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
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.
Odd.
I can't reproduce that problem. Maybe someone else will report a success or failure.
i downloaded it and played it locally. It went fine all the way 1:43 (53.241KB)
500Kbytes/sec is almost as little compression as on a good quality DVD (with a bigger image). You can compress more. :-)
playing went good but sometimes picture went crappy under linux mplayer and it is a bit short :)
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.
Ask: Yeah, I need to play with the settings a bit. :-)
It's a beautiful sight when the glider leaves the ground.
