last week i downloaded the new Vimeo iPhone app just after reading about it on Lifehacker.com. i was a little skeptical cause i'm still rolling with my 3GS. but it was free, so what would be the harm. i gotta say that it's not bad.
it crashed on me a few times. and 1 was a little frustrated every time i tried to add a pic shot in portrait mode it would somehow appear turned 90 degrees to the right. i figured out i'd have to save the project every time i added something to the timeline. so after overcoming the frustration with the app crashing i managed to piece together a short video consisting of a photo and two video clips of me and my buddy jimmy climbing an indoor rock wall. i was able to add some text, however adjusting the volume levels after adding a music track was probably too much my 3GS to handle. it would consistently crash doing that.
as for the video...
my buddy Jimmy and i decided to do a little indoor rock climbing at the Lifetime Fitness center in Cary N.C.. i was about 4 feet away from reach the top. my only excuse is my 30 minutes of high cardio on an elliptical machine prior to talking the wall. it's all good fun, however. i must admit i was very concerned (and perhaps a little scared) that the safety line wasn't going to hold me if i fell. there was quite a bit of panic in that last moment just before my fingers gave out. good times.
camera work by my buddies Dennis, Jimmy, and myself.
back to the app...
despite the crashes i have to say that the app worked very well. and i'm willing to put up with it cause 1) it's free, and 2) it works on my phone.
hopefully i can make more use of it later on down the line. perhaps Vimeo will release an update that will address the crashes on my 3GS, and add some nice features that will rival that of Apple's iMovie for iPhone. one can only hope. thanks Vimeo!
lately i've been fortunate with a opportunity to assist as a photographer and videographer on a music venture by two co-workers of mine. John Lobe (vocals) and Mark Benton (keys) have formed a new and budding two-man band specializing in easy listening music for the older crowd. so far I've recorded them at The Rose Garden in Upton (twice), FireFlies in Framingham, during the Westborough Festival, Borders Bookstore in Shrewsbury, and during rehearsal sessions. most of those footages will be seen on the group's band site.
but i have posted a video on Vimeo i edited during one of their rehearsal session. this video is special to me, because it's the first time i ever edited anything like this. a simple linear editing process using footage shot from two different angles.
camera #1, front - JVC Everio 30GB HDD, wide screen mode
camera #2, right - Sony DSC-H9 in standard mode
keep in ming that i'm still working with my 2008 Mac Mini. and working with this little-train-that-could wasn't easy. things are little different now that i'm running Final Cut Express 4 (FCE4) under Snow Leopard 10.6.4. my 2GHz Core 2 Duo w/ 2GB of 667 memory is barely enough to edit a single video source within FCE4. but two?
to make this simple music video required a some prep. first off after extracting the videos from my cameras i had to convert both video sources into readable MPEG2 files, and extract the audio tracks using MPEG Streamclip.
i dumped both video and audio files into a FCE4 project and began the lengthy process of syncing everything together. i wasn't going to use both audio tracks, just the one from the JVC camcorder, as it was the better of the two audios. but both were needed in order to help with the syncing of the two videos. probably not the most efficient way to go about this, but my little mac can't handle the video scrubbing very well. so using the both audio tracks (lined up with their respected video tracks) helped a great deal.
once both video tracks were synced up and match to the main audio track, the next step was to determine how to pan from one video track to the next. after listening to the song and trying to identify certain cues, i ended up with the final edit.
filters were added to both video tracks to help with the brightness, contrast, gamma, and de-interlacing. these took a while to find a satisfactory adjustment, because of the under-powered nature of Mac Mini. actually it wouldn't be so bad if the mini had a real GPU with (and here's the key now) dedicated video memory. but i digress.
after exporting the final cut to an MPEG4, i imported the video into Handbrake. i love this app. it takes all the imperfection found from the original source videos, and the compression process from FCE4 and cleans it up real nicely. because of the poor low-light performance of both cameras at the time of recoding, the source videos were very grainy. Handbrake helped to fix of all - if not most - of that and produced a great quality video playback.
the video sources may not have been the best - i know, it looks 80's-public-access-channel cheesy - but the focus here was on the editing. all in all i'm quite pleased with the final cut. i hope to do more work like this in the future, but first off i gotta get an iMac - i know i keep saying that - along with better camcorders. damn it! why must my hobbies be so expensive?!!!
for a little while i've been a member of global-flat.com. it's a site dedicated to BMX riders who practice the discipline of flatland freestyling. as you may know, i too practice this discipline, and i've been fortunate to meet with some very good people from Mass on this site.
on Oct. 25 i hooked up with a bunch of guys from the Boston area. they congregate in a street hockey rink in Cambridge right on Charles St. upon my arrival i first met Rick. we first corresponded over global-flat.com. he told me that he too was a 35 y/o getting back into flatland freestyle. though married, and with children, he has made an effort to get back into a sport that he enjoyed once as a teenager. so we had a couple of things in common sans the marriage and children.
later in day more riders began to show up, and the scene was becoming more active with rider pulling off all kinds of spinning moves. initially all i could do was watch and envy at their skills, hoping that one day i could do all that.
i got to know some of them and found out they too were in their 30's, and though there were a few in their 20's, it kind of solidified my impression that, at least within the states, flatland freestyle was being practice mostly by the older crowd who lived through the glory days of BMX during its roots in the late 70's and 80's.
conversely, on an international scale, flatland freestyle is dominated by a younger crowd.
it's funny when you meet people who share the same interests as you. there's this phenomenon that occurs where you seem to do better at executing moves in the presence of others than alone. or perhaps it's just me trying to impress them, and i just got lucky. either way i felt as if anything can be possible so long as i practice with a peer group.
for example, i've been trying to nail down a pedal kick tail-whip (non-foot jam style). on rare occasions alone i'd get it, but it's mostly a miss. but in front of these guys i was able to get it down no problem. it even seemed like an effortless move. last night i tried several attempts of them in my "backyard", and damn it if i couldn't get it at all. what happened?
well, back to my story...
so i brought along my camera in case i had the inclination of recording my experience there. the guys seemed pretty cool with me taking some videos of them. so i started shooting manually, following them around trying to get some good angle shots. these were nothing but random videos that were taken of any riders as they rode by me. a few times i mounted the camera on a tripod provided by another rider name Rich (the second rider to show up at the rink). this way i could be in some of the footage.
after spending 5 hours with these guys, i decided to retire, go home, and review all of the videos taken that day. i recorded about 5GB of MPEG1 video, 640x480 @ 3000kps on my Sony DSC-H9. what was i going to do with all this footage? put it to music, of course. i told the guys that i would most likely make a music video out of them, and post it on Vimeo and YouTube. no one objected to the idea.
so i spent that week importing all these videos into a Final Cut Xpr project, picking and choosing which clips of footage i liked best. tried to keep all the riders well represented throughout the project while at the same time maintaining the actual time line of recorded events. i added a few scenes of myself, but mostly focused on the more experienced riders.
once i had initially selected all of my clips, i began to think about the music i wanted to use. like most of of my projects i was going to pick one song and use that, but i didn't have anything that would cover the 8 minute run-time. so instead i decided to use multiple samples of songs about 1~2 minutes in length. i'd mix up the tempo and style using Drum n' Base, down-tempo, and hip-hop tunes. i chose six song from my iTunes library i felt worked well in in certain portions of the video. the end result was a nice mix that, not only would keep the viewer entertained, but seemed to play well with the video.
later i started to notice moments in the video where some unintentional choreography took place between the riders and the songs. this gave some ideas, and decided to rework the video to get more of this incorporated.
i don't know why i never though of this before. that was one of my intended design for my AMV, Dyson's Revelation.
so i continued with the process where it started to take me into a different direction. more editing was done, and more thought went into the presentation.
in the end i took it about as far as i was willing to go. this video project almost became an obsession. i wanted (almost needed) to complete it by the end of the week; no more. it took some good time away that could have been spent riding. especially now that time is becoming so precious cause the air is getting colder, and i don't have a place to go ride during winter season when the snow starts to fall.
i've posted the video on both Vimeo and YouTube. so far the responses have been positive. and though this project took time away from riding, it was a lot of fun to work on. it left me thinking that i'd like to do more of these kinds of videos. perhaps i will, if the guys let me. and who knows, in time i may get better and have a nice featured moment in one where i'm doing more than a mere pedal kick tail-whip.
all-in-all meeting these guys was a good experience. one i hope will continue as i practice the discipline of flatland freestyling. global-flat.com is a great place to meet other riders in your neighborhood.
here is my premier video on Vimeo. it's the second installation of my Flatland Sessions
[Vimeo detail]
this video was captured on the 4th of August, 2009. it serves as a follow-up from my last video to show off my progress. it's a casual session i decided to record using my brand new iPhone 3G [S]. the video was just an excuse to play with my iPhone, so i'm not putting a great deal of effort here. however, i've gotten a little better. more time practicing would've been spent if it weren't for all this rain we've gotten over the summer up here in Massachusetts.
DO NOT ATTEMPT TO ADJUST YOUR SET!
throughout the video you'll notice weird color shifts. in combination with the music i've chosen, this is an attempt to mellow out the mood of the video. just something i thought i'd throw in to help spruce up an otherwise boring video.
[end]
unlike the first captured flatland session where i condensed the length of the video by utilizing Fade In Fade Out Dissolve, i decided to leave this video intact and instead focus on using some kind of neat visual effect over a mellowed-out down-tempo tune.
one reason for not chopping it up, was because, where as the first session was captured in 720x480 resolution; the video resolution capture on the iPhone is 640x480 (the horizontal field of view is narrower). this posed a problem as i was riding in and out of the frame more often than before. also the video was shot from the ground and not from a tripod. i felt this too had a limiting affect of the field of view. in order to stay within the frame longer i had to be farther away from the camera.
another reason was the audio. unlike the first where i completely removed the audio in favor of a background music, i decided to leave the original audio in. i have yet to figure out how to mix the audio correctly in Final Cut Express 4 (FCE4) as it separates the audio from the video into its own track.
a third reason was simply time. the video for Session #1 contained over 40 minutes of stock footage from multiple angles. so i had a "40 minute" reason to shorten it down and highlight the important parts. in Session #2 only 00:11:50 of stock from one angle was taken. it didn't seem worth the effort just to shave off two minutes.
i did attempt to condense it, but did not worked out very well. still, i think final cut turned out just fine. in fact the end result came out looking really sharp for a VGA quality video compare to that from the original iPhone video, which contained a lot of grainy digital noise due to the low light conditions. the end-quality of the video was thanks to the process of taking the final video exported from FCE4 as an MPEG4 (@ 9000kbs), converting it into a DVD/MPEG2 video (@ 7000kbs) using Burn.app, then cleaning and polishing it up - using some pretty hefty video enhancements - by running the MPEG2 video through Handbrake, and back out to an MPEG4 video (@ 3000kbs). with all these conversions you'd think there be a loss of quality. well, there is, but you can't really tell, because 1) without the original stock there's no basis for comparison so you don't know what to look for, and 2) even if you could tell the loss of detail is way in the background.
unfortunately, because of YouTube's rule regarding video runtime - they limit it to no more than 10 minutes per video - i couldn't keep both sessions under the same roof, and , therefore, i had to find another home. Vimeo was perfect. so long as i keep my uploads to 500MB per week, my videos can be as long as i want. and the quality of videos on Vimeo are always good. i was really stoked when i saw how sharp my video came out. plus if you like the video, you have the option of downloading a copy for yourself. however, you have a week from the date of publish to do that, and you'll need to be a member.
feel free to stop by at the actual site and leave a comment.
last week i downloaded the new Vimeo iPhone app just after reading about it on Lifehacker.com. i was a little skeptical cause i'm still rolling with my 3GS. but it was free, so what would be the harm. i gotta say that it's not bad.
on Oct. 25 i hooked up with a bunch of guys from the Boston area. they congregate in a street hockey rink in Cambridge right on Charles St. upon my arrival i first met Rick. we first corresponded over global-flat.com. he told me that he too was a 35 y/o getting back into flatland freestyle. though married, and with children, he has made an effort to get back into a sport that he enjoyed once as a teenager. so we had a couple of things in common sans the marriage and children.