Articles

The following articles are available on this page:

• Webcam Comparison — the features and quality of four webcams, tested by filming actual road movies.
• Time-Lapse Video of a Guy Driving Across the Country — a music video by director Michel Gondry.
• 2008 NYC to Montreal Rental Car Road Rally — backroads racing in rental cars.

Also on SpeedyCam: the Michelin F1 Driving Experience report from Valencia, and the story of how this site got started (and which cars didn't make the cut as camera car).

Webcam Comparison

What is the best webcam for the best price? Over the years I bought several webcams, and most of them were used on SpeedyCam to film road movies around Europe. The quality differs significantly — and so did the prices. Here's how they compared in real life.

This article dates from the early 2000s: every camera in it is a museum piece by now. It's preserved here as a snapshot of what filming time-lapse road movies took back then.

Logitech QuickCam VC

I bought my first webcam in spring 1999. I actually wanted a QuickCam Pro, but because Logitech couldn't produce enough of them at the time, I settled for the entry model — the QuickCam VC (video conference).

That camera was first used for my LoveTest.com Road Show: on holiday in Spain with my friends, we put the webcam on our balcony to film the pool area and broadcast it live on the Internet. The second big web broadcast was the solar eclipse of August 11th, 1999, live on my EasyScopes site — during one hour, more than 5,000 people connected to my laptop to watch the moon move in front of the sun. Without much webcam experience, I was quite satisfied with the QuickCam VC, though it was a bit slow at times.

Logitech QuickCam Pro

Getting a QuickCam Pro in Europe was impossible for quite a while. During a work trip to New York I attended a conference and fund-raising dinner, where one of the auctioned items was — a QuickCam Pro. My winning bid was $150, about the European retail price, and I was very happy to get it.

The image quality is much better than the QuickCam VC's, it films at higher resolutions, offers a low-light mode for dark scenes, and can zoom in on an object. Most of the earlier movies on SpeedyCam were created with the QuickCam Pro.

X10 XCam2

While surfing the web I kept seeing those (annoying) pop-up ads for a tiny wireless webcam called XCam2. After several weeks of them, curiosity won and I ordered one through the European distributor.

I really wanted to know if the wireless link would work across our home — it didn't: 30 feet and a few walls were too much, so the camera ended up at the end of my corridor watching the front door. At the Alive music festival I used it to film the VIP restaurant and backstage area; there it worked flawlessly, but I was still disappointed by the movie quality. The video signal was noisy and the colors were off. There's a battery pack option for the camera, but the receiver needs mains power — which rules out using it in the car with the laptop on the back seat.

iREZ Kritter SV

Still hunting for a great-quality webcam, I came across iREZ and ordered their Kritter SV (s-video) with a CapSureUSB capture device. The Logitech cameras connect over USB and the XCam2 over composite video; the Kritter uses s-video, and the CapSureUSB feeds either into any USB-equipped computer.

I was very impressed with the Kritter SV. It offers superb video quality even at big resolutions, it's easy to mount properly in the car, and it filmed the celebrity chat area at the Alive festival (Dog Eat Dog, Iggy Pop, Front 242, J.B.O., Sub7even). It became the SpeedyCam workhorse.

Time-lapse software

The movies on SpeedyCam were captured with BTV Pro by Ben Software, whose frame averaging is very useful in time-lapse work. On Windows, WinTLV by C3 Systems produced good time-lapse results. Several of the cameras also shipped with their own software able to produce time-lapse movies.

Time-Lapse Video of a Guy Driving Across the Country

An awesome time-lapse video of a guy driving across the country — this is a music video by director Michel Gondry, and it scratches exactly the same itch as the SpeedyCam road movies, just on an American scale.

Watch the video on YouTube

2008 NYC to Montreal Rental Car Road Rally

Start at midnight on Friday, August 15th, 2008. Arrive in Montreal around noon on Saturday — or sooner, if you've got fresh driving skills.

Use your wiles or a whup-ass navigator to choose the best and fastest routes; checkpoints ensure mostly backroads driving. On Saturday night there's a huge party with drunk-making beverages, and plenty of places to crash — Montreal, despite being in Canada, is a real city and sports plenty of bunks near the party site.

Watch the rally video by Richard Blakeley on Vimeo

More from the archive

• Michelin F1 Driving Experience — a first-hand account of the one-day driving event in Valencia, Spain: Clio V6 Trophy, Formula 3 and a genuine Arrows Formula 1 car.
• Time-Lapse Choices — how the idea for this site was born, and which cars were (and weren't) used to film our movies.
• Picture galleries — the camera cars, a speed-trap photo, and the IAA Frankfurt motor show.