Trailside video photography

[Michael Neal]

I use Cineform Neoscene to do 24p pulldown (where necessary) and rendering to lossless AVI. Then I edit in Sony Vegas.

I have used this procedure for the Canon HV30, Canon 7D, and now the GH1 and it works great. I then render in either H.264 or WMV. With Vegas I can also burn blu-ray DVDs up to 20 minutes long on a standard DVD with standard DVD burner.

The GH1 also shoots in Motion JPEG 1280 X 720 30p, up to 80 mbps with the newly hacked firmware.

The Sennheiser MKE 400 microphone is a very good compact solution for audio, you can plug in camera or other external audio device. I have the zoom h4n recorder and it is great, the h2 is smaller and more compact for backpacking purposes.

[Daniel Fosse]

Michael, this is what I'm talking about… intermediate codec. It's a frequently used technique.

As for software I can only speak of Power Director (which is a turd) and Adobe Primere (Which is really good). I havent used Primere in about 8 years but when I did it was top notch.

As far as audio is concerned, you hit on another old hobby of mine. I used to do quite a bit of stealth concert recording. There are instances where a band allows live recording but a venu does not. There is a whole hobby dedicated to making ultra small and very high quality recording equipment. I made several rigs with high quality mic caps plus preamp no bigger than a golf ball.

Why this may matter to you is that we are, afterall, on a lightweight backpacking forum.

Check out this company (I have no affiliation):
http://www.soundprofessionals.com

They used to make some really nice mini-shotgun mics. They have a lot of mini-mics and preamps.

I went through a whole line of recording decs. Cassette, Mini-Disc, HDD, and my current rig is a Zoom H2. The Zoom is really nice and is very lightweight. I'd be happy to put it on the scale i fyou are interested in weight. The Zoom also runs on AA batteries which is great for field work.

The Zoom H2 has a decent preamp built in. Another cool trick the H2 has is that it can record in surround sound using its 4 directional mics. I havent tried to use this for video but have read of others getting good results. You can take advantage of the Dolby surround sound capabilities of DVD.

[Bob Gross]

Sony Vegas was one piece of software that was recommended to me. The other was AVS. Before I run off to the store, I am trying to figure out where the pitfalls are.

In summary: I am recording in the field. Last weekend it was high in Yosemite with birds and critters scampering around. I was recording full HD video with my still camera, and it is stored as a file in .MOV format. That plays, but it is large. Sometimes I record audio externally or without video.

I would like to be able to cut and paste, title, do some transitions, overdub audio, and then write to a DVD.

Ideally, I would like to be able to crunch the file down in res to something that I can distribute from my web site. I'm not sure whether that means changing just the res, or the format, or something else. That way, I can give away the low res show and keep the high res show for special people.

–B.G.–

[Michael Neal]

Sony Vegas Platinum is the most affordable solution that is good, otherwise you will need professional version software like Adobe Premier.

[Bob Gross]

Yes, I have been trying to read up on this since the earlier discussion.

The native .MOV file needs to get transcoded by Neoscene or something very similar, and it goes to .AVI or something very similar and takes up a lot of disk space.

Then slicing and dicing happens, external audio added, or whatever. Sony Vegas Platinum 10 seems to be a popular choice, but there is the suite and the non-suite. I also need to find some royalty-free audio to augment what I record myself, something like Grizzly Adams Meets Jeremiah Johnson.

At the end, it maybe needs to end up as .MOV or other format, just depending on the audience and the transport method.

Right now, I have to practice on shooting technique (with the new camera). It doesn't do me any good to post-process what is a crappy video clip. Of course, to do that properly, I have to have a wildlife "script." Bears don't seem to take direction easily.

–B.G.–

[Bob Gross]

When my Canon EOS 7D camera is in video mode, it stores the video clip as a .MOV file. That is not easily editable by standard video editors such as Sony Vegas HD. So, apparently video producers are transcoding the .MOV file into a .AVI file, and it is much more easily editable. That transcoding is done by a software program called Neoscene. After much gnashing of teeth, I managed to get the Neoscene software purchased, installed, and activated. Then I used it to convert one of my Alaskan bear clips of two minutes into the .AVI format. That created a new file of 1.1GB size. Good Grief! It won't even fit onto a CD-R. I'll have to plunk these files onto a DVD.

This is going to get ugly in a hurry.

The sound is going to be a pain to work on. For most of my bear videos, I was on a viewing platform surrounded by about 40 of my closest friends. Not. The other bear viewers and photographers were all talking, and of course my microphone picked up all of that.

When the bears got really mad at each other, the growls became roars, and they could be heard more than a half-mile away.

–B.G.–

[Michael Neal]

yes Neoscene files are huge, I have 2 terabyte external hard drives so far for storage. I would not use DVDs or CDs for storage.

You should get a good shotgun microphone which rejects sounds to the rear and sides for recording wildlife at a distance. The stereo microphones are good for when you want to pick up all surrounding sounds.

[Bob Gross]

I had intended to use a DVD for transportable temporary storage, simply because nothing else will fit the huge files.

I did purchase a good shotgun microphone, and I built my own dead cat to help minimize wind noise. Alas, it was too bulky for travel. So, I built a dead kitten and used that some in Alaska recently.

The problem I found was that there wasn't a lot of good sound in the wilderness. The dawn chorus wasn't really great, so all I had was wind noise and water noise.

–B.G.–

[Rick Dreher]

This vid is worth a look. There's been a round of Panasonic µ4/3 hacks releasing more potential from their video sections, and the results are pretty spectacular. That the unlocked GH1 video IQ can clobber the best dslr video is a surprise I didn't expect.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1BMugSQl1I&feature=player_embedded

There's some precedent here. A videographer friend has told me for years that Panny's lower priced pro video cameras have many of the same components as the top-end units, and the propellerheads spend a lot of time and effort hacking into their capabilities. It would seem the design principle extends to µ4/3.

Paired with a "video enhanced" lens the GH1 can double for a camcorder in several aspects that dslrs have yet to achieve (fast, realtime autofocus, stepless realtime autoiris, etc.). The excellent GH1 EVF is another feather in its cap. FWIW this is dpreview's take on the "stock" (unhacked) GH1 with the 14-140 shooting video.

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/panasonicdmcgh1/page19.asp

Lack of a silent power zoom is one area nobody has addressed, and there are ghoulishly complex mounts for dslrs that provide power zoom and focus until somebody does. Nobody's taking those backpacking.

Cheers,

Rick

[Michael Neal]

The GH1 is amazing, I am going to shoot a local day hike soon and I will post the video.

For sounds you might have to take a field recorder and capture good sounds when they occur and mix in, even if in is not the actual sounds taking place on the video.

In place of a power zoom you can use a slider for some camera movements, I got the Indislider which is both small and inexpensive.

[Bob Gross]

The earlier advice that I received was to take the raw .MOV HD video and transcode it into .AVI using Neoscene. I did that, edited in some titles using Sony Vegas, and then rendered the first two minutes. In .AVI format, it won't even play on this machine (a quad 2.5Ghz). Hmmm. So I tried rendering that as a 3Mbps .WMV, which works, and then also as an 8Mbps .WMV, which works. Then I discovered that I don't need to transcode it to .AVI in the first place. Sony Vegas seems to slice and dice it even starting from .MOV format.

I have about 24GB of brown bear footage to edit.

–B.G.–

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