Video Upgrades, Clips, and Projects = Busy-ness!
There’s a lot going on. I recently complicated my life by contacting Mavis Muller, a local Homer artist, who oversees the creation of baskets, gives them to the community, then burns them. See here: Burning Basket Anyway, I had this idea to to a timelapse of the whole week of creation and then the burning. We’ll see how THAT comes out….I’ll post the results here. Could be a documentary (15 minutes or so) to accompany the timelapse. Or is that the other way around?
Actively looking into acquiring a device that will allow me to capture better-quality video than I am currently able to. I am limited to 25 Mb/s HDV, shot with my Sony HVR-Z5U, and this is not making me very happy at all. Since I like to shoot in challenging situations (low light, subtle gradients, contrasty, highly-detailed nature shots like water ripples and trees, the super-heavy compression of HDV is just not cutting it. The two solutions I am mulling over at the moment are the Atomos Ninja OR, depending on what great surprise Atomos will be unveiling this Friday, perhaps I will look to the Sound Devices PIX 220. Either will do the job….the PIX 220 is more expensive, but a little more functional – bigger screen, HDMI throughput, on-the-fly pulldown removal, and a few other details. More on this issue later, but I am REALLY looking forward to saying goodbye to HDV!!!
My current clip count on Pond5 is 775 video clips, not counting audio, with five uploading, another psychotic pattern rendering, and ideas for more. The list of Things to Shoot is long. One, something that will require some amount of destruction, involves having a camera and gun shoot each other simultaneously. I’ll let you know how that goes. I’m hoping to reach 1000 clips by November. That should not be too difficult. I can usually put out 10 a day easy if I’ve been shooting, and I can start harvesting my older work if need be, although that will consume more time than simply setting something up so I can shoot some of my ideas. Makes less of a mess though …
In the meantime, the weather worsens. Those carefree summer days are about gone. It has come to the point of jumping up and going out, regardless of other schedules, should the sun peek out and the rain stop. A dynamic time, this, and a chance to get things done inside, but a shortage of footage to edit and upload makes for a certain unease.
There is the involvement with several local people on various projects and ideas of theirs…..some will turn into something, others will not, but following these notions around to see which turn into something leads to further interconnectedness and more opportunities to complicate my life. I’ll talk more about each as they grow …
There are many tech projects to work on: A car box/mount so that I can shoot while driving (this will require the device mentioned above, as well as a LANC controller), a small crane, the motion-control systems for panning, tilting, and linear motions for timelapse work, developing a better mount for my camera slider so it is not such a pain to use, and, oh yes…there’s work to be done on the house, the VW, the Toyota, and who knows what else!
Busy-ness. It’s a good thing to have.
