Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

- Aldous Huxley
 

Art is nature speeded up.

- Malcolm De Chazal
 

A sense of getting somewhere fast satisfies a native American urge.

- James Thurber
 

I'll admit it - this video fascinates me.  I've seen it a dozen times, maybe more.  Once the driver gets out of town and you can see the landscape and sky, it really does give the impression of great speed.  I love watching the southern California hills dissolve into flat valleys and anticipate the northern hills near the end that cause the road to twist and turn enough to make me dizzy.  This was a clever idea - and I wish I had thought of it first.

If you have difficulty viewing this .swf file, please visit Kallahar's site, where you can download your very own Divx copy (65 meg) which can be full-screened.  (He also has a lower-quality version available.)

Click to Play

Kallahar writes:

This spring I went to Oregon to help out my family's softball tournament.

It's normally a 10 hour drive so I decided to find a faster way.  I strapped a rocket to my car and was able to make the trip in an astounding 6 minutes!  Top speed was 6900 miles per hour, or over mach 9.  To prove this to the world, I put a video camera on the front bumper which is about a foot off the ground.

I hooked up a cheapy Fry's camera to my front bumper and wired it to a VCR powered by a 12V-110V inverter.  To check the camera mounts, I bought a $120 car LCD TV.  Since the trip takes 10 hours, and VCR tapes only last for 6, I had to switch tapes once.  Fortunately I was able to stop for lunch in Sacramento with about 7 minutes left on the first tape.  Switching tapes while driving on the freeway was something I was really trying to avoid.

To create the video I had to capture the entire movie (25 gigs or so), extract it to single frames with VirtualDub, delete 99 out of 100 of them (left 10,000 frames), colour correct and deinterlace them, and then create an avi from the stills with VideoMach.  Then I just had to find a song that was exactly 6 minutes long.

Trip: 695.3 miles in 9.5 hours
Movie: 6 minutes (95 times faster)
Speed: 6953mph, mach 9.13

Source: quickwired.com site by Kallahar - kallahar@quickwired.com

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