Video Tips

[DVLocal]

I had my wife shoot some video yesterday - Diana made it look easy last year, and these were almost worthless - except I finally had the incentive to learn how to take video from the camera to the computer.

Suggestions on how to do it would be appreciated. My problems:

1. Perhaps my turns were too wide, but I did not seem to get good ski / knee shots to see what was happening as I zipped by. What is the best angle to shoot from?

2. The sun washed out some of the images as we moved from sun to shadow. Best locations for the sun?

3. My wife wore her white ski pants - that is an obvious one to change next time.

We have a Sony DV tape steady shot camera. I am still working on editing the video.

I was working towards setting up an upload ftp site and a discussion forum on a backup server I have so Harold could get a head start on his review program.

[milesb]

If you can shoot a south facing run, that is best. Otherwise, make sure that you are shooting from the east side of the trail in the morning, and west side in the afternoon. Overcast days actually seem to make best video, as the light is more consistent.
Use the snow/surf exposure setting on bright days.
Try to shoot at the midpoint of a run, so you get 3 angles of the skier.
If you can't do the zoom really well while following the skier, don't use it.
Make sure the skier doesn't ski close to you as he/she/it goes by.
Many pros tilt the camera slightly to make the slope look steeper.
10-30 seconds is a good length for a clip.

[DVLocal]

When I finally downloaded the V1 software Diana used, my videos started to be more usable and I could see big improvements from last year on groomed slope at Copper Mt. and a very steep ungroomed run. I get lots of ideas of what is next from these videos.

Then I realized the 4 minutes if video we had shot was just under 1 gig in size!!!!!

I trimmed to one 30 second run that was of most interest and it was still 95 meg. I converted it to a wmv and got it to 4 meg - still big.

Video is a steep learning curve for me.

Thanks for the input i the day was sunny, of course, and the slopes north facing, of course. This will take more planning for the next series.

[violao]

4 MB is not big for a 30 sec video. You've got 133 kb/s bit rate, that is nearly 100 times less than DVD bitrate, so don't expect good quality from it. Some tips for better compression:

1. resize to lower resolution

2. blur (soften image) before compression

3. shoot from a tripod

4. encode in 2 or more passes

I think #3 is biggest bit saver. If you can't use a tripod then try some deshaking filter before compression. Also avoid excessive zooming. As for #4 I don't use M$ applications (wmv) but I believe there should be this option somewhere. Otherwise use DivX, XviD or some other mpeg4 codec. The goal of #2 is to soften image so much that you don't get blocky video as a result - this is a trial and error procedure. If everythig else fails then you resize to smaller resolution.