Arizona

Mesa to past Globe, AZ - Mar, Aug, Apr, then Aug 2015

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• published: 03 Mar 2016
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51:18 - 56:13 was taken in beginning of April 2015 After 56:13 it's back to late August, 2015 About the entire project in playlist: This work wasn't meant to be done in a professional standard. It was using Galaxy S5 camera. I removed the audio from almost all the videos because it was boring and it was recording mostly the tires noise while engine noise was hardly noticeable! Play your own music in the background instead. Note: Some of the listed times of how much time passed away (eg. 30 minutes later) from one sequence to another are approximate since I made a few stops and didn't record the time that I spent not driving. This project took DAYS of processing since I used warp stabilization on all the videos. On Galaxy S5, the auto video-stabilizer was set on "off" by default for Globe to Grand Canyon project so it was a bit shakier especially before editing it. The rest of the videos had the auto video-stablizer "on" but still required to be edited with warp stabilization. Unfortunetly, there is a significant loss in sharpness after stabilizing the videos and uploading them to youtube. So, I highly recommend getting a better camera, camera holder, and a car with a newer suspension if you plan on doing something similar. For the editing: I used Adobe Premiere which has several types of video stabilizers (under "warp stabilizer") but found "position" option working out the best without significant image distortion for such type of recording. Most done at level 80 for smoothness as long it doesn't crop more than 6% of the actual video's edges. The lowest smoothness used is in video "Driving Inside Globe City..."; I only used 5-10% smoothness in order to not jepordize more than 5% of the video. Synthesizing Edges: There is one scene that was treated differently, where I used "stabilize, Synthesize Edges". The video is ~1:40-2:30 in "Sedona to Grand Canyon..." At high smoothness, premiere calculated to crop over 14% of the video edges since I moved the camera while recording. Thus, I decided to use synthesize edges (uses previous frames) so I don't have to crop much. I cropped about 5% of the edges using "additional scale" option to cut off the artifacts that were created by edge synthesization. Syntheizing edges gives you a good result; however, its processing and ram usage is tremendously high. On my AMD quad core processor (average-end) it was taking more than a minute to encode each second and that's with a medium-end gaming video card that is supposed to be using Open-CL (about 20 times slower than simply using "Stabilize, Crop, Auto-scale (default)" setting that I used for the rest of the videos). On my gaming laptop that has tri-core of Phenom-2 at 2.1GHz takes, it was 54 times slower to encode a video with edge synthesization than one at default mode (taking ~7.7 minutes to encode each second of video). Meaning, it would've taken ~5 days to encode 15 minutes of video if all was edge synthesized (assuming RAM size is infinite). RAM usage: In general, video stabilization in Adobe premiere takes lots of ram. Without synthesizing edges: 4GB of ram was not enough to stabilize 15 minutes of video in one go and it actually resulted my laptop to crash, so I had to delay the project until I got myself a desktop PC with 16 GB of ram. Later I found that 16 GB was barely enough for a 69 minute video that has been chopped off to numerous sequences. I had to flush out ram by repeatedly restarting premiere and sometimes restarting Windows between stabilizing long sequences to prevent PC crashing and excess use of the HD with virtual ram. It seems to me that Adobe kills or suppresses some windows processes in the background when Ram hits the max for long periods which leads to some programs not functioning properly until a system restart is done. I believe synthesizing edges was taking 4-5 times more Ram than the default setting of auto-scale and cropping. Additionally on processor & video card usage: Previewing a video after stabilization was CPU intensive and couldn't keep when set at high resolution and it was simply impossible to use it if you did any edge synthesization for that sequence. When edge synthesization was done to a sequence, it was taking at least 1-2 seconds to preview a single frame. So, I strongly recommend using a high-end CPU and video card if you plan on using lots of video stabilization. Some additional notes on editing: Make sure to do "warp stabilization" at the last step of the editing process since any further editing will make you redo the stabilization (very time consuming). For encoding: I relied on XviD4PSP 7.0.170 (defalut settings) to do the final encoding. It's fast, easy to use, and fairly small size since it uses x264 (better than H264).