Missing friend in Mammoth Lakes area

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ElCapPirate

Big Wall climber
Reno, Nevada
Aug 15, 2013 - 09:08pm PT
Pretty awesome Tom! Huge Props to you.

he last text was from an older fellow from a climbing gym here in PA; he can't remember what it was but probably insignificant and not warranting a response.

Maybe a drunken text? If so, he should just say so.

Keeping my eyes peeled around Reno, just in case the Minden tip was accurate.

Hoping for the best.

TomCochrane

Trad climber
Santa Cruz Mountains and Monterey Bay
Aug 15, 2013 - 09:36pm PT
please recognize that a lot of thanks is due to the expertise and dedication of Chelsea Wagner

i did get her interested in climbing and flying and filming

she has become a competent climber, a professional video editor, and an excellent pilot; and she did the flying today while i wrestled the heavy RED camera

Tony Rogerson, with help from his friends Chris and Sean, also helped guide us in the air, so we are doing this as a team

video capture is just the start of the image processing and analysis

Chelsea is now putting in the long hours required using Final Cut Pro for image processing the video, optimizing image stabilization, color balance, saturation, and exposure levels; and rendering to enhance detail display

we plan to pull out high resolution single frame images that can be examined at length, especially by those of you who are intimately familiar with this terrain (unlike me who has never set foot in the area)

to my knowledge this technique has not been used within the SAR community and this is my first attempt in this context, but if it works, we could be on to something

remote sensing analysis has been used in many other areas...i have myself used these techniques for supporting wild fire teams and for environmental analysis by DOI and EPA and DOE...so i have direct experience that these methods require a lot of tedious work once images have been captured

Also, Tony did a great job of keeping his stomach intact with little forewarning as to what he was getting into... while acting as second cameraman, assistant cameraman, flight navigator, and aerial search coordinator!

we are planning to share Blue Ray disks to people who want to help study the images
Gal

Trad climber
going big air to fakie
Aug 15, 2013 - 09:50pm PT
Chelsea rocks too!!!
TeddyKGBee

Trad climber
Chester Springs
Topic Author's Reply - Aug 15, 2013 - 10:02pm PT
Here are two short videos that I have of Matt:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tdavidock/9448799608/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tdavidock/9448782010/in/pool-findmattgreene

Wish I had better ones. Do you remember any info about him? Tent type and color? Did he have a backpack? Facial hair? Was he driving? Thanks for anything you can share.

Tom
Klimmer

Mountain climber
Aug 15, 2013 - 10:02pm PT
Wow, Tom et al that is really incredible work!

GOOD JOB!!!

I hope the effort really helps to solve this mystery. THAT is a lot of RED HD camera footage to look through very carefully.


I wondered what RED camera imagery was ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Digital_Cinema_Camera_Company



Now I know. ;-)
healyje

Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
Aug 15, 2013 - 10:03pm PT
we plan to pull out high resolution single frame images that can be examined at length, especially by those of you who are intimately familiar with this terrain (unlike me who has never set foot in the area)

to my knowledge this technique has not been used within the SAR community and this is my first attempt in this context, but if it works, we could be on to something

This sort of single image, crowd-sourced image analysis/search has been and is used in a number of applications. If you can use your experience to make it easier to setup and manage I'm sure there are no shortage of folks who would be grateful.
Fluoride

Trad climber
West Los Angeles, CA
Aug 15, 2013 - 10:32pm PT
Been following this thread but haven't posted yet

Just gotta say a huge thanks to Dean, Tom and everyone else looking for Matt. I'm sure his friends and family are so grateful for your efforts.

Threads like this one...and the one on Blitzo...make me so proud to be a member of the climbing family. When times get tough we look out for each other so well.
kunlun_shan

Mountain climber
SF, CA
Aug 15, 2013 - 10:50pm PT
we are planning to share Blue Ray disks to people who want to help study the images

Tom, its been mentioned before in this thread - you might want to contact tomnod.com, which is a crowd-sourced platform that lets volunteers look through and tag large numbers of images. This was used in the search for Ben and Gil last year in Peru. They might be willing to host your HD images. Nate Ricklin, part of the tomnod team used to post on the Taco.... Do a search, or use his email mentioned at http://tomnod.com/team/

What do you usually use the Red camera for? That's a very high end piece of equipment! What resolution are the video frames you are producing for the search?

Great that you are taking the time to do this!!! It's an impressive effort.


edit - watching Blue Ray video does not fit with tomnod and still frames....

need a crowd sourced HD vdo tomnod style platform..

TeddyKGBee

Trad climber
Chester Springs
Topic Author's Reply - Aug 15, 2013 - 10:54pm PT
I contacted Tomnod and they put in a request for imagery, but haven't heard back from them in over a week. I have an email and contact for the person that responded to my request. PM me and I will share if you think this video could be of some use to them. They were quick to respond to my email.
splitter

Trad climber
SoCal Hodad, surfing the galactic plane
Aug 15, 2013 - 11:07pm PT
not to make light,
but life is theatre,
and this is a dramatic production.

a wonderful stage is up there,
for whatever the encore might present.

a good place to get lost,
a good place to search for clues,
a good place to surrender,
a good place at which we cast our hope.

even a good place to die.

the human spirit is on proud display, here.

~ Norwegian ~
WURD!!!
BLUEBLOCR

Social climber
joshua tree
Aug 16, 2013 - 01:11am PT
GUD to hear from you again Splitter!
Seems appropriate!!

Wish I could be up there look'in!

GUD luck Friends!!
TomCochrane

Trad climber
Santa Cruz Mountains and Monterey Bay
Aug 16, 2013 - 02:07am PT
We have used the Final Cut Pro editing program to compile a 23-minute HD video of scenes captured during several hours of rotating around the Minarets. This will take most of tonight to render.

Rendering is generally required any time Final Cut Pro must perform more calculations than the computer can handle in real time. It is usually needed for high-quality final output produced from files created by the RED camera. The editing is performed on lower res proxy files prior to rendering. The proxy files don't display anywhere near the quality of the rendered version.

The next challenge is how to view final output material that is designed to be projected on a full-sized theatrical movie screen. We have been studying a proxy version on a four-foot wide video display and are looking forward to examining it in greater detail when the rendering is complete in the morning.

We plan to share Blue Ray copies of this for people who have a way to view them to contribute to the search for Matt. We could share the video on something like YouTube, which would provide a nice aerial tour of the Minarets, but without providing the level-of-detail required for SAR purposes.

We also plan to create single frame captures at high res that can be shared more easily than HD video running at 30 frames per second. However this is not something we have done before.
i'm gumby dammit

Sport climber
da ow
Aug 16, 2013 - 03:44am PT
^^ that is awesome. if nothing else, perhaps this will help to bring to light more streamlined and effective ways to meld technology and a userbase into the searches of the future
SalNichols

Big Wall climber
Richmond, CA
Aug 16, 2013 - 04:29am PT
Is there an easy way to annotate the images to show the areas that have been searched?
TomCochrane

Trad climber
Santa Cruz Mountains and Monterey Bay
Aug 16, 2013 - 11:22am PT
The following photos are NOT high resolution, but are simply JPEG screen captures that show the frame outline of some of the RED images we captured.

As I am not intimate with this area the way many of you are, it will be a helpful contribution if you recognize their location and help tag whether they are a priority to examine in high resolution.

We snatched these out of a fast moving video stream that would no doubt help you identify the location. I am not trying to increase your challenge of identifying these locations...just that we are not there yet with sharing video clips or high res images.



We have tagged the preliminary edited video stream with arbitrary time code numbers in the upper left of each frame, to help keep track of what we are looking at.

We are producing a 23-minute video that is about 20 gigabytes and could be viewed from Blue Ray, Quicktime, DVD, or Vimeo account. We may place it on the Vimeo account of our little company, Liquid Light Inc.

Norwegian

Trad climber
dancin on the tip of god's middle finger
Aug 16, 2013 - 11:24am PT
round top mountain in mokelumne wilderness
(tahoe area)
has three attactive snow / mixed couloirs
this time of year.

i'll see about getting over there in the next week.
WBraun

climber
Aug 16, 2013 - 11:51am PT
Isn't Banner Ritter and the Minarets area under jurisdiction of Madera County?

So that would be under Madera County Sheriffs office for any official searches in that region?

In 1971 we flew to the notch between Banner and Ritter.

One of the people we were looking for mistakenly walked out the wrong way and ended up coming out the west side at Mineral King.

There's many times the person will end up some where way out in left field outside the "assumed" search area.

These kinds of missing people searches are "Needle in the Haystack" affairs .....
TomCochrane

Trad climber
Santa Cruz Mountains and Monterey Bay
Aug 16, 2013 - 12:39pm PT
a little intro into the arcane subject of HD Video:

High-definition video is video of higher resolution than is standard. While there is no specific meaning for high-definition, generally any video image with more than 480 horizontal lines (North America) or 570 lines (Europe) is considered high-definition. 720 scan lines is generally the minimum even though many systems greatly exceed that. Images of standard resolution captured at rates faster than normal (60 frames/second North America, 50 fps Europe), by a high-speed camera may be considered high-definition in some contexts.

Most computers are capable of HD or higher resolutions over VGA, DVI, and/or HDMI.

The optical disc standard Blu-ray Disc can provide enough digital storage to store hours of HD video content.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-definition_video

High-definition television (HDTV) resolution is 1,080 or 720 lines. In contrast, regular digital television (DTV) is 480 lines (upon which NTSC is based, 480 visible scanlines

We are shooting 30 frames per second at 4K (4096 x 2048 which is 8.4 mega pixels per frame). This can currently only be displayed directly with a special projector in a major movie theater. However the advantage for this project is that we can crop out a 25% section of the picture and still have 1280x720 to look at on a Blue Ray disk.

We also shot some passes at 60 frames per second at 3K, to help stabilize shots taken from the airplane.


High Fructose Corn Spirit

Gym climber
Potemkin Village
Aug 16, 2013 - 01:03pm PT
No doubt this will evolve in the future.

RC hand-launched drones would be a game changer - flying slow and low over all those nooks and crannies, ledges and moats, already mentioned. At a micro-fraction of the cost, too.

It's a shame this ability doesn't already exist. Imagine a company based somewhere off the east side with a dozen of these ready to go out of somebody's garage when in need.

It could even be set up such that these drones could be controlled by sleepy-ass couch climbers like us. Wouldn't that be something!



Of course Rosnau Rescue would have to be licensed to fly and then only at approved SAR times. We couldn't have its squadron of drones flying over the Minarets just whenever.
High Fructose Corn Spirit

Gym climber
Potemkin Village
Aug 16, 2013 - 01:12pm PT
rc set ups still need visual contact with the pilot

They would have on-board cams, cellular transmission-internet capabilities, the works. It's all quite cheap, too, think about it.

With today's technology, this could be done from the comfort of your lazy boy in Carson City. Indeed just like today's military does out of Las Vegas-Afghanistan. On a slow day like today, you could do the Ritter Glacier and I could do the Michael Minaret ledges. Even Jennie and Sully could take part - buzzing the shrunds. By day's end, a lot of ground would be covered. Indeed, as much a game changer as Wiki's been regarding retrieval of info. Wow.
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