Project Valiant
Creating a 360° video from San Francisco to (not quite) Boston
In the early 21st century, I took a road trip with about 11 friends from Philadelphia to San Francisco and back. My friend Tadge brought along a 4x5 camera, and a lens called a Apo-Lanthar 300mm f/9, which was radioactive enough to set off geiger counters. I asked him, “What do you take pictures of with a radioactive lens?” He replied: “America.”
A decade later in 2010, I was ready for another cross country jaunt. I was living in San Francisco with a 1964 Plymouth Valiant convertible, a car I’d always wanted, but that didn’t exist outside of junk yards in the salty rusty Northeast.
It was a magical car. It predated the moon landing. It had an ashtray for every passenger. It had an AM radio, incidentally the most electrically complex thing in the car. Everything else was mechanical, with a “can’t kill ‘em” Slant-6 engine. When I pressed down on the gas pedal, it pushed a lever that opened a little flap on the carburetor, which allowed air to gasp in, huffing atomized jets of gasoline with it down to the pistons, where a series of valves would close, and a spark would trigger an explosion in perfect time. No transistors or sensors or limiters anywhere along the way, just iron and fire and simple machines. The slant-6 is a clock that runs on explosions.
I’d driven it to Big Sur a half dozen times, whenever someone came to visit for more than a couple of days. In the Valiant, you got a totally unobstructed view. No roll bars or head rests or shoulder belts or other gizmos to get in your way. I wished I could take a picture that captured the feeling.
I tried a few things. First, I stuck a GoPro on the bumper, but it was too low to the ground, and kind of Mad Max-y. Then I tried suction-cupping my Canon 7D to the windshield with a fisheye lens. That was better, but even that didn’t give you a full sense of place. There were things to look at in all directions, no matter where I pointed it, you were missing something.
I did some googling and found a Canadian kid who’d taken 360 video of the world’s largest dodgeball game. I looked over his technical writeup and started doing some research of my own. Turned out, the best way to do it was to sync up 5 cameras (with a clap, just like the old days), dump individual frames from each one (30 frames per second * 5, 150 images per second. Yeesh.) and then stitch them all together one by one with Panotools. Arduous work, but technically doable. There really wasn’t any info about 360 video at this time, only a handful of people were making it, and they were doing so by applying techniques from still photo stitching frame by frame to video.
So I set to work as I often do: I begged some free welding work from my friend Jule and also borrowed two GoPro’s from him and my dad, and purchased an extra two myself. He overnighted me a square piece of aluminum with a tripod-compatible bolt on the bottom that I would use to mount all 5 GoPros. I also ordered 5 old-school iPod connectors, which GoPro used for their extension port, and soldered up the power connectors so I could power all the cameras externally while driving. These ran down to a small 5v power supply driven by a 7805 voltage regulator circuit I soldered together on some perfboard. It got piping hot, but it was outside the car on the windshield and so the rushing, free air of America’s highways kept it cool. I did burn myself on it a few times though.
Each camera had a 32GB SD card, which meant I could record about 4 hours of video at a time before all 5 were full. I bought 12 of them and when we stopped for gas I would rotate all 5 out with fresh cards, and Kat would copy and clear each of the old ones to an external hard drive on my laptop. By my calculations, the entire drive was going to take somewhere north of 400GB to store, and the hard drive I carried would write billions of 1’s and 0’s to a magnetically sensitive disk as we drove.
The first day was the longest drive I’d ever done in the car to date: 13 hours straight from San Francisco to Salt Lake City, through the mountains on the Nevada border and past the salt flats where they set land speed records. And the whole setup worked. We arrived dusty and exhausted and crashed hard that night, but the next morning I went through the hard drive and scanned through the footage and it had all worked!
That was the first and only successful day of the trip, video-wise. As we continued across the high plains of Wyoming and South Dakota, one or more of the cameras conked out during a leg, taking all the footage it had recorded with it. Deep scans and SD card recovery tools were no use, and a 360 degree video with a big gap on one side didn’t really work. I tried to narrow down which cards or cameras were bad, but it seemed to move around unconfined to any particular piece of hardware, and we eventually gave up trying once we hit heavy rain in South Dakota after an underwhelming trip to Mount Rushmore.
When I got home to Boston, I never quite figured out what to do with this huge pile of footage, still filling up a big chunk of a few hard drives on the shelf. I cobbled together a WebGL video player for 360° videos called Valiant360 and published a 30 minute section of the road trip that did work, as we departed my garage and left San Francisco heading due east before the sun came up. It’s a project I felt a little guilty never saw the light of day in a big way, but also I never really figured out how to stitch such a huge pile of imperfect video with sections of video missing at random.
Now it’s easier to make 360 video, with lots of precision 3D printable brackets on Thingiverse, and a handful of commercial solutions. Someday, perhaps, someone may succeed in capturing the whole country end to end and all the way around. But in the end, you should probably just drive it yourself. The world’s smaller than you think, except for Nebraska.
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