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Transsiberian Railway Trip as a Single Slitscan

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Re: Transsiberian Railway Trip as a Single Slitscan

#13

This is cool! I love image processing/compression stuff, but I think I might be missing the point of this 'slitscan' approach - doesn't really seem to produce any kind of visually interesting effect. I zoomed in full of anticipation but was disappointed to find it just looks like kind of.. noisy garbage. Am I missing something important here?

Maybe you didn't zoom long enough? In the zoom level that you're expected to go, it looks like a series of thousands of photos, each of a point in the trip, taken with a cheap camera (with some noise, but not particularly distorted and far from "garbage").

You should be able to see the railway going on, places, stops, etc.

Re: Transsiberian Railway Trip as a Single Slitscan

#15

This is cool! I love image processing/compression stuff, but I think I might be missing the point of this 'slitscan' approach - doesn't really seem to produce any kind of visually interesting effect. I zoomed in full of anticipation but was disappointed to find it just looks like kind of.. noisy garbage. Am I missing something important here?

Click the 1:1 icon at the top left of the "map"

Re: Transsiberian Railway Trip as a Single Slitscan

#16
Kind of weird just taking the middle row of pixels. He mentions using a pano library at the bottom, so he could have just fed every frame into it instead of one row per frame and gotten a clear panorama instead of so much blurring and messes. The whole point of the pano library is to remove the dupe pixels, after all, something that didn't happen effectively with what he did.

Re: Transsiberian Railway Trip as a Single Slitscan

#17
I've always wanted to do this, neat.

I bet you could regularize the horizontal dimension by scaling each pixel's width proportional to velocity (say via an interpolated GPS tracklog). As-is everything is either oddly compressed or stretched, depending on how fast the train was moving at the time.

Re: Transsiberian Railway Trip as a Single Slitscan

#18
post #16

Kind of weird just taking the middle row of pixels. He mentions using a pano library at the bottom, so he could have just fed every frame into it instead of one row per frame and gotten a clear panorama instead of so much blurring and messes. The whole point of the pano library is to remove the dupe pixels, after all, something that didn't happen effectively with what he did.

Good pano software takes, like, a minute to stitch say 10 photos together, sometimes requiring manual intervention. At 30 fps, it would take 180 times as long as the journey to complete the stitch. He'd expect the results sometime in 2018.

Re: Transsiberian Railway Trip as a Single Slitscan

#19
post #12

Very cool! Have y'all considered uploading the entirety of the original footage to Youtube?

Google worked with RZhD to put a virtual ride on Youtube a few years ago: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/feb/16/google-tran-sib...

The link to Google.ru 404s [1]. Does anyone know if this is a real 404 and this site is gone, or if this is Google's dumb idea at localizing content (they send 404s depending on how they think your IP represents your geo location ... for some reason).

1: http://www.google.ru/intl/ru/landing/transsib/en.html

Re: Transsiberian Railway Trip as a Single Slitscan

#20
post #16

Kind of weird just taking the middle row of pixels. He mentions using a pano library at the bottom, so he could have just fed every frame into it instead of one row per frame and gotten a clear panorama instead of so much blurring and messes. The whole point of the pano library is to remove the dupe pixels, after all, something that didn't happen effectively with what he did.

> Kind of weird just taking the middle row of pixels.

That's kind of the definition of what a slit-scan is ;) Maybe they wanted that specific effect, maybe they didn't have the resources to do something "better" – part of the beauty of slitscans is how simple they are.

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