I recently went to Barcamp Blackpool – I’ve blogged a bit about that here, but right now I want to talk a little about the video I made.
The video was the first real footage I shot on my new camera and the first full thing edited using my new workflow.
First, have a look at the video:
So it was shot on a Canon mkII at 24mm/f4 with a Glidecam XR 2000. It’s worth understanding that I’ve not had any of those devices more than a week and so my threshold for success is set at “understand more than when I started” and “try not to upset anyone”, and with those criteria I think I’ve succeeded.
The Glidecam is a lot of fun, but also presents challenges – actually carrying the camera on a Glidecam is significantly heavy if you are a sysadmin like me and have no upper body strength. Balances the Glidecam correctly is an art that I’m learning, and using it – well I’m getting to grips with that! I do feel that, objectively, the video probably felt like “fly all the things” – however one of my objectives was to learn about the device more, an so learning when not to run around is valuable information.
Marek Isalski gave me some feedback on the camera setup and I think I largely agree – colour correction/white balance would have made a difference, and things like the auto-exposuring messed up a few shots. Once I get the feel of things a bit more, I suspect I can probably learn to judge some good manual settings for to put the camera in, or I can learn how to update those settings mid-shot, if that’s possible. The focal distance on the f4 is quite forgiving, but clearly, there are some clips where even a rough eye for that could make a big difference.
This was the first ‘good’ clip to take advantage of a small change in my workflow which has had a big impact on how I work.
I have a small laptop for web and stuff on the move, and a [rapidly ageing] “power desktop” for editing. My laptop doesn’t really play my DSLR footage very well and is really underpowered by most standards, it’s not ideal for video editing. However, a recent version of Kdenlive – my favourite video editor – recently added a “proxy clips” feature.
Essentially, when you turn this on for your project, it generates low resolution, low quality clips of your videos for you to edit with, and then, when you come to render your project, it uses the original footage. What this means in practice, is that, so long as you’re happy waiting for your project to render on your device, editing high quality footage on an under powered device is less of an issue.
What this meant for me was that I could sit in a hotel room with my ultra light X60S Thinkpad and throw together a little video before bed, without having to wait til I got home, sorted all the footage out, and got round to editing it all together. For me, this is a big difference.
Clearly, I’ve more to learn about many things, but I’m happy that this video has succeeded in showing me a few places to improve whilst also, hopefully, not upsetting too many people! 😉
