HOW TO SET UP PIC IN PIC USING REAR SMARTY CAM?

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PostPosted: Mon Sep 12, 2022 3:55 pm
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PostPosted: Mon Sep 12, 2022 12:13 pm

I have a front and rear AIM smarty cam set up. I would like to be able to sync the videos and have the "rear" cam video play in overlay on the front video (pic in a pic so to speak) as though it was a rear view mirror. Can any of you high tech people direct me to a intuitive software program/video editing program that I can use to do this?
I had a STACK system prior to 2014 that did this easily, so I can't understand why AIM hasn't adopted this old technology.

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PostPosted: Wed Sep 14, 2022 10:01 pm
I was wrong about AIM and the second camera. The second SCHD(SmartyCam) only works as a rearview mirror. Then with certain dash of dashes. I am not sure the rearview mirror is being recorded.

The way I see it, Race Render appears to be the playback with front and rear camera in a small window. The Front camera SCHD allows you to set the a number of channels, GPS, time/date, track map, plus various ways to display.

Hope I didn't send you on a wild goose chase
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PostPosted: Thu Sep 15, 2022 2:33 am
I'm not sure what setup you are getting in terms of the video feeds, but if you have two separate video files a program such as OBS Studio or OpenShot can handle taking two video files and producing picture-in-picture after the fact. RaceRender also claims to do this, but I'm not sure if it's a feature offered in the free version or not, as I've never used it. OBS Studio is very intuitive for setting up picture in picture, images, etc - but even though it can render to a file, it's really meant more for livestreaming rather than producing a finished video. OpenShot is a bit clunkier to use IMO, but has a proper timeline feature which you can use to sync the separate videos.

This is all predicated on you having two separate video files from two separate cameras and there not being some "right" (better) way to configure this to get the AIM dash to render the video that way as it's being recorded.

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PostPosted: Tue Sep 20, 2022 6:37 pm
Thank you for your kind replies. So far i bought the RaceRender. I worked for hours on it. I got the PIC as in a rear view mirror to work (easy) but the bit rate on the rear smarty cam is slower than the front. There is a way to adjust rate on the Race Render but it is hit and miss. Essentially every lap the rear cam falls behind so that it is confusing.

I have emailed the AIM people and of course they are not interested in Race Render. They don't seem to comprehend the issue as apparently my cameras are too old 2014. I would think that the cameras would plug into the AMI dash and it would coordinate the views.

I may look into the OBS Studio. It seems that this is way too difficult. I did post my race (front cam only) on YouTube.com
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PostPosted: Tue Sep 20, 2022 7:25 pm
Presumably you mean framerate, not bitrate, since it's affecting sync rather than video quality.. That's not too awfully surprising, as traditional cameras ran at 24 FPS, most modern stuff is 60, and you sometimes see 30 and 48 thrown in the mix - unless you have stuff from Europe, where you get 25 and 50.

If the difference is small I'm guessing it's going to be 30/24 or 60/48 which are both 1.25 so you should make the rear camera video 25% longer to get it to line up.

You can use a video editor to outright slow down the timing of the video by doing math on how far off the rear camera is from the front camera after multiple laps using a common reference point to minimize error. Edit the video length in something like OpenShot, save the edited video, load in RaceRender, and you're good to go. (Or it sounds like RaceRender has this functionality built in?) Basically rather than trying to sync every lap, just find a reference point on the track lap one, find the reference point on the final lap, get the count of seconds on front/rear cams, do math, adjust the rear video length accordingly - it'll be close enough that the error will be pretty small at the end.


But you don't even have to do that if the videos have information embedded in the files. To identify this information is pretty easy on Windows: right click the video file, click "properties" in the right-click menu that appears, then select the "details" tab. It will have an entry indicating "Frame rate". Here's an example.
video_prop_example.png
video_prop_example.png (12.49 KiB) Viewed 7078 times

(If you've been doing editing you may have to look at the original files again.)

Hope this helps.

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