NOTE May 2023: The project will be re-worked in the coming months.

Bergensbanen Minute by Minute set a trend for a series of shorter real-time railway ride recordings, performed by NRK staff.

NRK created a major programme around Holmekollbanen, an above-ground branch of Oslo subway (T-Banen), which runs from the centre of Oslo (Majorstuen) and all the way up to the Holmekollen ski jump facilities. The program was recorded during the Ski World Championship in Oslo in 2011. NRK had a wonderful interactive page, which showed the Holmekollbanen’s route, elevation, stops and history (in Norwegian). Alas, the page is no longer available. The complete NRK programme can be watched at the official site.

The front and side view camera recordings from the trip with Holmenkollbanen in Oslo were published by NRK under the Creative Commons license.

“Holmenkollbanen” – NRK
http://nrkbeta.no/2011/03/07/holmenkollbanen-minutt-for-minutt/

I have created several renditions of the trip

NRK Programme Timelapse

As a backup, the timelapse can be watched from the on-site location.

3-Way Camera Combination View Timelapse

As a backup, the timelapse can be watched from the on-site location.

Rear Right Camera View Timelapse

Left Camera View Timelapse

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Pseudo-3D

Even when one has only one camera source, it is still possible to create a pseudo-3D image, using frame shifting. I got the idea from Frank Eivind’s blog and it, naturally, had to be tested. The basic idea is to let the right eye see the video stream, which runs 1-5 frames ahead of the left-eye view. With enough forward or lateral motion one will get almost the same effect, as from two separate camera sources. The downside: the stereoscopic effect disappears as soon as there is no motion in the video.

As I used AviSynth, I could get away with a much simpler implementation, than what is described by Fran Eivind. Here is a fragment of the AviSynth script, responsible for the frame shifting. The anaglyph rendering itself is done by a plug-in, created by Gabor Kertai:

frame_depth=1
left_eye=Tweak(sat=1.2)
right_eye=Trim(left_eye,frame_depth,0)+BlankClip(left_eye,length=frame_depth)
Anaglyph(left_eye,right_eye,"optimized","rc")


I encoded the forward view and the left side views using this technique. For the forward motion, a shift of 2 frames was used, while a much faster sideways motion required only one frame to achieve a strong stereoscopic effect. Note how the feeling of depth disappears once the train stops.

Those interested may also download the AviSynth scripts, used in production of all the videos on this page.

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NRK resources:
Torrents fra NRKbeta – Direct torrent download links
Bittorrent fra NRK – cross-links to several project pages at NRK