Some progress

I finished the video from the snow crust overnighter in the beginning of March some time ago. When I started editing it, I almost immediately noticed that I lacked some shootage, but I guess this is normal and is part of the learning process. Maybe a good idea would be to actually do some concrete planning. While I did have some ideas when setting out, I had no real plan. The result is this (to be viewed fullscreen with a higher video resolution):



I also lacked the suitable step-up rings for the ND filters, so the parts where there is lots of light might not have as good quality as possible. I think with an f-value of around 18, the diffraction might actually affect the sharpness even in video resolution. Since this video, made when I had owned the camera for just a few days and did not really know how to use it, I've changed my settings for the camera video mode. This should give better head room for applying small corrections in the video editor.

One of the things I'm still learning is what shutter speed to use in different situations. The general rule is to use a shutter speed twice that of the frame rate, i.e. for 25 fps the shutter speed should be 1/50, which does limit you quite a bit and necessitates the use of ND filters for many situations. I think one can get away with higher shutter speeds when an object is mainly view from or towards the camera, but for panning or objects moving across the picture a fairly slow shutter speed is necessary, especially when using a frame rate of 25 fps (and I have my reasons for that). The clip below demonstrates what happens when the shutter speed is too high. It was shot during my Tour de Pöyrisjärvi last summer, but did not make it into the video, since the movement is much too stuttery.


For video editing I've settled for the Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 11, which I bought in a suite that gave some sound editing tools and other stuff as well. It gives a lot of features for a modest price, but takes a while to get used too. I think I'm getting the hang of it, but there are still lots of details I'm not sure about. E.g. the book DSLR Cinema mentions that transcoding (converting) the AVCHD clips made by the camera to a more editor friendly format using e.g. MPEG Streamclip is necessary to get the best color correction possibilites, something which sounds completely wrong in my opinion. This just shows that I have a lot to learn.

Finally, it is perfectly clear that YouTube pretty much destroys the technical quality of the videos. I wonder if Vimeo would give better results?