I'm super excited about something!!
The reason my videos are pretty much just straight copies from the dashcam without any titles or editing or anything is that all these years I've been using a computer that's over a decade old and barely able to do the most mundane of tasks. For the nerds out there to take pity on me, it's built around a Core 2 Quad processor.
If you go back to my earliest videos where I did put in titles and stuff, you'll see that the quality is kind of garbage. I don't know if the computer was responsible for that or whether Windows Movie Maker was just that crappy at making videos, but the fact that they looked bad and took LITERALLY HOURS to render before I could check them over to see if they'd actually rendered or whether there were swaths of black screen in them and I had to start the process over meant that I eventually gave up even trying.
Well... the kind folks at AMD took pity on me and hooked me up with some new gear to try out and OMG!!! I'm not quite done setting it up yet but last night I made my first video just to try it out and it BLEW MY MIND!!!
It's only a short video, but it's not just a copy of the source files stitched together. It's 1:38 long and the rendering took only ABOUT A MINUTE!!!
I can't thank AMD enough for this one! They supplied a motherboard that was about twice as good as what I was looking to buy, a Ryzen 7 2700X processor, 16 gb of DDR4 3400 RAM and a video card that was about 4 times better than anything I had planned on getting! It's an RX VEGA 64 for anyone that means anything to.
I'm over the moon right now with how quickly I was able to put this one together. I know it's not much, but it's a sign of what I'll be able to do in the future. No more raw dashcam videos for me! We're gonna have TITLES AND TRANSITIONS AND STUFF, BABY!!!
So... to explain the video itself...
I don't run any timing or telemetry recording or anything in the car on the track so the only way I know my lap times is when I take the hours to pore over the dash cam video, stitching the 1-minute segments into a complete video and then looking at the clock time at the bottom to see what the lap times are. Knowing there are 60 frames in a second means I can actually get a pretty accurate time from this.
So on a track day, I have no idea whether I'm doing better or worse than usual. I just know whether it feels good or whether I feel like I've improved in a corner or something. I don't know whether it's actually better until days later because, as mentioned earlier, just stitching those videos together (which overlap one another so it's not a matter of just lining them up) takes hours and sometimes doesn't happen until weeks after the event.
Over the past few events, I found I seem to have hit a barrier and haven't gone any faster in a long time. I can run 1:33 all day long, but unless I've missed it in all the videos, I don't think I've ever run a 1:32.
So, out of curiosity, I wanted to at least compare a couple of the 1:33 laps and see whether they're really identical. This video is a split screen of two of those laps. You can see that I get nearly a second ahead in the right-hand video and then catch most of that up on the left side by the end. The right side is ultimately quicker by a fraction of a second.
This suggests to me that if I were to put a complete good lap together, I may have nearly 2 seconds to gain just doing what I'm already doing now, which is really encouraging.
The fact that there's a passenger in the car (even though she was kinda tiny) also means there's a little to be gained.
Hope you enjoy watching this as much as I enjoyed making it. I'm no Spielberg but it's at least a window into what the future holds!!!
https://youtu.be/GI70pOuyzso
