Video practice

For several reasons I did not get the video footage I wanted from the Tour de Pältsan trip. During the first day I didn't bother to take the detail shots I would have needed. After that the weather was mostly rainy, which in conjunction with the hordes of mosquitoes didn't really tempt me to take extra breaks for filming. The main reason, however, was that I didn't have enough protection for the camera from rain and it stopped working on the second day due to too much moisture. It didn't really get wet, but the moisture obviously caused some condensation inside the camera, affecting how it worked. Back at home it worked fine again when it had dried up completely. We'll see if I get the motivation for putting something together from the few pieces of video footage I have...

Yesterday I practiced a little video filming in the forest next to my home. It rained the entire day, but this time I had a rain cover for the camera and had no problems with the rain. I used the Panasonic GH2 with the Olympus 9-18/4-5.6 mm lens, except for the first scene where I used the Panasonic 20/1.7 lens. The result is here:

I'm actually quite satisfied with this little experiment. The film is mostly has a good pace, without using MTV-style one second clips, and has a suitably absurd mushroom picking section in the middle. I also tried some new (for me) things: The focus change from near to far in the beginning turned out quite fine, despite the actual focus change being made in software from one clip focused near and another focused far. The slow motion section at 1:02 turned out quite well too. It was made by using 720p with 50 fps and a fast shutter time (1/400 s) and then using a 0.3x playback speed.

For Vimeo usage the limited bitrate (recommended 5 Mbps for the source material) has some implications. Panning seems to work fine, but panning and zooming contains to many changing details and the encoder goes nuts. Check e.g. how the background gets its own life at around 27 s. A render with a bitrate of 15 Mbps shows no such problems.

There is still a lot to learn, but I think this was a valuable practice session, since I did learn something.