analogmike

I need a new recorder, was looking at the chasecam memory card recorder and it looks great, with many options. But I need something for this week at Sebring so I put together a cheap recorder that also records to memory cards.

Found the sandisk V-Mate at circus city and it looked interesting.

It's a home recorder, like a tiny VCR, but uses 5V dc, so I built a voltage regulator and tried it with my racecam in my old car to see if it would work. The racecam is about the best camera out there so it should come out good, but I bet it would be decent with a cheap webcam too.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=wFbwBroa1xs

Hope someone can use this info to make a cool cheap system.

Circuit Motorsports

I've heard some people talking about doing this but this is the first I've seen the results. It looks great. Nice work. I'll have to keep that in mind.

CWay27

What kind of camera are you using??

JackOlsen

It looks like you're going to have the same problem that so many of these little cameras have, which is too-high contrast when you're shooting a lot of sky on a bright day. The sky bleaches white, and the rest of the image gets too contrast-y. It seems to be a common side-effect of cameras that use the MPEG4 compression scheme. Pixel count and frame rate are easy statistics for manufacturers to brag about, but I suspect they have to pay a little more to make a product that uses M-JPEG (or motion-JPEG) for the compression. I've seen a few affordable cameras that use this, and the picture quality is significantly better. John Wurth found a cheap still camera that recorded beautiful video using M-JPEG.

More recently, Mark Kibort and some other people found this camera which costs a little more than the one you got, but uses the better compression scheme and (presumably) won't suffer from the bleaching problem. Maybe someone on this board has shot enough video with theirs to confirm or deny this.

Your footage looks great, and you didn't pay much for the setup. But the trees you've got blocking the sky makes it hard to judge whether this camera will suffer the same problems that so many do on a bright sunny day.

CWay27

^ but the sandisk is a recorder and you're talking about a camera.

Phokaioglaukos

How did you connect the racecam to the recorder?

analogmike

I am using a $1000 high res racecam, it has excellent contrast. But my lens and windscreen were pretty dirty. I also have an old Chase conecam but have not tried that with the sandisk yet. I am using the RCA analog digital and audio outputs (the racecam also has digital outputs). I don't think the number of lines is matching quite right so the picture is not as clear as it should be (high res racecam output getting converted to 640 x 480?).

The sandisk has adaptor connectors for RCA inputs and outputs so it's easy to use for many applications.

The sandisk can record in several formats, you can watch the videos on sony gameboys, cellphones, etc in addition to the MP4 PC format I chose. It's nice just pulling the card out of the racecar and plugging it into the PC. If you have an "incident" you can bring the card to the stewards and show them the video on their computer. My 4GB SD card I use for recording audio (Edirol concert bootlegging device) is supported and I think will record for 2 hours in that resolution.

Circuit Motorsports

Most every camera with a aperture that changes with the amount of light coming in does the same thing only when you get to the really nice ones do you minimize that but it still happens to some extent. The key is to aim the camera so you aren't getting the sky as half of the shot. It's tough to aim the camera to where you aren't getting much sky because you think you are missing a lot of the shot.

Here's one of the GoPro that does the same thing depending on what the sky is like.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...arch&plindex=1

JackOlsen

The video compression takes place in the recorder, not the camera. It's the way the image is translated into digital data. Some cheap cameras do cause problems, but I've used the same set of bullet cameras with different recorders, and seen dramatically different results based on what recorder was ultimately digitizing the image.

Disclaimer: I'm not an expert at all on this stuff. But I have gone through a few solid state recorders already, including one I had to feed 5V to, which is probably from the same original manufacturer as the one Mike is talking about.