Don Coffey cab ride video discussion

[Ianno87]

I completely agree with you on this. Also, I prefer the camera quality in your videos Don to that of V125 - I'm finding Video 125's camera quality has become somewhat rather odd over the last few years, less sharp / odd colouring and some very odd photoshopping (Devon Branches!).

Agree - Don's videos are of much better quality.

Video 125's are also very samey in weather conditions terms. Whereas stuff that can be found online has sunrises, sunsets, rainshowers, etc which all add to the atmosphere (Cabview Holland has some gorgeous ones)

 

[sw1ller]

I’ve been called worse but thanks whoever put my name right!!!

You know I can spell ya name! Haha. It was autocorrected.

 

[AlterEgo]

I’m sitting on several thousand pounds of advertising revenue which after discussions with TfW and Metrolink, we’ve decided will go to the Samaritans but I’ve had to hire an accountant to keep me out of trouble with the tax man and I’m waiting on his word about whether I can do it tax free. Everything needs to be declared and transparent to do it but I just need to get a green light off him.

Really great to hear this. Do keep us posted - I love the channel and am glad it's returned!

 

[Peter Mugridge]

Thanks Peter.
I’ve considered voiceovers but apart from me sounding like a bad Fred Dibnah impersonator, I know a lot like to listen to the in cab sounds. The videos have evolved from no captions to showing key locations (it’s surprising that watchers from around the world like to follow them on a map) then most of the rest is what I’d be yakking about if I had you riding with me. It’s the stuff I find interesting. I spend hours researching the routes I don’t sign and they are a learning curve for me.

A voiceover would be useless for me anyway... I'm cloth eared!

 

[Don Coffey]

You should find the North Wales Coast vid accessible now. It’s the original one which has some typos and while V2 is actually sitting in the editor party redone, it will give me chance to work on previously unseen stuff.

 

[Don Coffey]

A couple of recent vids if anyone is interested;

Hindlow to Crewe

keep an open mind if you’re not into light rail. Once I got involved with Metrolink I found it fascinating. This is East Didsbury to Rochdale. There’s a lot of crossover with heavy rail and heavy rail clips.

 

[Railwaysceptic]

A couple of recent vids if anyone is interested;

Hindlow to Crewe

keep an open mind if you’re not into light rail. Once I got involved with Metrolink I found it fascinating. This is East Didsbury to Rochdale. There’s a lot of crossover with heavy rail and heavy rail clips.

Thank you for these new videos, both of which do the single most important thing about railway videos: providing the viewer with the means to see and examine routes otherwise unavailable for scrutiny. I tipped off a friend in New York who grew up in the Peak District about the Hindlow video and he's emailed back to express his enthusiasm.

In an earlier post, you mentioned your good working relationship with Northern. As and when they are in a position to facilitate this, is there a chance they and you could plug some of the gaps in the coverage of the railway network? I'm thinking in particular about Hull to Scarborough, Middlesbrough to
Saltburn, Horbury Junction to Sheffield via Barnsley and between Moorthorpe and Pontefract. I doubt I'm alone in wanting these.

 

[malc-c]

Don, I watched the Hindlow to Crew the other night, and whilst long, was very interesting. Have you ever thought of narrating the video rather than having scrolling text ? The only reason I suggest that is whilst reading the text you miss what's going past the window.

One other suggestion, how about a series of videos where we follow a train (ideally freight) all the way to its destinations, for example from where we left off in the Hindlow to crew video we can continue to Northampton, and then eventually to the customer where the wagons are unloaded.

 

[Don Coffey]

Thank you for these new videos, both of which do the single most important thing about railway videos: providing the viewer with the means to see and examine routes otherwise unavailable for scrutiny. I tipped off a friend in New York who grew up in the Peak District about the Hindlow video and he's emailed back to express his enthusiasm.

In an earlier post, you mentioned your good working relationship with Northern. As and when they are in a position to facilitate this, is there a chance they and you could plug some of the gaps in the coverage of the railway network? I'm thinking in particular about Hull to Scarborough, Middlesbrough to
Saltburn, Horbury Junction to Sheffield via Barnsley and between Moorthorpe and Pontefract. I doubt I'm alone in wanting these.

I’ve had some comments from the US and one was somebody who used to live in the area. Maybe it was him. I recently sat close to (we have a staff section on our trains) the area director for northern and he re pledged Northerns support for the videos. I know he was in contact with Metrolink about the above video too, he’s been very supportive. I was a driver manager at Northern and only the other day was chatting with a colleague who told me they are still strictly hampered with covid restrictions. What I’m getting round to saying is, we might well get more of the yet unseen routes as soon as conditions allow.

 

[Don Coffey]

Don, I watched the Hindlow to Crew the other night, and whilst long, was very interesting. Have you ever thought of narrating the video rather than having scrolling text ? The only reason I suggest that is whilst reading the text you miss what's going past the window.

One other suggestion, how about a series of videos where we follow a train (ideally freight) all the way to its destinations, for example from where we left off in the Hindlow to crew video we can continue to Northampton, and then eventually to the customer where the wagons are unloaded.

I’m always open to suggestions Malc. The videos have evolved somewhat since the first which had no captions nor narration. It seemed fairly unanimous that captions were popular as they wanted to listen to the footage as well as see it. There will always be exceptions- some don’t want anything.
The full freight vid is not a bad idea as far as I’m concerned but it’s not as easy as it sounds. Freight tends to run with different drivers so Tunstead to Northampton would be two and it doesn’t always come back. I’ve not been out on any of the Freightliner jobs, they were using my cameras but filming for a job of their own. If I had been, the Buxton driver would have left at Crewe and I’d have gone on to Northampton then had to get back. I could easily be out 20 hours. I did go on those binliner runs with DBC and was out for 15 hours on one of them and saw neither anywhere near beginning to end. Even if I did like the Hindlow to Crewe and covered it on two days, I still have to get back from wherever it goes. I know it would make a good video but the logistics isn’t easy. I’ve got lots of freight footage that I’ll share over the coming months.

 

[malc-c]

Don, I must apologies. I'm not in the industry so lack knowledge of the logistics you mentioned. I guess even if you were able to leave a fixed camera in the cab you need the assistance of subsequent drivers to change batteries and memory cards, which could only be done at scheduled stops etc.... and then you would need the last driver on the run to somehow get the equipment back to you...

Looking forward to seeing the freight videos you have... for me they are more interesting than passenger services as we get to see parts of the network that are normally off limits to the public, such as the quarry in the above video.

 

[samulih]

Captions are the best part of the videos, informative, no need for narration, just hum of the engines enough

 

[A.Butler]

Yes, have got to agree with that!! ^^^

 

[Highlandspring]

Personally I have no interest at all in the scrolling captions and find them very intrusive (the location labels are ok though). No captions and no narration would be ideal. Would it be possible to do a version with and a version without them?

 

[33101]

The videos have evolved somewhat since the first which had no captions nor narration. It seemed fairly unanimous that captions were popular as they wanted to listen to the footage as well as see it.

The captions are a great way to tag on extra information, without distracting from the experience of hearing and seeing the view from the front. Personally, I think an audio commentary would be something best done on an alternate audio track (not sure if you can do that with youtube, though).

If I had one request... occasionally, you freeze the video & audio to highlight something that the captions are referencing - whilst superb for seeing stuff that may otherwise fly past in a blur, it's rather jarring and feels akin to the stream buffering. Could you instead, put the freeze-frame into a sub-window, letting the video+audio play on, or simply let the audio play on for the duration of the static video frame, letting the video jump forwards to the point where the audio has reached after the freeze-frame is done?

That said, you're doing a grand job, Don - I really appreciate these videos!

 

[Pigeon]

Thank you Don for providing these videos, and also for showing up somewhere we can discuss them with you without the need to sign up to an American nazi's personal spyware and indoctrination platform.

Thank you in particular for the Hindlow to Crewe one, because I have been looking for one of the Midland Peak Forest route for ages.

That one also illustrates a technical point I wanted to make: that 25fps is a better choice of frame rate than either 30fps or 60fps, which seem to be default choices of some kind with a lot of kit, judging by lots of people's cab ride videos as well as yours, but are not good choices.

It seems that an awful lot of cameras, even ones manufactured recently enough to know better, claim to record at 30fps but actually do not; instead they record at 25 or 24 fps and then insert duplicate frames to bring the total frame count up to 30 per second, as a means of "faking" a frame rate of 30 per second. The result is that the video plays in a series of 0.2 second jerks, which is particularly noticeable on cab rides where the motion of the actual scene is so continuous and steady. Some of your earlier videos do this, and it is almost certainly the camera's fault because if you step through one of the sections with a scrolling caption one frame at a time, the motion halts every five frames but the caption continues to scroll; your editing software is generating the caption at a genuine 30fps but the source material it's adding it to is a hooky 30fps faked by duplicating frames.

Cameras that record at 60fps do seem to avoid duplicating frames even though the rate is faster, but the faster rate causes a different problem. If the total bitrate of the recording remains the same, then because it needs to represent double the temporal resolution, the spatial resolution can only be half as much. Then on top of that the spatial compression algorithm makes it worse, by allocating most of its bits to the areas of the image that change a lot and skimping on the areas that stay much the same from frame to frame... which on a cab ride video means that most of the bandwidth goes on encoding the ballast and shrubbery flying past at the edges of the picture, while the actual focus of attention - around the vanishing point - is allowed to blur and degrade.

Recording at 25fps, as in the Hindlow to Crewe video, avoids the first problem entirely, and provides the best available conditions for minimising the prominence of the second one. And it is perfectly adequate for sneaking the illusion of motion past the persistence of vision; super high frame rates are a silly fashion thing about having the biggest number and do not do anything useful towards improving the quality, although they may enable some people to fool themselves into thinking otherwise.

So please make 25fps your standard for future videos too!

I must say I did not realise those Gopro cameras were so amazingly rubbish. I thought conking out after 30 minutes was something only the £10 cheapo versions did. I thought Gopro ones were supposed to be expensive high quality things that wouldn't do things like that. You may find it worthwhile to take the works out of the case and remount them in a diecast alumimium box, with air holes in it and the parts laid out in a less squashed-together fashion than the original so the air can get at them. I did that with a cheapo one, along with replacing its battery with an 18650 cell for increased capacity, and it will record for two and a half hours continuously without a hitch.

Replacement lenses in a variety of focal lengths for standard size miniature camera threads are available on ebay and they only cost a few quid, though they do seem to take a bit of searching for. So it is both cheap and easy to replace the usual silly wide angle things with a "standard" lens (ie. one that is neither wide-angle nor telephoto, but approximates the usual viewing angle of the human eye).

I'm thinking in particular about Hull to Scarborough, Middlesbrough to Saltburn, Horbury Junction to Sheffield via Barnsley and between Moorthorpe and Pontefract. I doubt I'm alone in wanting these.

There is a Hull to Scarborough video around already, youtube id xHriU-kLqTg. Horbury Junction to Sheffield via Barnsley, though, is indeed one I have been looking for also, as is Chesterfield to Rotherham via the Old Road.

 

[malc-c]

It seems that an awful lot of cameras, even ones manufactured recently enough to know better, claim to record at 30fps but actually do not; instead they record at 25 or 24 fps and then insert duplicate frames to bring the total frame count up to 30 per second, as a means of "faking" a frame rate of 30 per second. The result is that the video plays in a series of 0.2 second jerks, which is particularly noticeable on cab rides where the motion of the actual scene is so continuous and steady.

You might find that the original footage plays fine on Don's PC, but when uploaded, Youtubes compression functions causes the stuttering.

 

[Pigeon]

That was my original thought, but in fact Don's videos provide the evidence that shows it is not youtube, but must be the camera. The duplicate frames are already there before he edits it to add the captions: if you step frame-by-frame through a section where there is a scrolling caption at the bottom, you can see that the view of the track ahead periodically remains unchanged from one frame to the next, but the moving caption still continues to scroll. Therefore the duplicate frames must have been added before it gets as far as Don's editing software, which can only mean they were added by the camera. If it was youtube doing it then the captions would freeze along with the view.

As to whether or not it plays fine on Don's PC - I don't know, but I strongly suspect that a lot of people don't notice it even when it is happening. It's a very common problem and I was noticing it on cab ride videos long before Don even started making them, but for something that has been happening so often and for such a long time there seems to be remarkably little discussion of it on the internet at large. I would have expected that either the camera manufacturers would have been so swamped with complaints from customers about juddery recordings that they would long ago have realised that it is a bad idea to make them like that, or failing that, that the questions of how to make the camera stop doing it and how to make video editing software take the duplicate frames out again would have become "hardy perennials" on the internet with plenty of well-documented answers in video-related FAQs, but neither of these things seems to have happened.

Also, it was the standard dumb method used to convert 24fps movies and 25fps European TV to 30fps American TV back in analogue days when there wasn't the processing power to do proper interpolation; but I don't recall it ever having been common for Americans to complain about movies on TV being juddery (contrast with it being such a standard joke that NTSC stands for "never twice the same colour" that it is a familiar joke even on this side of the Atlantic). So there do seem to be grounds to suspect that it is only noticed by those people whose personal visual apparatus happens to fall outside the range of the standard assumptions regarding what is perceptible and what isn't.

 

[malc-c]

Personally I don't think it's happening in camera. It's either as a result of the rendering settings being different from the stock footage (and thus the frame rate used in the time line of the NLE software), or YouTube. Most NLE software will detect the format the footage has been recorded in and match that in the time line, regardless of it being 24, 30, 50 or 60fps. Ideally when rendering the timeline out to produce the final video the format should match the stock footage settings, but if for example a 25fps time line was rendered out at 30FPS to suit YT format then this could be where the stuttering may occur as the frame rate will have been padded out.

But I have seen noticeable stuttering in videos I've uploaded. I shoot at 50fps, the footage from the camera is indeed 50 frames in a given second and I can step through it a frame at a time in any one of three NLE software packages, and then render that edited footage out at 50fps and upload to YT. Youtube shows the video as 1080P / 50 fps, but there are occasions when it seem to jitter, or more like speeds up, pauses for a frame and then speeds up again as if buffering, but it being too regular for that, and the buffer is good. Often it's more noticeable on a fixed shot of a train passing, rather than a panning shot.

I'm not saying that you or I am right or wrong.... I've never used Go-pros so it could be that this is indeed an issue with this brand... My (now somewhat dated) Panasonic HC-VX870 4K camera may be more "up market" and does what it's supposed to do and produce footage in the format set in its menus ? These go-pros being designed for action activities might have issues writing the footage to the SD cards and as such frames get duplicated?, but if this was the case, and given the popularity of these devices, I would have thought a lot of people would be complaining enough to have the matter resolved. A quick google of the subject and most of the results were user error where the low light levels caused the camera to from form 60fps to 30.... or were related to filing at 240fps to produce slow motion footage that was padded out. I couldn't find any forum posts where people had proved this and the manufacture has released an updated firmware to correct it.

The only way we could rule out YT as being the issue would be for Don to upload and give access to an uncompressed format on another platform so we could stream or download the file and see if that stutters as you mention. If Don finds that the raw footage form the camera stutters then maybe he has a fault in his camera that he is not aware of, (until now). For me I don't notice the stutter, or if I do now its been pointed out, it's not an issue that prevents me from watching and enjoying Don's videos

 

[Pigeon]

Personally I don't think it's happening in camera. It's either as a result of the rendering settings being different from the stock footage (and thus the frame rate used in the time line of the NLE software), or YouTube. Most NLE software will detect the format the footage has been recorded in and match that in the time line, regardless of it being 24, 30, 50 or 60fps. Ideally when rendering the timeline out to produce the final video the format should match the stock footage settings, but if for example a 25fps time line was rendered out at 30FPS to suit YT format then this could be where the stuttering may occur as the frame rate will have been padded out. ... The only way we could rule out YT as being the issue would be for Don to upload and give access to an uncompressed format on another platform so we could stream or download the file and see if that stutters as you mention.

Oh, we can rule out youtube already. Here are some illustrative sequences of frames from the York to Middlesborough video (KyICdtVk4wI). (I tried to upload them as attachments but discovered that making the attachment thing actually work would require more effort to code around the idiocy of the xenforo software author than I am prepared to put in right now.) This one - dupframes.jpg - is a sequence of differences between frames, rather than the frames themselves; mid-grey corresponds to no change between frames. It is clear that we are seeing five normal frames and then a sixth frame where only the scrolling caption has moved while the scene remains unchanged. This shows that the dud frames are not inserted at the rendering-out stage, but were already there before the captions were added. Don's editing software has - correctly, from its own point of view - identified the source footage as 30fps, and so has generated captions which scroll at a steady 30fps even though the underlying movement is not steady. It cannot be youtube doing it otherwise the captions would stop as well as the action.

This one - sigs.jpg - is a rather longer sequence of frames covering several seconds as we approach a pair of colour light signals. I have cropped the frames down to show only the signals otherwise it would be ridiculously large, and I have messed with the levels so the signal lights show up a bit more clearly. The point of this is to show that the aliasing between the frame rate and the 100Hz signal flicker frequency has transposed the flicker frequency down to some fraction of a Hz, and therefore the rate at which the frames were actually captured by the camera from its image sensor must be very close to some integer sub-multiple of 100Hz, the remaining difference being due to neither the frame rate nor the signal flicker frequency being dead on their nominal values. 25fps x 4 fits this, but 30fps x 3.33333... does not.

So we can see that the footage was originally captured from the image sensor at 25fps, but it was then faked out to pseudo-30fps before it got to the editing stage. Very cheap cameras certainly do do this (as in, cheap enough that I don't mind breaking them by being clumsy when taking them to pieces) to obfuscate the mendacity of their claims of performance. The processors used in them can barely keep up with what they're being asked to do, even though they have hardware compressor/encoders, and when you ask them to operate at their maximum resolution they have to play SBs with the frame rate to pretend they can cope. I thought Gopros were supposed to be better quality than that, but maybe they still have the same kind of internals and what you're actually paying for is an instruction sheet where the English is not more difficult to understand than the Chinese, or something. (Don's comments about them crashing after half an hour also suggest that they are not what I originally assumed they were; the very cheap ones get so hot that they would probably do the same except the battery doesn't last that long.)

It's not caused by the camera being unable to write to the SD card fast enough. It wouldn't help with that. When that happens the cheap ones just drop frames.

But I have seen noticeable stuttering in videos I've uploaded. I shoot at 50fps, the footage from the camera is indeed 50 frames in a given second and I can step through it a frame at a time in any one of three NLE software packages, and then render that edited footage out at 50fps and upload to YT. Youtube shows the video as 1080P / 50 fps, but there are occasions when it seem to jitter, or more like speeds up, pauses for a frame and then speeds up again as if buffering, but it being too regular for that, and the buffer is good. Often it's more noticeable on a fixed shot of a train passing, rather than a panning shot.

Are you talking about watching them in the browser, actually direct off youtube? If so that may well be down to the browser doing other things in the background which are pinching CPU off the video decoding thread. Avoiding that kind of nonsense is just one of the reasons I never watch videos in the browser (and in the case of youtube I can't any more even if I did want to, since they comprehensively broke their site a few months back and made it stop working altogether). I download the videos from the command line using youtube-dl, and then play the downloaded video from the command line using mplayer; that way the only problems I encounter are those caused by deficiencies in the video file itself. If you haven't tried that or the equivalent, it may be worth trying, to get a better idea of exactly where the problem is arising.

given the popularity of these devices, I would have thought a lot of people would be complaining enough to have the matter resolved.

I find that a puzzle too, but it has been a problem for a very long time; I have a fairly large collection of cab ride videos and an awful lot of them do it. But then it has for an even longer time been the standard method for American TV to broadcast movies made on film and they seem to have managed to get away with it. Maybe how much of a problem it is depends on how close that aspect of one's personal visual apparatus is or isn't to the centre of the distribution.

I reckon also that cab ride videos are unusually likely to make it a problem, because the motion of the train is so steady and unvarying and there are no natural discontinuities to help mask the effect. Particularly when there are electrification masts to provide an extremely regular repeated pattern at the kind of rate that tends to show it up.

For me I don't notice the stutter, or if I do now its been pointed out, it's not an issue that prevents me from watching and enjoying Don's videos

Oh, indeed, I'm not intending it as any sort of criticism nor intending to imply that I am not very grateful to Don for uploading them. They're some of the best there are. I'm just considering the possibility that Don may not perceive the effect and so it may be useful to him to have a citation for a combination of equipment and settings which he has used recently that does not produce it.

 

[Don Coffey]

33101
Thanks for the comments and rest assured, I’ve got so many Freightliner videos to share, I don’t quite know where to start. Regarding the freeze frames, I do sometimes add a separate screenshot as an alternative but that actually loads the media library and I kid you not, a 3 hour video with captions and various maps and additional photos is vast. I upgraded the iMac because I could literally stop the old one and even this one with the fastest spec-able processor and a TB of memory (read that as expensive) sometimes slogs when processing the final movie. I don’t profit from these videos and that was an expensive commitment to producing the videos for charity. I’m not complaining because the computer is mine at the end of the day and it’s lightning fast for virtually everything else but what I’m saying is what media I add just clogs the computer. I daren’t start work on a long video without transferring enough off the computer to give me 500gb of space. Once the coloured circle of doom starts spinning, the best thing to do is walk away and leave the fans howling at full speed.

Malc C and Pigeon

I’m not an expert at these things and you’ll see from my early videos, various attempts at improving the quality. I was very aware of and just as frustrated by the quality of those early videos. The first one of any length was Lime St to Huddersfield and that was done with a dashcam from my car. The angle is far too wide and distorted so overhead gantrys are curved. Then I started with various cameras but what I found was, they either kept hunting for focus or couldn’t handle the motion at higher speeds and just started pixelating or simply hung. A GoPro seemed the best solution as it wasn’t limited to 30 minutes like many cameras and it was intended for fast action. Sounds easy doesn’t it? Well first of all, I’ve got to carry all this clobber round with me and the bag I’ve got is full of maps and documents which are quite heavy enough and then with drinks and food etc - you get the picture. I can’t delay a train while I’m chuffing about with a camera so whatever solution I found had to be lightweight and quick to mount. Getting the camera close enough to the screen to avoid reflections was the next challenge and the cheap ebay suction mounts won’t hack it so the genuine GoPro (read that as expensive) are the only reliable ones I’ve found. Still I wasn’t there because a GoPro Hero Black and a GoPro 7 suffer badly from overheating. I can’t get more than an hour or so from a battery so they have to be plugged in to a power supply. For some reason if I plug a GoPro into the train’s onboard USB it will hang so I have to carry a powerbank as well. I don’t know why GoPro cameras get so hot - just processing ones and zeros I think but they get hotter still when they’re on charge. So hot that when they throw in the towel at about five seconds notice, you can literally burn yourself touching them - they stink of hot! Then there was a severe hanging problem. They would just stop - sometimes with a critical error message and sometimes with no apparent reason or indication. I’ve got a lot of experience with dashcams and I know that Sandisk cards do similar things but several conversations with GoPro, they were insistent it wasn’t that. In the end I cured it myself with very fast (yes, read that as expensive!) Samsung cards. The point I’m making is that with camera, memory card and weather or instructors wanting the train for a trainee of other operational difficulties, I could have ten failed attempts at getting one trip from Piccadilly to York or Hull. This is all to do with getting the footage without considering the processing. You’ll also see in some videos, two GoPros on a bracket that John Waters made (who is Railcowgirls media guru). That’s an attempt by both RCG and me losing footage by having two cameras running simultaneously.
So, now for getting footage I’m happy with. I’m now on two GoPro 8s and a 9 which are out with other operators at the moment as Covid is doing nothing to help me! You’ll remember the politics involved with route learning and cab access that nearly frustrated me enough to Jack it all in - the very subject of this thread. All that aside, getting footage that I am happy with is only really evident in the later videos where the motion is smooth and the colours are representative. If you look at the Stoke video, it is almost a time lapse which I can hardly bear to watch although very few have commented about. I didn’t understand the relationship between PAL and NTSC or their respective frequencies. I’ve got to know a chap who was a TV producer for Borders TV and he has put me right on a lot of things. For instance, he was the one that advised me that 25fps was more than enough and the resultant tiny amount of motion blur is more acceptable to our brain than too crisp that looks somehow false. So with file size and then processing the footage on the computer I’m about where I’m personally prepared to go at 2.7k/25fps. However, it doesn’t end there because having accepted that without going to broadcast standard equipment which I’m neither prepared to purchase or carry (they used my footage on the Channel 4 TV series which is good enough for me) we then have to get YouTube to play ball. Although I don’t think these days, there is a time limit for videos, just like an action camera isn’t really expected to record continuously for 3 or 4 hours, YouTube probably isn’t the best medium for presenting it. I’ve got quite a fast broadband connection but I sometimes cringe during a premier at how bad it pixelates and how jerky a previously silky smooth video is presented. Apparently when the video is uploaded and then processed, it is broken into fragments and sent to numerous servers around the world. Then when it arrives at the server it is going to live on, it is reassembled. Trust me, I’m aware that the videos aren’t cinematically perfect but given the level of commitment that is sensible and the free platform that YouTube provides (yes I know they make a lot but we do make a lot for charity) they are free to watch and certainly the later ones are quite acceptable. Sorry for the long reply but I just wanted to demonstrate that it’s not plain sailing! It’s an expensive hobby but I do enjoy it and I hope they will remain as a legacy and a record of the railway as filmed. I’m so far into a high end imac, several GoPros, a multitude of external memory devices (7Tb), Samsung’s Christmas card list and enough cables, adapters and other gadgets to sink a ship.

 

[Pigeon]

Thank you for the comprehensive reply! I must say I had not realised how much clobber you had to carry, nor that your success rate could be as low as 10%. Glad to hear you have acquired a technical adviser who seems to know his stuff.

Agree about Samsung memory cards. The amount of fakery and mutton presented as lamb in memory cards is terrible, and it makes it very hard to make sure you really are getting what you think you are, even from "respectable" sellers. Samsung seem to put more effort than most into choking off the supply of cheap dodgy fakes.

Youtube recodes the video into several different quality levels, and tries to feed you the least quality it thinks it can get away with that will still pass muster. This is another of the many, many reasons why I never play videos in the browser but instead download them first and play them separately: the download program can be set to override the automatic quality selection thing and always get the highest quality version regardless of what youtube thinks. It takes around twice as long to download as it does to play, but I'm not in a hurry!

 

[malc-c]

Thanks for the insight Don.... Maybe as a side video you could document how you go about making a cab ride video..., the planning, research you do, the kit you take, setting it up, any banter with drivers etc.

Cheers

 

[satisnek]

Seconded... Thanks Don. I'm no expert when it comes to digital video but I would disagree about 25fps! The PC is an American invention and has therefore adopted American video standards as its default, which includes a refresh rate of either 30 or 60fps. As mentioned upthread, I'm a fan of 60fps (anything less than the 50 or 60 interlaced fields of analog video is inferior to my eyes) and can enjoy up to 1080p60 on YouTube, which only becomes a bit gritty if my broadband is being throttled. But I never considered GoPros getting hot and bothered and enormous file sizes, so I can see why lower rates are necessary.

European video standards (25 or 50fps) don't work too well on my PC and monitor, whether the source is YouTube or DVD-Video (using VLC Media Player) - I get a noticeable 'pulsing' on continuous motion such as that found on cab rides. I've tried fiddling with the settings but it only made things worse!

Like I said, I'm no expert, but how about shooting at 30fps as necessary but mastering at 60fps so that the captions roll across smoothly? Actually, having just rewatched the Derby-Nottingham-Lincoln video, was something like that tried here?

 

[Pigeon]

PCs have not been tied to any factors derived from national video standards since monitors started getting larger than VGA and had to become able to adjust themselves to numerous different video output rates and resolutions. 60fps was already getting kind of slow back in the 90s, with many monitors having a maximum vertical scan rate of over twice that. Then when flat panel monitors started coming in, which don't use CRT-style raster scanning, and even more so when they started using digital interconnections with the computer instead of analogue, the whole concept got kind of weird and less meaningful in the first place.

You should be able to set your vertical scan rate to any figure you like, between certain limits which depend on the resolution, in increments of 1Hz or less, and have the monitor understand it (unless you are managing to still be using a video card which is something over 20 years old). Though whether it necessarily corresponds to anything physical in a modern system is less certain. I would expect that Windows probably makes this difficult and Macs probably make it even more difficult, but the hardware can do it, and the software to make it do it is probably discoverable if you hunt for it.

 

[33101]

Regarding the freeze frames, I do sometimes add a separate screenshot as an alternative but that actually loads the media library and I kid you not, a 3 hour video with captions and various maps and additional photos is vast. I upgraded the iMac because I could literally stop the old one and even this one with the fastest spec-able processor and a TB of memory (read that as expensive) sometimes slogs when processing the final movie.

Yeah, video editing tends to be a workout for most PC setups - what editing software are you using?

For some reason if I plug a GoPro into the train’s onboard USB it will hang so I have to carry a powerbank as well.

I wonder if any USB ports present in the cab are used for data, rather than just 5vdc power delivery? If so, something on the train is possibly trying to communicate with the GoPro...

I don’t know why GoPro cameras get so hot - just processing ones and zeros I think but they get hotter still when they’re on charge. So hot that when they throw in the towel at about five seconds notice, you can literally burn yourself touching them - they stink of hot!

With HD (and above) video, there's quite a lot of ones & zeros - likely being dealt with by a single IC with minimal cooling due to the small form factor & a case designed to keep dust and water out. The lithium battery also puts out a significant amount of heat when rapidly charged or discharged, which all equals toasty.

 

[satisnek]

PCs have not been tied to any factors derived from national video standards since monitors started getting larger than VGA and had to become able to adjust themselves to numerous different video output rates and resolutions. 60fps was already getting kind of slow back in the 90s, with many monitors having a maximum vertical scan rate of over twice that. Then when flat panel monitors started coming in, which don't use CRT-style raster scanning, and even more so when they started using digital interconnections with the computer instead of analogue, the whole concept got kind of weird and less meaningful in the first place.

You should be able to set your vertical scan rate to any figure you like, between certain limits which depend on the resolution, in increments of 1Hz or less, and have the monitor understand it (unless you are managing to still be using a video card which is something over 20 years old). Though whether it necessarily corresponds to anything physical in a modern system is less certain. I would expect that Windows probably makes this difficult and Macs probably make it even more difficult, but the hardware can do it, and the software to make it do it is probably discoverable if you hunt for it.

Yes, it's my monitor. It's a specialist 1600x1200 screen, so it's the wrong shape for 21st century video anyway, and the vertical scan rate is fixed at 60Hz on digital inputs, although it will go down to 50Hz on analog. Trouble is, my PC has digital outputs only. I've tried using an adaptor and adjusting the settings, but like I said, it only makes things worse!

All I know is that Don's York - Newcastle run and RailMart's Settle & Carlisle jaunt in uncharacteristically fine weather play flawlessly at 1080p60 and these are the YouTube cab rides which I judge all the others by.

 

[Railwaysceptic]

There is a Hull to Scarborough video around already, youtube id xHriU-kLqTg. Horbury Junction to Sheffield via Barnsley, though, is indeed one I have been looking for also, as is Chesterfield to Rotherham via the Old Road.

Apologies for the delayed response. Your link doesn't work for me and the only Hull to Scarborough videos I can find are not in-cab videos. There is a very good video of much of the old road from Chesterfield. It's from Railmart and goes to Deepcar.

 

[Pigeon]

Apologies for the delayed response.

Not to worry! In any case BT have broken my phone line and can't be bothered to sort it out so it is rare for me to be able to read it at all...

Your link doesn't work for me and the only Hull to Scarborough videos I can find are not in-cab videos.

Sorry, it wasn't supposed to be a "link"; it's the youtube ID, ie. the string of gubbins that comes after the "http : / / www . youtube . com / watch?v=" bit. (I'm trying to present it in a form that ensures the forum software does not mess with it and/or turn it into an "embedded video" which doesn't show the actual link.) It should work if you put that in front of it.

It has to be said, though, that it's pretty rubbish. It does Bridlington to Scarborough, then goes back to Bridlington and does Bridlington to Hull in a train with the filthiest windscreen ever. And it misses out most of the mileage in between the actual stations. It's better than nothing at all, but not by much.

There is an very good video of much of the old road from Chesterfield. It's from Railmart and goes to Deepcar.

Thank you, but I've already got that one. It is jolly good, but it turns left at Beighton. I'm looking for the complete run through to Masb[o]rough, so I can pretend it's the view from a Midland Railway express...

 

[Don Coffey]

Just a quick “heads up”, there’s a premier tonight at 9pm (late so the guys in oz and NZ can catch it in the morning). It’s footage from a brand new Class 397 from Edinburgh to Carlisle through some really dramatic countryside. It was filmed by Ben Elias whom some of you will have followed on his channel and both Ben and I will be online to answer any comments or questions you may have. You’ll need to be a YouTube subscriber (free to subscribe) to comment so you can be ready with your question.