Hi-Def San Francisco

Hi-Def San Francisco is project of CloudView Photography. The camera is a 3 megapixel StartDot Technologies Netcam XL mounted in a weather proof enclosure high in the hills of Sausalito. Images are captured every 15 seconds cropped from the full resolution to 1920x1080 and uploaded in 480, 720 and 1080 resolution to the web server. Periodically the software (running on a FreeBSD server) creates a time lapse that collapses the prior 24 hours into 240 seconds of video.

Images from this site are copyright Cloudview LLC. Commercial use, including embedding a standalone image in a web page is prohibited without prior permission. High bit rate feeds for suitable for broadcast use are available. Please contact me for more information.

Common questions:

Q: Why is the picture all gray (or black)?
A: Fog - many days the city is obscured by for at least part of the day.

Q: What does the full view look like?
A: This! (this image is scaled down from a 500mb panoramic stitched from multiple DSLR images)

Q: How do you make the panoramic images?
A: Each image represents multiple originals shot with a Canon 1Ds DSLR and Canon 300mm 2.8L image stabilized lens. The images were then processed using "Panavue" to create high resolution masters. The final master were then chopped into 256x256 tiles and fed to the Google Maps engine to permit easy access to what would otherwise be huge files.

Q: What programs do you use to create the time lapse images.
A: The image is captured using wget, cropped, scaled and time stamped using ImageMagik and the time lapse movies created with mencoder. The resulatant media files are served from Amazon's S3 servers or locally depending on popularity.

Q: How do you know the names of the ships?
A: All large vessels transmit their name, position, course, speed, size, type and destination using a system called AIS. Using a small receiver we capture that data, translate it into a position within the field of view of the camera and log each ship as it passes.

Q: Why only ships over 75M?
A: If we logged small vessels the report would be full of the ferries and tour boats that ply the bay. Since they are small they tend to be hard to pick out so we ignore them (sorry Red & White,and Blue & Gold fleets).

Q: Will you share AIS data and where are the receivers?
A: Yes. The data used comes from two receivers. One is co-located with the camera 500' feet above sea level in Sausalito the other is in the Berkeley hills. A combined feed with duplicate messages removed is available on host : hd-sf.com port: 9009. The feed is for non commercial, personal use. If you wish to use the feed commercially (including web site carrying advertising) please contact us.