Category: Video Editing
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New Project: Mini-Documentaries on Madagascar’s Informal Sector
I’m excited to be working on a new and admittedly somewhat ambitious project: a series of short documentaries examining some jobs in Madagascar’s informal sector. I plan to describe the work itself, but also spend some time thinking about why these jobs exist in Madagascar (and probably other developing countries), but not elsewhere. I’ve played…
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It’s always hardest cutting your own video…
Why, other than a few hardcore fans, is a film’s director the only one who likes the “Director’s Cut” better than the movie that was released to the public? It’s hard to delete the footage you worked so hard to get, or even sometimes to eliminate scenes altogether because they don’t help the “story” along,…
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Driving in Chennai: Timelapse
In time-lapse photography, it’s common to keep the camera pretty still and let the subject do the moving – or if at all, to move the camera very slowly. But it can also be fun to do a moving camera time-lapse, especially when you want to convey something about the sometimes frantic (at least to…
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What is it with computer company customer service these days? (I’m talking about you, Toshiba and Dell!)
I’m seeing a lot of reports these days lamenting lagging computer sales, and theorizing why that might be. Â I’m of the opinion that a big part of the reason is customer service. Â These days, it seems that more and more, when you speak to computer companies’ customer service and sales departments, you’re confronted with people…
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Underwater Videography: Things I’ve Learned
If you’ve ever managed to take along a camera snorkeling, you probably had the same reaction I did when you got your finished footage home to the computer: “It looks nothing like it did when I was actually snorkeling.” Colors are washed out, everything is a dingy blue, all the fish you saw are nowhere…
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21 Sunsets – a timelapse project
I love doing timelapses – especially of natural phenomena. But I admit it can be a lot harder than it first appears – if you want to do it right. But moving to Namibia and finding housing on a westward-facing hill – I knew that would be a great opportunity to hone my timelapse skills.…
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iPad for video and music creation
Although you can’t beat the price for video and music editing software when it comes to iFilm and GarageBand for the iPad, trying to create a video from top to bottom using nothing but an iPad 2 still leaves a bit to be desired. Probably people who have never used any other video or music…
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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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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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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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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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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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Recording Live Concert Footage
When I was a kid, often you couldn’t take a camera into a music concert – probably they wanted to make sure they had the market cornered on posters and publicity photos back then. Now, in the days of ubiquitous mobile phones and pocket camcorders people are not only sharing photos, they are sharing music…
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Army Peer-to-Peer Safety Video Contest
Good news and bad news – my entry to the US Army Combat Readiness / Safety Center’s video contest was approved, but so were a load of others! The contest has been running since October, but like most video contests, most of the entries will be rolling in close to the 30 April deadline. So…
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The Parallax Experiment
Given that the current hot topic in home videography is “home 3-D movies” (both camcorders and screens to view them) I thought it would be appropriate to attempt making some 3-D on the “cheap.” Really cheap. I got the idea from Ashton Kutcher – actually, a video he posted in the Nikon Festival contest. If…
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Animation How-To Videos
One of my discoveries this week on Vimeo was an excellent series of how-to videos by Carleton Torbin. I’m guessing he made a short film with lots of different kinds of animation, and followed up with the series of how-tos, as a kind of “the making of” series. I could have it backward. Other than…
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Washington DC meets Bonanza
Sharing how I created a bonanza-like “unburning” credit, overlaid over several other images, with multiple chroma key or “green screen” effects – using basic home editing software and materials you can find around the house.
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TimeLapse on Vimeo
I’ve been continuing to research better timelapse video, and found a great channel on Vimeo. I could sit and watch these all day! I’m concluding the best way to do landscape/nature timelapse where you may be operating in low light is (besides expensive gear) to record individual frames at specified time intervals, ratherthan simply recording…