A couple weeks ago I took some friends flying and they brought along a kick ass little Sony DV camera. I borrowed the camera to suck the 44 minutes of video onto the TiBook and play with iMovie a bit.

After a visit to Fry's to buy a 120GB external FireWire/USB drive (I ran out of space), I had 8.5GB of video sitting on the Mac. So I messed around with iMovie long enough to figure out the basics (but not much more).

Just for fun, I've created a movie of a glider takeoff. I was flying the glider. Jeffrey Friedl ran the camera and his wife, Fumie, and her Mom were in the back seat of the glider.

I call this creation "Glider Takeoff" because that's exactly what it is. Here it is. It's a little big (16MB52MB), so if you're not on a high-speed connection, don't bother. I'll do a low-bandwidth version if anyone really wants to see it.

Don't go too hard on the filming technique or the my lack of iMovie skills.

I have over 44 minutes of video, so I'll try to do something a little more interesting for my next movie. Most of the film is in-cockpit flying, so that could be fun.

Update: My updload failed. The whole movie is not there. Fixing that now, but it'll take time.

Update #2: The whole movie is on-line now.

Posted by jzawodn at May 02, 2003 08:03 AM

Reader Comments
# sean said:

Um... hrm... started watching it but about halfway thru it crapped out. Downloaded it locally, played it again, halfway thru it stopped, sound went staticy (is that a word? ;) and then the same frame stayed for the remainder. Just thought you might want to know.

on May 2, 2003 09:13 AM
# Jeremy Zawodny said:

Odd.

I can't reproduce that problem. Maybe someone else will report a success or failure.

on May 2, 2003 09:42 AM
# jjj said:

i downloaded it and played it locally. It went fine all the way 1:43 (53.241KB)

on May 2, 2003 01:54 PM
# Ask Bjoern Hansen said:

500Kbytes/sec is almost as little compression as on a good quality DVD (with a bigger image). You can compress more. :-)

on May 2, 2003 05:28 PM
# Nurullah Akkaya said:

playing went good but sometimes picture went crappy under linux mplayer and it is a bit short :)

on May 2, 2003 07:41 PM
# Charles said:

It's a good job, played well in my browser (Safari) through to the end. I love iMovie, but even more, I love seeing people's FIRST iMovie production. Picture quality was awesome, but you should probably compress more just to save yourself bandwidth. If you want to do this a lot, it might be worth checking into Sorenson Spark or maybe an open source avi codec like ffmpeg. I use Sorenson, it's the best quality and compression but least cross-platform.
BTW, here's a tip that a pro filmmaker once told me when I had to edit some aviation film like yours. At the very end, the camera is a little shaky and it's hard to follow the glider, so apply slow-mo to that section, like 1/2 speed. He says "it looks lyrical." That trick is easy in iMovie.

on May 2, 2003 09:32 PM
# Jeremy Zawodny said:

Ask: Yeah, I need to play with the settings a bit. :-)

on May 3, 2003 10:51 PM
# Daniel Von Fange said:

It's a beautiful sight when the glider leaves the ground.

on May 4, 2003 01:01 PM
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