Category Archives: video

Some Board of Trade Video

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Over a year ago I shot a job that Midwest were undertaking on the Board of Trade building here in Chicago.  The job was spread over three weekends and I was there for the first two.  The job involved lifting a lot of steelwork and piping into location at the back of the building where the steelwork was then assembled using the helicopter to move the individual pieces into position.

All of this was a touch trickier since the assembly location was close to the building which is pretty high.  Therefore, 300′ of lifting line had to be used which made the job of maneuvering the helicopter to position the loads just that bit harder!  The final week involved the cooling towers being put in place but I could not be there for that.

I shot a bunch of stills but also got a fair amount of video which, at the time I did nothing with.  While doing some work on my database recently, I realized just how much footage I had and decided to have a shot at editing it down to something a bit more digestible.  Here is the result.

Final Overnight Time Lapse

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I mentioned before that I had tried to do an overnight time lapse video.  In that post I detailed all of the ways I had screwed up the process.  Rather than sulk, I did take all of those lessons to heart and went back for a second attempt.  This time, I was a lot more successful.  I hadn’t got around to figuring out how to make the tethering work properly but the alternative was acceptable and I had learned the rest of my lessons.

One minor hurdle still existed.  Our windows are not at their cleanest at this time of year and shooting through the glass is the only option.  We are due to have the cleaners take care of them shortly (although that will probably only guarantee some rain immediately afterwards).  In low light and with a wide enough aperture, the dirt smudges are not too much of a problem.  I have to make sure the shoot doesn’t include any time with direct light on the window which would make the muck flare up in the shots.

The other minor issue is a function of the double glazing.  More intense light can show up the effect of the light bouncing between the glass panes.  At night this isn’t a hassle except with the moon which is so bright.  For some reason I should be able to figure out but can’t, the center of the window almost totally removes this effect and it gets worse towards the edges.  However, the moon is so bright in the scenes it blows out and, since the whole thing animates to a video, the loss of shape in the shots becomes less apparent as the moon zips across the sky.

With all of that said, here is the video itself.  It seems to have worked out well.  Sadly, the messed up effort seemed to have got some more interesting light sequences from the windows of the building but you can’t have it all.  Enjoy!

What a Balls Ups

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I have previously played around with time lapse videos made with an SLR, a timer release and some software linked to Lightroom to create the finished video.  I decided to go a little longer with one and make a video throughout the night, starting before sunset and finishing off once the sun had come back up again.  This did not prove to be as simple as I had hoped!

It should be pointed out that most of these problems are entirely of my doing.  First of all, I did a calculation of how many shots I thought would be necessary to complete the clip.  This was more than would fit on one of my compact flash cards.  No problem, the camera has a second slot.  It turns out that, unlike the MkIV which will switch to the second card when the first is full if you so desire, the MkIIN won’t do that.  Okay, not problem.  I shall tether it to Lightroom and download direct to the laptop.

This didn’t work.  I believe this was also my fault as the MkIIN has a firewire connection as well as the USB and the USB tethering showed up on the computer but didn’t actually do anything.  Okay, I can fix this.  I shall let it run for a long time and change the card shortly before going to bed and the new card should work through the rest of the night.  A fully charged battery and off we went to dinner.

Upon my return, I find that the camera is not shooting any more.  Foolishly, while I worked out that a 16Gb card would be fine, I didn’t remove the 8Gb card that was in there so the card was full.  I swapped the card with another one quickly and set it off.  A while later I come back to check on it and nothing is happening.  The new card is full.  I hadn’t formatted it first.  What a fool.  I also have a flat battery.  This is not going to be good.  Fortunately, the MkIIN came with the DC adapter as standard (unlike the MkIV – how tight are you Canon?) so I swapped that in, put in a fresh card and formatted it.  Then I went to bed.

This finally worked.  The remaining shots worked fine.  The result wasn’t too bad but, since it had some obvious jumps in it – the moon was traversing the scene when the gaps occur – it wasn’t usable.  However, it did teach me a bunch of thing that I now need to deal with for the second attempt.  let’s see if I can balls that up as well!

Thornton Quarry Video

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The Thornton Quarry lift job with Midwest Helicopters was a full day job so it provided a bunch of opportunity to try different things.  This was true for the stills but it also allowed me to experiment with the video as well.  Since the aircraft was operating all day, I was able to get to multiple locations and see all aspects of the job as they happened.  Normally, this isn’t possible since a lift will only last about 30 minutes.  In that case, you have to pick the location that will get the shots you must have and accept that the alternative shots will not be made.

This time I was able to move around the whole site and capture as much as possible of what was going on.  Some of the clips looked really interesting and the time but they actually proved to be no use.  Some of the boring stuff as it appeared at the time actually ended up being really of use when it came to editing.

At this point, it is important for me to apologize to people like Gerry Holtz.  Gerry is an editor and he does this sort of thing for a living.  Anyone else who knows about editing professionally, you are all due my apologies and my respect.  I am trying a bit with video editing but what I have learned is that it is bloody difficult to do.

On this shoot, most of the video was captured using my SLR.  The rest of it was shot on a GoPro which is such a great little device to get something a little more unusual.  It was handheld (or mounted in the case of the GoPro).  No tripods or dollies and certainly nothing as impressive as a Kessler Crane!

I suspect that to be good at editing it is important to have had some education in the process.  I am doing it the guy way – try something and then try something else and see what happens.  Not even a manual to consult!  Consequently, I make some progress but probably my approach starts from the wrong place.  If I was going to do a lot more of this I would take the training aspect seriously.  However, for the time-being, this is a little side hobby so I will probably stick with what I am doing.

Part of the fun(?) of the edit process is taking all of the disparate elements of the footage and trying to combine them into a coherent timeline.  Part of the engineer in me thinks it should be delivered in the same order it happened.  This is rubbish of course.  The viewer has no concern of course.  As long as the result doesn’t obviously have terrible jumps or continuity issues, no-one is going to be any the wiser.

Also, how much do they need to see.  About eighty lifts were done during the day.  Does the video need to have eighty lifts?  NO!  In the end, I concluded that two lifts were enough to tell the story.  One wasn’t enough but it didn’t need more than two.  I cut the length down as I went but even then it was still quite a long piece.  A pro would probably have it down to a couple of minutes but then, as I mentioned, I am not a video pro.

One lesson I have learned as I have practiced this video stuff is how many of the tools the software has are no use at all.  There are a million transitions between scenes, all of which make it look like you are experimenting with the software but they are a distraction from viewing.  I have learned to use simple transitions that are short so they are not obvious to the viewer.  They just stop the jump being the item the viewer focuses on.

Anyway, the final part of this story is that I was very happy with the result for this video.  Unfortunately, it turns out the company that was doing part of the work is very sensitive about their equipment and doesn’t like the equipment being shown on the video so I have had to remove it from my YouTube channel.  Consequently, I can’t include it in this post.  Oh well…

Some Fishy Video

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As you might have noticed, there is a bit of theme developing with some of the stuff I post.  Photos are the main focus of what I do but I am also dabbling more with the video side of things.  There are some things that video can show that stills do not represent as well.  Since the 1D MkIV arrived in my hands with the ability to shoot HD video, I have been surprised how many times I have taken some video along with the stills.

Anyway, all of that is a roundabout way of saying that I have got some video from the Shedd Aquarium here in Chicago that goes along with the previous posts on the swimmy things.  It is shot through glass (of course) in the public areas so I know that the reflections are sometimes there but even so,  I hope you like it.

Some Ski Plane Video

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In the previous post I talked about the trip to Oshkosh for the ski plane fly-in.  While I was mainly taking stills on this trip, I did also take the GoPro with me for the occasional bit of video.  Unfortunately, the bar clamp I took was a little larger than the ideal place to mount it.  Instead I hand held it which makes for some fun bouncing around when on the ground!  However, it isn’t too disastrous so I am prepared to let some of the footage make it out in public.  Hardly broadcast quality work though!  Still, I hope you enjoy it.

Model Day in 15 Seconds

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You might be a bit bored with me playing with time lapse video.  If so, look away now!  Here comes another one.  We had guest visiting for the New Year and one of the things we took them to see was the scale model of the city.  The Chicago Architecture Foundation has a shop on Michigan Avenue and the building in which the shop is located has a large atrium.  In this atrium is a model of the city.

All of the buildings in the Loop and some of the surrounding areas have been accurately recreated using stereolithography.  This is a technique using resin and lasers that builds solid objects one minute slice at a time creating a solid object of great complexity.  If you are interested in the technique, head over to YouTube and search for the term and you will come across a number of videos showing it in action.

The model is set up in the atrium with custom lighting.  Apparently, the lighting is designed to recreate the pattern of the sun from sunrise to sunset over a 15 minute period.  I had been to the model a number of times and had shot details of it before.  This time, I decided I wanted to get a time lapse of the light progressing across the model to see how it came out.  Since I had the plan ready in advance, as soon as we got to the place, I set up the camera and then went back down to join the rest of the crew.  There is enough in the model to keep people interested for 15-20 minutes so I wasn’t going to delay everyone.  It did mean, however, that I had to carry a bunch of stuff around with me for the rest of our walk!

Enough of the back story.  Here is the video that resulted.  To be honest, I don’t think the lighting effects are as obvious as I had hoped that they would be.  However, you do get to see some of the movement of the light.

More Time Lapse Sunset

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I had a plan to meet up with my friend Joel to catch up recently.  We were looking for a place to meet and went with the Holiday Inn by the Merchandize Mart.  It has a bar that is a comfortable place to talk and has the added benefit of a great view over the city.  I wasn’t there to shoot anything but, knowing the view was good, I took along some gear just in case.

Joel and I chatted for ages and didn’t get around to taking pictures for a while.  As the sun was setting, the sky was getting very interesting and I finally had to apologize and grab the camera.  I got a few shots and then set it up by the window next to me to shoot a time lapse.

This required no input from me so we could continue to talk without interruption but it should provide something interesting to check out later.  However, I hadn’t planned as well as I hoped.  As the light dropped, the shutter speeds were getting perilously close to the delay between each shot as I had set the ISO a little lower than I thought.  Changing it is not a problem but I was using a lighter tripod which was not as well locked off as I thought.  I managed to move the head a little.  I corrected but knew the alignment would be off a bit.

Fortunately, while I couldn’t completely remove the effect, when I processed the time lapse using Lightroom and LRTimelapse, I was able to find the frames where the jump takes place, set them as keyframes, adjust the cropping of the second of those two frames to almost perfectly align and the resulting video is a lot better than it would have been.

Thanks Joel for a fun time.  It was good to catch up and I appreciate the stuff you gave me.  Here is the video that resulted!

Art of Flight

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This one will not necessarily be what you were expecting.  Despite the title, this is not about flying – at least in the normal context of this blog.  This is about snowboarding.  Some time last year, I came across a trailer for a movie called Art of Flight.  It is a movie in which some of the world’s best snowboarders go to some of the most remote parts of the planet to ride slopes that have not been ridden before.

Red Bull, ever one to support extreme sports activities, obviously provided a lot of support to this process with a number of Red Bull helicopters showing up throughout the film.  Helicopters are the best way to get to some of these locations but even then the trip can be a bit hairy.  Some of the helicopter flying is pretty extreme as well!

The featured snowboarder is Travis Rice.  This guy certainly knows what he is about and is willing to try some amazing stuff.  He is joined by a variety of guys in the different locations but they all like to try some cool descents across terrain with little in the way of forgiveness and weather that doesn’t always want to cooperate.  They also go to some more normal locations but try some amazing tricks even then.

All of this sport would be impressive on its own but that is not what makes this film special.  The magic comes from the way it is filmed by Curt Morgan.  He makes use of innovative filming technology and improvisation and a lot of cameras to film the boarding from multiple angles to provide a phenomenal perspective.  The quality of the camerawork and the editing turn this from good to great.

I got the BluRay/DVD box so I can watch it now on DVD and on BluRay in HiDef when I get around to having a BluRay player!  You can get it at Amazon and I certainly recommend it.  In the mean time, check out the trailer below to get a sense of what is included.