What I Did This Summer Video

As part of in service Carly had to do something "creative".  Kathryn baked a lot of cakes this summer, so Carly decided a beach decorated cake seemed like a good idea, since we went to the beach and stuff.

I decided this might be a reasonable chance to make the little video I put on my goal list for the year.  So I did.

I just finished reading "How to Shoot Video that Doesn't Suck".  I'm not sure if I actually succeeded in making a video that doesn't suck, but if I didn't it is not the book's fault.  The book is excellent.  It isn't about the technical ins and outs of video.  It is how to think about making a video, from planning, to shooting, to putting it all together.  I think this is how creative how-to books should be.  All too often books are rehashes of instruction manuals with the addition of showing examples that different settings have on the results.

Out of the many photography "how to" books I really enjoy, the only one that feels purely technical is "Light, Science, and Magic", which is a special book precisely because it is so technical.  I have found other technical books useful at various points in my journey-- but, I wouldn't call them page-turners.

What are ya'lls favorite "how-to" art books?

[ sorry about making you sit through a 60 second video that may suck. ]

More Video Learning

Kathryn was a wee-bit jealous because of the last video, so we made another one today while Carly was at the grocery store.  First, no, it isn't anyone's birthday.  Second, Kathryn was asked later not to say "shut up".

So, in order to build on what I learned last time I changed a few things.  First I used our little Flip HD camera.  That took care of file format issues and video format issues.  I also turned off the fish tank.  Because I was a lot a faster this go around I had time to throw on a background track and learn to work with that too.  I also found the "effects" menu and was pretty excited to see an adjustable black and white mode.  I have seen it before, but failed to find the adjustment panel.  All in all from start to finish this took about 45 minutes to record the video and background and edit together.  Again, the purpose is to learn.  Right now I'm not so happy with abruptness of the ending, but proper planning can solve that issue.

I like learning new things, but at the same time video is not my favorite thing in the world so I'm not sure how much I will mess with this stuff in the future.  Maybe a bit more.  All the new still cameras are built with pretty interesting video capabilities, and sooner or later I am going to end up with one.  It is inevitable.

Trying to Learn Some Software

I spent a little time trying to learn to sync up audio and video today using Adobe Premiere Elements.  The first order of business was creating the audio and video.  Carly was out shopping and Tobias thought the idea of making her a "video card" was fun, then changed his mind once everything was rolling.  Its still amusing, so I went with it anyway.  I used our P&S camera as the video camera and a little Zoom handheld recorder for sound.

So, what did I learn?

•   The fish tank is loud.
• Adobe Premiere Elements doesn't come stock with a motion jpeg codec.  That was annoying, but I converted the video with ffmpeg to get around that for the time being.
• Window light works for video too.
• The camera doesn't default to HD (d'oh).  It is set correctly now.
• Its not too terrible hard to sync the audio and video together. First trick needed is to unlink the audio and video on the timeline.  After that it is pretty simple really.
• It really was worth it to record the sound separately -- The audio off the camera has lots of white noise and seems to really "spike" up in volume when Tobias was talking.

Some day maybe I'll use a camera that can capture decent video.  For now, I'm going to use what I have to goof around.

Timelapse video experiments

I started this blog for a number of reasons, one of which was to encourage myself to experiment and try new things.  I have always been curious about lapse videos.  I really have no excuse for not trying to make one earlier.  My cameras are equipped with an intravalometer  which is the necessary bit of camera equipment to make them.
 



 I knew how to setup the camera, but I didn't know what to do with the frames once I captured them.  A bit of googling led me to this page.   This was all I really needed.  However, there are tons of more complete resources out there to help also.  Here is a good overview.

I set my camera up to make a frame every 3 seconds.  I let it make 150 frames or so.  I had my camera set to create small JPEGS at basic settings.  Even dropping down to the small setting creates frames with more resolution greater than HD video.  I used the gimp to resize the frames to 720P resolution.  I let it change the aspect ratio on one video, and let it pad the video in the other.  I'm not sure which way I like better.  In the future I should probably compose with the aspect ratio in mind, and crop it down in post.  I created the videos with the following command:

>ffmpeg.exe -r5 -i DSC_%4d.jpg -an -vcodec copy drip.avi

It makes the video at 5 frames per second, making it about 30 seconds in length.  I didn't add any audio.  I like seeing how the shadows and trees move about in the videos.



Feel free to watch the videos, but remember these are the efforts of a beginner testing the water.  You will never get that time back.  You have been warned.

(Note: If you are viewing this in Reader or Buzz, the embedded objects don't seem to show up)