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keelerad

Using Race Render to add data to videos

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OK I have had a few people ask about how to add data to in car videos, the way I do it is to use the data logged in the torque app and an app called Race Render 3.

 

To give people some hints on how to do it I've produced a few videos, a couple to show how to select what to log in Torque and how to send the log files to your computer.

 

Then one to show how to download a video from youtube to a standard 720p mp4 format, by standardising your video input that you are going to use in race render it means that any customisation you do based on a screen size will be valid every time.

 

Then a video showing the basics of how to combine the two in Race Render and export the finished video back to youtube

 

So first video how to get Torque map trip logs off your phone to your computer

 

 

This will send an e-mail with an attached zip file that contains a tracklog.csv data file, you can open this in excel or open office to see all the data points you have to play with, but you don't need to

 

This video is just to show where you can see what PIDs you have configured to be logged in Torque, if it's not in the list it won't be in the log file so you won't be able to add it to your video. The screen I demonstrate in the video is showing the data points I have set up to log, to add more use the 3 dots menu top right.

 

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Next video is the way I normalize any video from any device to end up as a 720p mp4 file, this means that all my input videos I use in Race Render are always the same format, so any custom setup I do in Race Render to match the screen size will still be OK every time.

 

You don't have to do this step, but it's also a good way of archiving your videos so if you ever want to go back and redo it you know you will still have access to the original source.

 

I'm not going to explain how you upload videos from your device to youtube, if you don't already know how to do that then google an answer, go away upload a few and come back here once you've worked that out.

 

Basically I use youtube and a Firefox youtube downloader to do this pre-processing, this can be added to Firefox from here

 

https://github.com/gantt/downloadyoutube

 

There is another downloader that can possibly do higher quality vids here but I haven't tried it yet

 

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-video-and-audio-dow/

 

By letting youtube do the conversion for you, you won't risk any of the nasties associated with a lot of free video editing software you might consider downloading, doing this way lets youtube do all the donkey work and you don't end up with adware or viruses on your computer.

 

Once you have the add on installed (it's easy follow the instructions on the link above) you can download a 720p version of anything from youtube to your computer as a 720p mp4 file (Initial-D, Wheeler Dealers, whatever you can find as well as in car vids)

 

 

Ok so now we have covered how to get a video in a standard format and a torque trip log file onto your computer, the next step is to combine them.

 

The Race Render software I use for this was recommended to me by Rob after seeing my complicated attempts to produce closed caption subtitle files to overlay videos. I can guarantee you Race Render is much simpler and produces a lot better results.

 

So the video starts assuming you have :

1. Installed the software from http://racerender.com/RR3/Features.html (there is a free trial version that lets you try it out but has some features disabled)

    Note there are both Windows and OSX versions of this software, the example video below is done using the Mac version but the Windows version is very similar (if you pay for a licence you can actually install and run both versions off the same licence code if you have both systems)

2. Got your tracklog.csv file onto your computer (see vid 1 above for a suggested method)

3. Got a valid video file onto your computer (if you can upload it to you tube you can use the method in vid 3 above to download a 720p mp4 version)

 

I don't use anything above the standard options in the example, in real life I have saved my own prefererred screen layouts and data config maps that I use, but the example vid shows what you can do very simply with just the std options

 

 

Any comments/questions/suggestions add them below

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As you will have seen from my videos I normally also display air, oil and coolant temp and the fuel level for a laugh. You can get it to display what gear you are in by opening the csv file in Excel and with some fairly simple macros based on speed vs revs generate what gear you are in and add that as a column to the csv file before using it in Race Render.

 

To add a picture in picture drivers or rear view video as well is also pretty simple, but you then have one more synch to do to get that (i used the traffic light at Blyton that lets you onto the track to synch the 2 vids together, then synched the data against the combined videos).

 

If you do a picture in picture and the little one doesn't show up, move up in the stack of overlaid items bottom right, as those at the top of the list appear on top of those lower down, so if its under the main vid in the list you won't see it.

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