LocomotivesUK Rail Blog

LNER Class A4 4498 (60007) Sir Nigel Gresley Steam Locomotive Video Compilation

This latest addition to the LocomotivesUK Youtube Channel features all the footage I managed to piece together of LNER A4 60007 (4498) Sir Nigel Gresley over a period of years from 2002 until 2015.

There was one clip missing, likely lost in the Seagate hard drive failure, but it wasn’t all that brilliant to begin with. One evening in April/May 2008 I caught a glimpse of it doing a trial run to Whitby and back prior to the runs featured in this video which did survive.

The opening 3 still images were taken at Pickering Station on 14th April 2015, a couple of months before that Seagate Hard Drive problem I keep mentioning. Thankfully I was able to recover them from my personal Facebook albums. Continue reading “LNER Class A4 4498 (60007) Sir Nigel Gresley Steam Locomotive Video Compilation”

NYMR’s 76079 Steam Locomotive at Whitby Station (6th July 2018)

I took this footage on the morning of 6th July 2018 while trudging back from capturing footage from the Cook 250 Event going on in the town the same morning.

I only really caught a very short clip of video footage as the locomotive wasn’t really doing much other than sitting at the platform producing steam, but I also caught some fairly decent still images I was able to drop into this video to help pad it out a bit. Continue reading “NYMR’s 76079 Steam Locomotive at Whitby Station (6th July 2018)”

Trying To Make Old Video Footage Great Again

My first digital camera of sorts was a thing called a Trust Spycam 100, which was basically a webcam you could unhook and stick in your pocket to use as a low resolution digital camera and a very basic video camera without sound that could record clips measurable in seconds. As far as I can remember I bought it probably some time around 2001/2002.

I eventually upgraded to something more usable in March 2006 as a 27th Birthday present to myself. The camera in question was a Fujifilm A345, a 4.1 Megapixel jobbie that could also record video with sound, and I picked it after much perusal of the reviews at Steves Digicams camera reviews website, which I used to read a lot more often back in those days.

The video footage it could record had 2 options:

160×120 pixels, which looked crap even back then
320×240 pixels, which was somewhat better

It recorded them to the old FujiFilm xD memory cards, up to a maximum of either 64mb or 128mb, I can’t remember which now.

Back then the playback footage didn’t look too bad on my old 15-inch Compaq 151FS monitor, which was manufactured in November 1995, acquired along with my first second-hand PC in the summer of 1999, and finally retired in Spring/Summer 2017.

In it’s place I now have a slightly newer 20-inch widescreen Samsung 2032 LCD jobbie which was a freebie hand-me-down from one of the customer’s in the family shop. According to the sales blurb page on Amazon UK it first became available in August 2008, but some other pages I’ve seen suggest it first became available in 2007.

While this new monitor makes it easier to see what the heck I’m doing, the 1280×960 screen resolution I have it set up makes it almost impossible to watch the episodes of Star Trek I have on iTunes, they look pretty bad if you try to play them at full screen (640×480 Standard Definition video files), and unless you stand really far back only look any good if played in a window around the size of a picture postcard.

This issue also doesn’t do much for my old digital video footage recorded on my older non-HD camera collection.

Having remembered how good the upscaling looks on my Panasonic EX-99 VCR/DVD/HDR machine, I got wondering if such a thing was possible with old digital home video footage.

After much poking around on a well known popular search engine, I ended up with 2 pieces of software to tinker with to see if it was possible:

After much tinkering to see what was possible, I ended up with the video I’ve plonked at the top of this blog post, which I uploaded back on 12th June 2018, and long forgotten what I did to it while procrastinating over getting round to this blog post amid an assortment of problems over the summer that held the job up.