Archive for the ‘videos’ Category

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The Lemons Experience – Thunderhill 2008

Tuesday, January 6th, 2009

As some of you may already know, Team Formula BMW finished in 10th place at the 2008 24 Hours of Lemons race at Thunderhill. Instead of the usual blog post with in-car video, I’ve tried something new with a video blog post of the off-track action. The goal was to create a mini-documentary that shows the Lemons experience as seen through the eyes of Team Formula BMW. It is a 25 minute video that goes all the way from car prep and transport, through tech and judging, ending with the actual race itself. My personal favourite is the section on the Tech Judging which starts at the 7:38 mark.


The Lemons Experience – Thunderhill 2008 from rnair on Vimeo.

All the video footage was shot using a Nokia N96 cameraphone and was then edited together using Adobe Premiere Elements. A big thanks to Nokia and the WOM World folks for lending me the phone to me – I’ll post my official review of the phone in a bit. As I said before this is my first video blog post and obviously isn’t perfect. I learned a lot of things while making this video and I’ll have a future post with tips for making your own videos.

Update: We’ve made it onto AutoFiends and Jalopnik, you would think that professional blogs would be include a pingback when they link.

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Posted in 24 Hours of Lemons, motorsport, personal, review, videos | 5 Comments »

How good is the N95 camera?

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

I was recently at the WOM World get-together in SF when we started discussing the some of the ways that Nokia should market the N-series devices, specifically the N95 vs iPhone issue. One of the things we all agreed on was that the camera on the N95 is a huge differentiator that Nokia really hasn’t been pushing as much as it should. People are so used to seeing crappy photos from devices like the Razr and the iPhone that they dont expect phones to have good cameras. I, on the other hand, have been using various variants of the N95 for well over a year and the camera is so good that I can honestly say that I will never buy a point-and-shoot camera again. People who see the shots are blown away by the quality of the images and often wont believe that they are from a cameraphone. Additionally the fact that I can use ZoneTag to upload, tag and geotag photos directly from the phone means that I upload way more photos from my phone than I ever did with my point-and-shoot camera.

So anyway, I had a quick look at some of the photos I’ve taken over the last year and have pulled out a few of the really outstanding shots to demonstrate the quality of the N95 camera – hope you like them.

Monday 7:04 pm 6/25/07 Warrenton, Oregon
One of the first really great shots I took with the phone was this shot of the wreck of the Peter Iredale of the coast of Oregon. I took a bunch of photos of the wreck but I particularly like the contrasting colours in this picture. You can also see that the photo has been automatically geotagged using ZoneTag which allowed me to do 2-click upload the photo while on vacation while also suggesting the tags “shipwreck” and “beach”.

My first magazine photo
In case you have any doubts about the print quality of the images you should check out this photo of mine that was used in a full page advertisement in SportsCar magazine. The photo was taken with an N95 classic after I spun out at the track.


One of the things that people forget is that not only does the N95 take great photos but it also shoots 640×480 video at a full 30 fps. The above video was taken at a BMW club autocross using an N95 8GB (N95-2) on my homebrew track video setup. As you can see the picture is clear and skip free. The loud rustling sound is the wind noise from the air entering the cabin once you go above a certain speed. Also check out this trackday video that I made at Reno-Fernley Raceway using the same camera setup.

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The two photos above are part of a set that I took from the front row of an Iron Maiden concert in San Antonio using my N95 classic. The concert environment with its combination low light, moving subjects, backlighting and audience jostling is pretty hostile to cameras and makes it super challenging to take clear photographs.

The biggest issue for me was the time it takes for the N95 camera to both switch on and also focus on its subject. I would often click the button to capture an interesting moment but the moment would be well past by the time the camera actually took its shot. I took about 150 photos on that day and roughly 40 were worth putting on Flickr with another 40-50 worth saving. Not a very good ratio but since people were having worse ratios with high-ish end cameras I certainly cant complain. Also being a cameraphone means that there are zero questions asked when you take it into the venue :-D


The last thing I want to share is some video that I shot from another Iron Maiden Concert (this time in Concord). This was from an N95 8GB NAM and as you can see the video is pretty damn good despite the tough camera conditions. The sound is once again the biggest issue – it just cant handle the loud noise and ends up clipping most of the audio.

All in all I can say that the N95 has a truly spectacular camera (for a phone) and it can easily be a replacement for a point-and-shoot camera. Plus if Nokia can fix the sound/clipping problems on the phone they should seriously market the N95 as a full-on camcorder replacement as well. The addition of easy uploads to Flickr and YouTube (the current Flickr share SUCKS!!!) would make this the perfect point-and-shoot photo and video capture device.

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Posted in mobile, photos, review, videos | 7 Comments »

Fixing VLC player crashes on Mac OS X

Monday, March 17th, 2008

I’ve been a big fan of the VLC media player on the Mac and have been using it exclusively as my media player. However at some point the VLC player got very funky and suddenly stopped playing all video content. If you tried opening any video file it would open a blank video window and play the files audio for a few seconds before crashing. I tried deleting the app and getting the latest version on the website but that really didn’t seem to help. After a bunch of web searches and looking on several different forums I seem to have stumbled on a working answer.

1) Quit the application if it is running
2) Delete the VLC folder in /Users/USERNAME/Library/Preferences
3) Delete org.videolan.vlc.plist in /Users/USERNAME/Library/Preferences
4) Delete org.videolan.vlc.plist in /DRIVENAME/Library/Preferences

Restart VLC and it should play videos with no problems

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Posted in technology, tutorial, videos | 40 Comments »

Lotus Elise Supercharged

Friday, February 29th, 2008

Chris Harris review the new Supercharged Lotus Elise – me wants to upgrade :-)

Harris is one of the best automotive reporters out there – he strikes an excellent balance between the humour of Jeremy Clarkson and the driving ability of Tiff Needell. If you liked that review I highly recommend the Chris on Camera series where he reviews a different car every week.

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Posted in cars, review, videos | No Comments »

Driving in the dark

Tuesday, January 8th, 2008

A few people have asked me what it was like to drive Thunderhill at night and I figured the best way to explain would be to show you what its like. This is a quick lap with no traffic from the 24 Hours of Lemons race in December. Its pretty hard to see the course so I have labeled the corners to give you a better idea of the course.


Driving in the dark from rnair on Vimeo.

As you can see, the visibility is not the greatest which makes driving quite an interesting experience. While the lights do give you some idea of where the apex is, the real problem is in finding your track out point. Turns 1, 2 and 4 were especially difficult since the optimum racing line has a very wide track out point where you run over the outside kerbing on the exit. This is all well and good in the sunshine since you know exactly where you are going and you know that its safe. In the dark however, you simply cannot see the track out point when you turn in and you basically have to hope that the exit is clean and that no one has dumped mud or oil on the kerb. The other problem is that its really quite hard to see the track surface and/or its boundaries, especially when people drag mud onto the track. In many cases, the white line marking the track is completely obscured and you just have to guess at what your turn-in point is and hope that you wont put a wheel off on the inside. Some of this might be improved by using better lights: we used the stock E30 headlights and tried spreading the beam sideways to try and light up the apex but since it is a road car the amount of adjustment allowed was just too limited. The next time we will use more powerful, fully adjustable dune buggy lights instead. My solution to the visibility issues was to take it slow and always leave myself a margin for error, it may not have resulted in ultimate lap times but it meant that I always had enough “in hand” to be able to adapt to the any unexpected changes in the racing surface. Our goal was to just stay out of trouble and rack up the laps at a steady pace – since we were in 6th place after 10 hours I guess it did work :) .

The next video is an example of what happens in low visibility, the cars are just entering turn two after someone had an agricultural moment and dragged a massive amount of mud right onto the racing line. None of us can see the mud on the line and come into the corner at race speed only to lose all grip mid corner. One car spins out completely while dPunks and I have some interesting sideways moments. While I got through it ok, it did give me quite a scare and I ended up taking turn 2 quite slow for the next 3-4 laps. Endurance racers who race at 10/10ths all night must be either incredibly brave or incredibly dumb :-)


Muddy moment from rnair on Vimeo.

The next video is of a couple of laps in traffic. As you can see it is actually easiers to drive in traffic since there are a lot more headlights lighting up the track :-) . Also the headlights make it impossible for someone to sneak up on you which means that you always have a good idea of the cars around you and what they are going to do. This leads to much better manners on the track and less problems off the track. Compared to the October race at Altamont the traffic here was incredibly well behaved and there was hardly any contact.


Driving in the dark (in traffic) from rnair on Vimeo.

This final video is a highlights package attempting to show some of the interesting from my 4 hour stint in the dark, I apologize for the crappy editing. All the video in this post was recorded using the PDR100 Racer kit from our sponsors at ChaseCam – I highly recommend it for your own racing/track video.


Thunderhill Lemons highlights 2007 from rnair on Vimeo.

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Posted in 24 Hours of Lemons, cars, videos | 2 Comments »

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