Storm Highway by Dan Robinson
Storm chasing, photography and the open roadClick for an important message
Storm Highway by Dan RobinsonClick for an important message
Home | Blog Index | Blog Archives | Christianity & Faith Essays | Storm Chasing Essays

                   Monday, January 14, 2008 - 4:02PM

New high-definition dashcam

By DAN ROBINSON
Editor/Photographer
Important Message 30 Years of Storm Chasing & Photography Dan's YouTube Video Channel Dan's Twitter feed Dan's RSS/XML feed

From Dan: How the crime of copyright infringement took $1 million from me and shut down my operation.

In September of 2025, my work is generating the most income it ever has in my career. Yet, I'm being forced to shut down my successul operation, against my will, due to one cause alone: 95% of that revenue is being stolen by piracy and copyright infringement. I've lost more than $1 million to copyright infringement in the last 15 years, and it's finally brought an end to my professional storm chasing operation. Do not be misled by the lies of infringers, anti-copyright activists and organized piracy cartels. This page is a detailed, evidenced account of my battle I had to undertake to just barely stay in business, and eventually could not overcome. It's a problem faced by all of my colleagues and most other creators in the field.

Yesterday I installed "Dashcam 2.0" in the car, upgrading the old one that I've been running since July of last year. The new camera is an SD-card based 720P unit that shoots full 1280x720 HD video, encoding the footage in H.264 to the memory card. I bought a 4GB card that will hold two hours of video. When the card gets full, I just delete it and start over - much simpler than rewinding a tape! The whole unit is easily detached from the mount that I made, allowing me to carry it around as a leisure use / backup camera. Credit goes to my brother Matt for this find.

The new camera has a few issues (as expected for a low-end consumer model) such as terrible audio quality, no optical zoom, no focus, no image stabilization, CMOS rolling shutter and low codec bitrate to name a few. I won't be using this to shoot storm video! But for a dashcam, this thing is perfect for the job and is a 1000 percent leap in quality over the old RCA to VHS system. Here is a test-run of the new dashcam from this morning on I-64 in Charleston. To save space, I turned the audio bitrate WAY down on this WMV - so the sound in this clip is a lot worse than the actual source (though it is bad to begin with).

As for the old camera system, I fulfilled my original plans to have two camera views by moving the cam to the back window - giving me full-time front and rear cameras while I'm driving.

Did you get your phone back?
- Posted by Mom

Got it today in the mail!
- Posted by Dan

30 Years of Storm Chasing & Photography
Important Message
Dan's YouTube Video Channel
Dan's Twitter feed
Dan's RSS/XML feed

GO: Home | Storm Chase Logs | Photography | Extreme Weather Library | Stock Footage | Blog

Featured Weather Library Article:

Lightning Video Ghosting
That strike you got on video was probably not as close as it looks.
More Library Articles

All content © Dan Robinson. All usage requires a paid license - please contact Dan for inquiries.

Web Site Design and Internet Marketing by CIS Internet