Video Shooting, Editing and Production
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Amazing Jelly Bean Stop-Motion
Take a look at this stop-motion music video made for Kina Grannis’ song “In Your Arms.” And before you look at it, take note of the fact that it is 100% stop-motion – no green screen, no CGI. This video was photographed frame-by-frame over a period of 22 months, involved a crew of 30 people,…
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Flower TimeLapses using iPad
I’ve noticed a number of the flowers here in Namibia open and close daily. Especially some of the succulents and cacti. What that means is that if I want to do timelapse videography I can try and record every day until I get it right. Unfortunately some of the succulents flower only one day, which…
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Sandboarding. Swakopmund. Sony Vegas
For years, I’ve been editing with versions of Adobe Premiere and Premiere Elements, and the one complaint I’ve always had is its tendency to lock up on most computers. The exception has been my old desktop running XP with 512 MB memory – but even there, I’ve got to restart the computer after I finish…
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iPad 2 Stop-Motion: Windhoek Sunset
Here’s another attempt at using the iPad 2 and the TimeLapse HD app to create a timelapse video. This one consists of stills taken every 5 seconds from a rooftop in Windhoek, Namibia. There is a bit of flicker toward the end as the ipad adjusts to the changing lighting. I’ll have to see whether…
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Review: iPad App Timelapse Camera HD
As I continue to look for ways to make my iPad useful beyond being a lightweight web browser / game console, I came across a handy app for creating timelapse videos: the aptly named Timelapse Camera HD. This elegant and simple app lets you set an interval between photos, the frame rate, choose front or…
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Music mashup using video editing software
So while it may appear obvious to others, it turns out you can use video editing software to create music mashups. I had noticed the similarity between certain tunes and wanted to give this a try, but couldn’t bring myself to navigate the learning curve required to learn music editing software. So I took some…
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Autotuning Everything
A recent phenomenon (and an unfortunate one, in my opinion) to hit the music industry is the use of Auto-Tuning software to correct pitch. For just a few hundred bucks, you can get a plug-in for your audio editing software that will insure every slightly off-pitch note is automatically brought into perfect tune (corrected to…
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Two Video Contests
When you love animals as much as we do in our family, it’s hard to get upset with folks sponsoring a video contest to support the ASPCA. And I didn’t really need the half of the prize that would have gone to me – an iPad (the other half was a $500 donation to our…
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Video Contest for Pets
I submitted a quick entry to GoodNewsforPets.com’s 10th Anniversary Holiday video/photo contest. They ask for a minute / 5 MB (max) describing a holiday moment with a pet, with emphasis on the human-animal bond. The interesting twist in this contest is that you can submit either a video, or a photo with a 100-400 words…
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Chroma Keying Made Easy Part 3 of 3
So in part 1 I talked about the basics and how you can “green screen” for very little money…and then in part 2, a couple of ways you could superimpose multiple “green screen” or “chroma key” elements on top of each other. In part 3, we’re going to kick it up yet another notch, and…
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Chroma-Keying Made Easy, part 2 of 3
The previous post talked about how to use chroma keying (blue-screen/green-screen) techniques in home video, relatively inexpensively. The question is, so now what can you do with that? Really, it’s up to you and your imagination. The most obvious use is to put yourself in front of a background which, for practical reasons, is difficult…
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“Green Screen” Cheap and Easy
Most people who dabble in home video editing know about “blue-screening” or “green-screening.” What they may not realize is that it doesn’t take a whole lot of money – or a great deal of know-how – to apply the technique in their own videos. Technically called “chroma keying,” the technique actually allows you to filter…
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Vimeo Awards Winners
Check out loads of cool videos from over 6,500 submissions in Vimeo’s short film festival. The winners are posted here and the community choice awards are here. Plenty of great viewing from filmmakers you never heard of.
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Sky and Sea Videos – Pitfalls to Avoid
The other day I was working on a home video of a recent vacation to Egypt, and I invited my 12-year-old to a pre-screening of my near-final draft (a shorter version here), and she told me it was all wrong. “Why?” I asked, horrified. “Your horizons are all crooked.” And she was right. I had…
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Full-Length Album Composed on Sony PSP
That’s right, on a Sony Playstation Portable. Killing time at various airports, trains, on the beach, and during the kids’ sports practices, and using the game Beaterator, I’ve composed and recorded a full-length album. I’ve stopped short of designing cover art until the Grammy nomination arrives in the mail. You can try this out for…
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Help Us Win! (please?)
For our latest video contest entry, my daughter and I teamed up. My daughter has become a video editing enthusiast in her own right and checks several online web sites about once a week for contests she wants to enter. She found the Green Eggs and Ham “Ham it Up” Contest being run to celebrate…
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Easy Ways to Improve Sound in Your Videos
You could go out and spend a wad of cash on all the latest high-tech sound recording equipment money can buy. Or you can do some easy things that will go a long way toward improving the sound quality of your videos: – invest in an external microphone – it doesn’t have to be a…
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The Blackbirds Came Back – Wildlife Videography
I was pretty excited about the opportunity to do a little more “wildlife photography” in my back yard. The blackbird pair that I featured in the video “Learning to Fly” came back for another brood. I saw one of them fly into the ivy that climbs one side of our house and grabbed a closer…
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Underwater Videography
I posted a few weeks ago about having to “make do” with a still camera to do underwater “video-“graphy – and then using photoshop and effects to make it look less like a slideshow. Well this time I made it work with actual video. Granted, there are a lot sexier underwater videos out there made…
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Too much time on your hands? Try this at home!
So my kids tell me this is SO last week, but I thought this video was HILARIOUS – somehow genius and somehow disturbing that this is what some people do in their spare time: Technology has brought the internet to 2 billion people, and a standard of living resulting in about 2-4 hours of spare…
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Underwater Videography
Last Christmas, I ordered my daughter a last-minute Christmas gift, paying for “guaranteed” delivery by Christmas. It was a waterproof cover for her Flip HD camera – and the timing was important because we were headed to Hurghada, Egypt, for a week of sun and snorkeling – on Christmas day. Thirty bucks for the cover,…
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Videomaker offering Webinars
Videomaker has a helpful web site and magazine chock full of video editing tips and new product reviews; they are nice enough to condense all the latest news into a handy weekly email – one of the few “marketing” emails I actually look forward to. Unfortunately they also occasionally send out flyers for training events I can’t…
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Telling a story in video
The cool thing about all this technology is that now anyone can create just about anything and share it with everyone else. Most of it goes unnoticed by the vast majority, but that’s not why most of us create. Most of us create out of some intrinsic desire to imagine, to create, to make something…
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New Music
I created some more music. Feel free to download it and use it for stuff (Creative Commons / Share Alike) – all I ask is to see what gets done with it, really. Maybe eventually I’ll put this on a separate page if there’s more, but for now: Some variations on a theme I’ve had…