Greetings!
Well, I’ve been back from our three week January break in Australia for a good few days now and apart from getting some quality time in with the pooch, I’ve basically been chopping together a wee holiday video to remind us of our trip; taking in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane & Fraser Island. Check it out:
The music is the beautiful ‘Hush’ by Aussy folk-duo ‘Angus & Julia Stone’ (track and album available to buy here)
I was inspired by a post fellow snapper Cris Matthews pointed me to on f-stoppers.com (here), entitled ‘How a professional photographer should document a vacation’. It featured two tasty ‘Vacation Videos’ (one shot on a Canon 5DmkII with a homemade glidetrack and the other on a tiny, waterproof GoPro video camera). Both really captured the spirit of their adventures. I decided I wanted to do similar, so set about
I’ve do quite a lot of DSLR videography, but didn’t want to lug around heavy gear so I was in the market a new compact. My trusty Canon IXUS 1000HS had served me well on past holidays, but has been dropped one too many times and is getting grumpy. One feature I loved about it was it’s ability to shoot ‘miniature’ (which looks like tilt-shift) video at 720pHD. I made this little vid of a trip Clare & I took with 2 pals to Marakech:
I basically wanted a camera that shot full HD footage at 50 or 60 frames per second (so I could slow it down afterwards to 24FPS and get a slowmo effect) and there really aren’t many on the market. After asking around my little crew of photo geeks, I was pointed to the clever little Sony HX9v. NB: I learnt later that the UK model is locked to 50p and the US version 60p (and sadly there are no workarounds as yet – cos 60p slows down even more). Geeking aside, I’ve never owned a Sony before and it really was a fantastic travel camera. I’ll be posting a blog or two soon featuring holiday images, and raving about some of it’s jazzy features (particularly the ace ‘Sweep Panorama’ & the cunning ‘HDR’ modes), but it really comes into it’s own shooting video.
Don’t get me wrong though, it’s not perfect. It’s irritatingly slow to wake up & shoot and playback is sluggish to the point that I gave up filing in camera to deal with it later. But what it does well, it does really well.
Anyhoos – for the shutter geeks out there, here’s how I made the Australia video:
The Sony HX9v shoots 50p AVCHD clips. AVCHD (Audio Video Compression for HD) is a new high definition movie recording format which allows High Definition recording on a variety of media. What they don’t tell you is that it’s borderline impossible to edit. So as with most video footage out of stills cameras, it had to be transcoded with the free MPEG streamclip to Apple Final Cut Pro friendly ProRes422LT. I was quite surprised at quite how compressed the AVCHD fomat video is, and the 44GB of footage, transcoded, became a hungry 270GB! Lordy – dig out an old external HD I did…
To make the footage play as slowmo, I conformed it from 50p to 24p with Apple Cinema Tools), then got busy chopping it to the audio track in Final Cut Pro 7. The new Final Cut Pro X claims to be able to ‘natively’ edit AVCHD footage, but apparently not stand-alone AVCHD video files, they have to be imported from a plugged in AVCHD camcorder, or a valid Camera Archive disk structure (yet another douchey feature of FCPX). I’ve tried FCPX and know they’re releasing updates to improve on disappointing features, but although it’s more user friendly, ultimately it still isn’t as powerful as FCP7. If you’d like to read more about the two, check out a blog DSLR video guru Philip Bloom wrote contrasting his use of the two here.
So that’s that really! The timing’s in the footage and the art’s in the edit. Here’s how my final FCP timeline looked:
As I said, I’ll be posting more pics from down under in upcoming blogs. I hope you enjoyed the video.
Interestingly; the last two videos I’ve shot and edited have been this one on a compact camera and a music video for my pal Pilla on my iPhone 4S:
I really think that you don’t need all the gear to get involved. Granted it’s a tech-heavy field, but as the 5D did to the Cinema industry, consumer cameras/phones are now producing stunning quality footage and gear-based barriers to being creative are hardly there any more.
So get involved – shoot some video and cut a movie!
Also – cos they’re ace, in incase you didn’t click through, those two F-stoppers videos were:
by the amazing Kyoto Studios, and a creative take on ’3 Days in Rio’, by Daniel Ferro:
Hope you enjoyed your pixel intake!
[ By the way - I'm not on commission from Sony; promise! ]
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