recording in car with Webcams supported by laptop????

[Simon Bidese]

After ur thoughts guys who are techies, Stewart? Evan? and anyone else who may know.
Will it work? Quality?  Potential too cause hard drive failure - too rough, resonation.

Thanks

Simon

[Brad M]

There is a fair bit of vibration, not sure if it would be enough to crash a laptop though.
Is there any reason you wouldn't just use a MiniDV Video Camera? Are you planning on doing some live streaming to the web?
I had a 7 year old Canon Digital Video Camera that was pretty unsuccessful due to too much vibration. Although a newer Sony worked a treat.
Brad

[alfagtv58]

Stuart should be able to offer some good advice, he has a new one he tried at Sandown recently....it was about the size of a biro!

[Simon Bidese]

thanks for ur feedback so far guys, i thought Stuart and Evan might have some good advice.  I have a laptop but not a handycam at this stage.

Cheers

Simon

[Colin Byrne]

I have my laptop strapped in test car's everyday at work and the car's get subjected to terrain that's much worse than a racetrack.  I haven't had a hard disc fail yet, others have but it's after over 12 months of constant abuse.  So I reckon a couple of track laps won't hurt it, I'd backup your files before you hit the track though!

I've got my digital tape camera mounted rigidly to the cage and have no problems with vibration of the image

[Simon Bidese]

great thanks Colin...nice to know.


I have access to a new Microsoft LifeCam NX-6000 Webcam from work, and was planning to mount this from a rollabr inside the car and place the laptop in the rear wheel well (secured in the boot of the gtv6), usinig a USB 2.0 extension cable to bridge the gab.

With a 2 Meg resolution the file size is about 100 Meg for 15 minutes of audio and visial footage.

Cheers,

Simon

[Stuart Thomson]

Hi Simon,

It's really a risk/cost thing.

I'd not risk my laptop in a racecar.  I'll easily risk a handycam, particularly as I use cheap ones I pick up on eBay.

I'm trialing some all in one video cams ATM, only VGA resolution and low sound quality, but they're small and self contained as they record on an SD card.  I'll let you all know how they go.  Unfortunately at Sandown I had other problems to fix, so didn't get much of a chance to muck about with them.

I'd watch out for webcams as they tend to have to squash the data to get it down a USB2 link, results in lower quality.  Some of the best stuff comes from spy cameras run directly to a video recorder.  the video quality is much better, especially with the 480 line resolution video cameras, and they are getting smaller by the minute.

The shock thing is probably OK, most laptops park the hard disk if they move too much, and record into the RAM, but if you have an incident all bets are off. 

Hope this helps.

Cheers
Stuart

[Simon Bidese]

Thanks Stuart it does.

Hope to catch up with u at Winton around this topic.

cheers,

Simon