Sunday, September 2, 2012

A new video and some analysis of it

I did some filming when going out with the kids for an overnighter last weekend. Filming the boys, especially when both are present, is to some extent an exercise in frustration. There is not much use planning any shots or taking much time doing the filming, since they don't have much patience for it. It just doesn't have much relevance from their point of view. I mainly filmed on the go and a few times managed to go a little ahead and rig up the camera on a tripod. When the tent was up I had more time, but after sunset a large number of mosquitoes became active, forcing the boys to retreat to the tent. I stayed out for some filming and photography, having raised my tolerance treshold for mosquitoes quite a bit during the summer.



The film is rather slow paced, but I guess that is the nature of the activity. As always, during editing a lot of scenes are missing, but one has to make do with what is available, and this time it turned out like this.

For most of the shots I used the Olympus 9-18 mm lens, switching to the Panasonic 20/1.7 lens a while after sunset. The camera was of course my Panasonic GH2. The handheld shots were taken with the camera on the tripod and carried in one hand, which worked fairly well. Some of these shots were stabilized in the video editor (Sony Movie Studio Platinum12), but software stabilization does not work when a lot of things are moving in the picture, e.g. when walking and filming at the same time.

The sunset timelapse, which I think turned out pretty well, was taken with the Canon S90 pocket camera using the interval timer of the CHDK. A ten second interval was good this time, but this depends a lot on how fast the clouds move. The tent timelapse would have benefitted from a much shorter interval. I tested doing a short pan of the sunset timelapse, but it didn't look good this time. There is in practice a lot of room for zooming and panning in post-production, since the timelapse material was taken with the full 10 MP resolution of the S90, and only 2 MP are used for HD video. A good trick to remember.

This time the Vimeo encoding was not a total catastrophy, but it is clear that 5 Mbps for 1280x720 25p video is not enough. In addition, the Vimeo encoding also seems to emphasize any jerkiness in the video.

Constructive criticism is as always welcome.

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