A lot of train videos are collecting dust in my computer folders, so for true train aficionados, grab a beer, sit back, and watch the trains go by.
The first video is one I have wanted to get for at least 15 years, since the first time I went to Palm Springs. It’s of a simple Union Pacific freight train going by the Palm Springs Amtrak station. If the station looks a little deserted and abandoned, losing itself under drifting sand, it’s because it is used very little. Only one train stops there each day, the Sunset Limited traveling between Los Angeles and New Orleans.
This video is 2:33 and only true train fan(atic)s will appreciate it, so feel free to skip it if it’s not your thing. For railfans, it has 3 leading engines, 84 freight cars, and 1 tail engine.
This second video is more interesting. It’s the Coaster commuter train making its way north from downtown San Diego to Oceanside, going through one of the canyons in Miramar. I found a vantage point that makes it look like someone’s model railroad. Watch the video and then I’ll explain more about how this video happened.
The Coaster video was taken around noon yesterday. By the time I found that vantage point, morning commuter rush hour was over, so passing trains were about every 1¼ hours. If you look at the video, you can see that the engine is at the front of the train, pulling it. I wanted a video of the engine pulling the train in classic train fashion.
Well, this is a great example of not believing everything you see. In actuality, the engine is pushing the Coaster. When I was watching the video, I really didn’t like the pushing engine so in Corel Video Studio Pro X6, I used just one click of the mouse button to reverse the train. Instead of going left to right, south to north, the coaster was actually traveling from right to left, north to south!
Unfortunately, when I reversed the video, the sound was reversed, too. There was a lot of traffic behind me, as well as some traffic horns, all of which really sounded weird when reversed. George Lucas I’m not….
Thus I went looking for some free music to add to the video. Jim, being a pianist and a classical music fan(atic), suggested “Jupiter, the Bringer of Jolity” from “The Planets,” composed by Gustav Holst. I found a section that I thought would go well, but it was only one minute long. The original video was 1:29. If I used Gustav Holst’s music, it would be by some orchestra somewhere.
That meant that the YouTube copyright police would be on my tail. So I used Video Studio again to modify music that I already owned to create something that would be mine. I increased the bass to give it more of a train chug-chug-chug feel, and changed the key from G to A. Now it’s my creation, and that satisfies the copyright police.
What’s really interesting about this is that the only two things that Video Studio reversed were the movement of the train and the audio. The tree at the left of the view at the beginning is actually at the left of the view. The track is actually the correct configuration; it wasn’t reversed. How did Video Studio do that with just one mouse click? In today’s world, the eyes just don’t know anymore, still picture or video……………
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