Camera car and layout ride


Charles Smiley

Charles Smiley

cspmovies
I bought the Sony AS100V camera and built a railcar to push it around on. This youtube clip below is an early attempt to make a good quality video using it. It's a little disappointing so far. I'm hoping someone can make a replacement lens that is much less wide-angle. It would seem that they could offer this with using the center part of the CCD imaging chip and discard the peripheral pixels since they start with over 13-million of them. That would only take a software/firmware update.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Poa6sUle80&index=1&list=UUkTgEPksvpxNV_CUV2BkHWw

The camera can be operated upside down and the software can flip the image inside the camera. So I took both mounting views on still photos as well as the bottom view. The trucks are old all-metal Central Valley freight trucks.

CAM-UP-1.jpg

CAM-FLIP-2.jpg

CAM-BELLY-3.jpg
 
Here's the car without the "load". The PVC cradle is a piece of 1-inch PVC pie sawed in half. Two half-round strips on the top edges fill the gap and grip the camera in a press fit. A strip of foam on the bottom helps eliminate some bumpiness on frogs and rail joints.

CAM-EMPTY-4.jpg
 
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Looks great. For whatever it's worth... i think the width of it is a much more realistic "human" field of perception than if you were less wide angle. Yeah, you can see the ceiling and it didn't help the "illusion" but an awful lot of cab ride videos seem like one is wearing binoculars...
 
" wearing binoculars... "

Looking through a pair of mailing tubes. :)

Bear in mind that the "target" of this type camera is guys on bikes, surfboards, skis etc... They will spend lots of time swishing their heads from side to side and that can cause some real viewer-nausea unless it is tamed down by a very wide angle.

I doubt anyone at Go-Pro or Sony pictured guys running trains with their camera. Trains make very smooth motions compared to the other uses. I like the Sony because it fits my tunnel portals And, side clearance is no problem either. This is a huge step beyond the one Lionel came out with years ago.

In another 5 years it will be just a item the size of an MV lens you can wire in the headlight maybe. It will double as a headlight too.

The memory card I put in it is 16-Gigabytes! It's smaller than the fingernail on my smallest finger. When I started out in engineering even mainframe, computer memories had less storage and occupied a large room. Disk platters were as big as a manhole cover.
 
kjchronister said:
Looks great. For whatever it's worth... i think the width of it is a much more realistic "human" field of perception than if you were less wide angle. Yeah, you can see the ceiling and it didn't help the "illusion" but an awful lot of cab ride videos seem like one is wearing binoculars...
Click to expand...
I got the same impression. Knowing it is a video of a model and not the real thing I didn't find the room features much of a distraction at all. Thanks for presenting it Charles. It was very enjoyable.
 
Nice video. Looks good, but it also looks like you are in the same boat that I am. It's a bit tall to get through tunnel portals. The picture below is what I use. No construction was needed, but I did have one problem. All of my flat cars have sprung Kadee trucks and with my curves being super elevated and the weight of the camera, it was a bit of a balancing act not to have the camera end up rolling down a hill. In my signature below is the video I got, which is in 1080P HD.

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It fits through tunnel portals with ease. Watch the first video clip as it goes through a tunnel. And it is narrower than a standard 40-ft flatcar so it won't sideswipe my train order signal masts.
 
Looked a bit too high. I have no problem with the width at all, but mine is too tall. I just used what I had available for a camera. Getting it for free didn't hurt my feelings.
 
Montanan. Good idea putting the flatcar back in the train> I think I'll try that.

Where-ja git that interlocking tower? Is it a laser kit?
 
The tower is a laser kit. Got it so long ago I can't remember where I got it. I thought I would give it a shot potting the camera at the back of the train. I had it on a longer train, but with my layout, you rarely saw the locomotive, so I shortened the train and liked the results. The only part of my layout that the camera won't fit is in a hidden staging area. Theat's where the video ended, but there wasn't much to see anyway. When the train is leaving the yard at the beginning of the video where the NP switcher is coming out of the tunnel is the other end of the staging area, which can hold 2 trains and allow a third track for continuous running. I want to get the yard area where the video starts ballasted so detailing on the town can be done and then work on older parts of the layout to upgrade the scenery and details. This layout was started over 25 years ago.

Waiting to see the video with the camera further back in the train. It is interesting to see the train winding through the scenery.
 
I put an "idler" flat in front of the camera. This is 4:3 format with the spherical aberrations wacked off the sides. Sony could make a firmware change and make a less extreme wide angle mode by using the inner pixels on that 13 megapixel CCD chip with no image quality loss.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQ4uOqvx5Zk&feature=youtu.be

The interlocking tower in this view around 1:59 is from Laser Art. I think it's the same as yours. It was a "Rock Island" model. I added some windows downstairs.
 
Another good video. It can be a lot of fun getting different perspectives and it sure will show and flaws in trackwork or scenery.
 
The GoPro can be configured for Ultra Wide, Wide, Medium and Narrow fields of view, as well as various resolutions. I don't know if the Sony has any such options or not.
 
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