One dull and boring Tuesday afternoon, I got an idea. I would make a short video (under 3 minutes) for every day of my remaining spring break, and submit it to the interwebz. I determined that such a course of action would keep me busy, prolong my procrastination of doing makeup schoolwork, and get me better acquainted with my new Canon 7D.
So I got to work, and created my first submission which is centered around a dusty piano of mine. It sits in a corner of the entry room, which has been turned into a makeshift office by my father who works from home. Check it out below, and please watch in HD. Feel free to Like it, and Subscribe to my videos while you’re at it.
View in HD
The only light I used was the light that came from outdoors through a nearby window, which wasn’t very much. However, these cameras are great in low light (though if I had a faster lens, it would have come out even better). I also decided early on that I would utilize dolly movements, however, I was without a proper dolly. So I grabbed an old skate board, through some 5-10lb weights on it for stability, and set a tripod with my mounted camera on top. However, it was wobbly as hell, an issue made worse by the high resting point of the camera. So I had to devise something else. Originally, I got a table with an adjustable height, added my long flat board, and used just the skateboard with a few weights. The low center of balance (without the tripod) minimized all wobble, which was nice. However, it was extremely limiting.
After some searching around the house, I found a collapsible dolly. Unlike the skateboard, there were two wheels firmly rooted to be perpendicular to frame, and set much further apart. So I lay it down, strapped a 5lb weight to the front, got a square board as a surface for the tripod, and weighted that down with a 10 lb weight. However, I had only two wheels and a dragging handle, which works, but isn’t ideal for smooth dollying. So, I placed the skateboard under the handle, and I was set. All I had to do was lay my “dolly track” (long strip of scrap plywood) and then place my makeshift dolly on top, adjust the tripod’s height, and set the camera up, and I was ready to roll. However, it took me some time to devise this ingenious contraption, and it took some effort to set up for each shot. Furthermore, while it was smooth, for the most part, a slow and consistent speed (and it had to be quite slow at a focal length between 50-100mm of closeup macro shots, otherwise it looked way to fast and I would start to get the dreaded “jello effect”).
When I finished, I started importing. Earlier I had found the perfect song for such a piece, a song titled Forever by Rob Costlow found on a royalty free music hosting site, http://www.audiofarm.org. However, I stayed up till midnight editing, even though I finished filming around 5pm, because of two things. First, it was Lost night. Second, H264 MOV files really butt heads with Sony Vegas. The playback was so choppy and inconsistent, I was practically editing blind, with little way to see the actual final product until I rendered it out. I’ve tried a number of conversions using both Prism and MPEG Streamclip, but they either don’t work with Sony Vegas, result in being just as hard to work with, or experience a resolution dump. So I sucked it up, and just dealt with it. Even though I captured and edited in 1080p, I exported at 720p for easier internet streaming, and even then the file was over 3gb in size. So I used prism to compress that to around 17mb. Big difference, but the resolution was maintained.
I know I am posting this on a Wednesday, but I am planning to film another video today, one that will be much shorter and much simpler… to an extent. When playing with fire, you never know what will happen.
