespa.

Dar, that fast route is about 35-40 minutes. If I take the lakeshore and canal roads they are very pretty and windy but the maximum speed limit is 50 km/h, with many 30 km/h stretches. I enjoy that route as well, but it averages an hour to get to and from the office. Lately I have become quite dependent on that expressway leg as the way home.

Canajun, here is a link to the YouTube video that finally allowed me to get all the separate images into a timelapse video. The key is to use QuickTime Pro 7. It's available both for the Mac and PC. The instructions in the video worked flawlessly. I used a 10 frame per second frame rate, rather than the 29.97 frame rate suggested in the video. Surprisingly, the video renders really quickly. Saving it in a format like MP4a or .mov takes only a few minutes once it's rendered, which takes just a few seconds. Once I upload to YouTube I just erase all the files so that I don't end up clogging up the Mac with my blog stuff.

The copyright in all text and photographs, except as noted, belongs to David Masse.