I built this crazy Banana Pong thing with a MaKey MaKey for the Art Jamboree that Art Milwaukee does… here’s a time lapse video from the event…
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Tag: video
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A Guide to Video for Smart People
Every now and then I see a post that talks about photography, and how many factors go into the cost of hiring a “real” photographer (and by “real” I mean “professional”) so for my own reference in the future, I wanted to write up my thoughts on the topic of shooting video. (For our purposes today, assume you’ll be shooting a few talking-head videos for a presentation.)
I’m calling this “A Guide to Video for Smart People” because someone very intelligent, who I greatly respect, hired me to do a video shoot. Since, we had to talk about pricing, I figured I’d share some of my thoughts.
1. When you hire a professional, you get a professional.
What is a professional, exactly? It’s someone who uses pro-gear, and has the knowledge to use it. Someone who has experience, and has done professional shooting before. Someone who knows about shooting, and lighting, and pacing, and talking to talent, and audio, and composition, and dozens of other things you don’t even think about because it’s second nature after a while.
2. Professionals use professional gear.
Everyone’s got a camera nowadays, but there’s more to shooting than a camera. For a typical interview shoot you might have a camera, lens, lights, audio recorder, microphone, studio headphones, tripod, stands, spare batteries, spare cards, spare XLR cables, reflectors, and a dozen other things you bring on every shoot. I’m not suggesting you need top-of-the-line everything, but even on the low-end it can be $2,000 for a basic set-up.
3. Professionals are thinking.
If you haven’t had the luxury of scouting locations, you might show up and get a quick tour of the location so you can pick a spot to shoot in. When I walk into a room, I’m looking at the layout, the lighting, determining where all the outlets are, looking at the height of the ceiling, figuring out where the tables and chairs can go, etc. If there are windows in the room, is it cloudy outside? How will the changing sunlight affect the lighting during the shoot? And that’s all before setting up the tripod.
4. Professionals respect your work.
Besides taking the shoot seriously and doing a great job capturing the footage, a pro-shooter will make sure your work is preserved. Anyone with clients will know that even though you might provide them with files, there’s a chance they’ll come back a year later (or five years later!) and ask for it again. For a recent shoot the raw footage came out to be about 9GB of data. After editing it was about 30GB of data. That all gets backed up, and archived, and managed so that you can go back a year later and provide the footage again.
5. Professionals edit.
Even if the client thinks it’ll be quick and easy and there won’t be any editing… there’s always editing. Unless you’re just doing camera ops for someone else and they want the raw footage, you’re editing. So much DSLR shooting is done today with secondary audio that at a minimum there’s the syncing of audio with the video. Add bump-in and bump-out, a few cross-fades, choosing the best take, and render time, and you’ve got some time invested. (I’m not even getting into the copying, burning, and delivering of the work, but hey, that’s another aspect.)
OK, that’s part one of my “Guide to Video for Smart People”. We covered five points. There are more, but I wanted to keep this brief. The great thing about working with smart people is that they’re smart (duh!) so educating them to some of these facts shouldn’t be too hard to do. Chance are after the first shoot you do, they’ll get it, and it’ll be the start of a great (working) relationship. :)
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Art Robots [video]
Here’s a video I put together to show how two of my art robots function. The video is playing right now in the gallery where some of the art is on display, as I mentioned previously.
You can do a lot with an Arduino, two servos, and a few other miscellaneous parts. ;)
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Radio Times
This post from NPR, Radio: The Port In The Storm, got me thinking about radio, and while I’m pretty well entrenched in the world of podcasts and my own music library, I do still love radio, and the interesting thing is, I think we’ve increased the amount of radio we listen to in our household this year.
Part of the rise of radio in our house might be due our dumping cable TV. We didn’t completely dump TV, as we still get the local channels, but it’s not that 500 channels (and nothing to watch) world we’re used to. We still use Netflix and Amazon, and we still record a few shows using an EyeTV Hybrid, but overall, our TV consumption is down, and our radio listening is up.
It’s mostly Radio Milwaukee and NPR, and the quality of both of those tends to outdo the TV we’d usually watch. It was just too easy to flip on the TV and let it play whatever… even with a laptop out and browsing/working, vapid television in the background isn’t that useful, and good radio is a better alternative.
I’d be interested to know if others who “cut the cord” ended up just replacing all their TV watching with online video alternatives, or if radio is taking some of their attention.
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Conforming Video
Now that I’m starting to shoot some video with the Nikon D3200, I wanted to try that old trick of shooting at 60fps and then changing the footage to 24fps for a bit of slow motion action. Now, you can’t just do this by slowing down the footage, you need to conform the footage. If you’ve got Final Cut Studio 7 you can use Cinema Tools to do it, and if you have Final Cut Pro X I guess it’s even easier, but let’s pretend you don’t have those, or you prefer open source… read on!
I couldn’t find a way to conform the footage using my old pal MPEG Streamclip, so I moved on to ffmpeg, and managed to find this bit on doing a conversion with a fixed number of frames.
Here’s what worked for me with two steps. There’s a way to do it all in one shot, but I’ve not got that to work yet.
ffmpeg -i DSC_0031.mov -f rawvideo -b 50000000 -pix_fmt yuv420p -vcodec rawvideo -s 1280x720 -y DSC_0031.raw
So the first command above takes our original QuickTime file right from the camera (DSC_0031.mov) and creates a “raw” version of it we output as DSC_0031.raw (NOTE: In both examples the code should all be on one line. I’ve broken it up to multiple lines for readability. Make it one line!)
ffmpeg -i DSC_0031.raw -f rawvideo -pix_fmt yuv420p -sameq -r 23.97 -s 1280x720 -y DSC_0031-24fps.mov
Once we have the DSC_0031.raw file complete, we run the second command and create a new file named DSC_0031-24fps.mov, which will now be at 24fps instead of the original 60fps. Note that we also specify the resolution (1280×720) and the frames per second (23.97). Obviously if you want other values, change those to something else.
So here’s the final video, shot at 60fps and played back at 24fps for just a little bit of slow motion. (With the RED ONE We can shoot at 120fps, but hey, a cheap DSLR doing 60fps isn’t too bad.)
One more thing on the video, it was shot with 3 camera angles, but only one camera. The trick here is to shoot the same sequence 3 times (yes, I drilled 3 boxes) with the camera in a different position each time. We do this all the time, sometimes you have to when it’s a one camera shoot, and sometimes it just works out based on the footage you’ve got.