by gordonjcp » Mon Jun 19, 2006 9:33 pm
allyharp: It was done using a semi-knackered Sony V6000 camera - one of the big old sits-on-your-shoulder Hi8 ones. Mine has the dreaded knackered electrolytics but the picture stabilises after about half an hour of running. I use it because I can lock down aperture, gain and white balance - the latter being the more important, although the brightness pumps quite badly so I need to work on better aperture settings. Basically as the day goes on the light does actually change colour a bit, and this will deeply upset a camera set for auto white balance.
It was captured on an el-cheapo TV capture card using mencoder on Linux, with the capture frame rate set to (IIRC) 0.125fps (200x normal speed). It was then recoded to retime it up to 25fps (otherwise you end up just getting a string of eight seconds long frames), again using mencoder.
The sequence was taken from around 0830 to around 2345. I'd like to run one from midnight to midnight some time.
And no, I haven't worked out what the regularly-flashing lights are yet.