"Look: No Driver!" A ride on the Docklands Light Railway

It's time to take a journey on the Docklands Light Railway (DLR) from Bank to Canary Wharf.

The DLR is run entirely by computer systems which drive and brake the trains and switch the track points. There is no driver to guide the train. However there is almost always a 'passenger assistant' who is there to ensure everyone's security (and check for valid tickets!).

Technical point:
There is much picture movement taking place in this episode. Given my self-imposed 3 Mbps video bitrate limit (safely within the playback bitrate limit of most video devices), the high definition picture may look a little soft and lacking in detail in some places. Abandoning my 'locked-off and look' design inevitably brings consequences since the video compressor will always be challenged if every part of the picture is changing from frame to frame.

For experimentation, I had to allow the compressor to run at 8 Mbps for the footage to be indistinguishable from the original - but I am unable to publish that version because devices such as Apple TV are unable to playback video at that high a bitrate.

I always run the compressor at its very highest possible quality settings (constrained only by the 3 Mbps bitrate setting), which means that it performs 'multi-pass' reads of the original footage in order to have the very best go at keeping the image detail and quality in the compressed version.