Creating interesting-to-watch videos is a lot harder than simply driving on interesting roads!
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This is the story of how I went from knowing nothing at all about shooting and editing video, to knowing slightly more. Read on if you want a Cus-ian Insight.
Initially I had loan of a cheap-ish SLR and found quickly that taking video from inside the car was frought with technical difficulty. The inside of an MX-5 is not exactly the best location to record audio. Rattles you don't notice while driving seem to be amplified, and sounds that seem loud enough to be picked up on a microphone, usually aren't.
Here's one of my very first attempts at recording a video.
Eventually I purchased my own DSLR, which to this day I've shot about 2 minutes of video on. It takes some marvellous photos when I twiddle the dials the right way (it's where most of the shots in my garage thread come from) and some really bad photos when I don't twiddle the dials the right way. The downside of my DSLR (Which is a Nikon D5500) is that the auto-focus is very noisy, so it shows up on the audio track, very noticeably. Canon cameras are better for video according to just about everyone.
I got myself a dashcam, which I don't use as often as I should, but found that it takes some rather laclustre video. It shoots a high resolution, but not a good quality picture. Nonetheless, I've taken some footage with it and put it on the intertubes:
I ended up buying a GoPro and a suction-cup mount with a view of attaching it to the exterior of the car. I've found the surface has to be very clean for the suction-cup to stay put. Luckily the GoPro housing is somewhat ground-proof. I'm not sure I'm game enough to test it at 100 clicks yet though.
I also discovered that audio processing was a lot harder than you'd think. This video - which was shot on the GoPro suction-cupped to the roof of the car - demonstrates how well you can line up two audio tracks without some kind of dedicated audio software. (ie: not very well at all, it lined up perfectly in the editor, but rendered out of sync)
I've just got hold of a "H4N" audio recorder with wind socks so I should be able to play with that sometime soon, and I've started playing with an audio editing program called Audacity (free, open source and cross platform) so I can hopefully fade between songs picked up in-cabin from the radio, and real audio tracks - copyright permitting - without the obvious failure of the video above. Audacity is smart enough to import the audio track of a video file and let you export to a separate audio file (for re-including in blender) so you don't need to stuff around splitting audio tracks out of video tracks.
I've settled on using Blender (blender.org) which is free, open-source, and cross-platform for video editing. I tried quite a few free editors, most of them suck. The following video was shot on the GoPro - 6Gb of individual stills (2333 in total) imported, cropped, scaled and rotated then rendered at 12FPS. It did have Muse's track "New Born" with it, but youtube had a hissy-fit over copyright, so the audio has been removed. It took me about 10 minutes to put together, and about half an hour to render.
Random thins I've learn-ded:
- Where possible, mount your camera as close to the 'action' as possible. The difference in brightness between inside the cabin and the outside world is enough to mean the whole outside scene is usually over-exposed and horrible. The road surface you're driving on is not as apparent as it is in real life, so straddling giant ruts just makes it look like you're driving on the side of the road for no apparent reason.
- The camera needs to be mounted *to* the car. In the first video it was on a tripod, with two legs stuck down behind each seat and the seats fully back so it "couldn't" move, but it did anyway.
- Do not use youtube's video stabilisation feature, it creates wavy videos. Or dashboards that look like they're bending. Blender's video stabilisation is far better, but a lot more effort.
- Clean your windows! Even when you think they're clean, a camera sitting a couple of centimeters away from a window will have light reflecting off any dirt or smudges that are on your window, on either side.
- Clean your lenses! Especially if you have a GoPro, it's very easy to get a fingerprint on the lens while you're moving it around. A big fat thumb print on your lens will give you that "Bold and the Beautiful" soft-glow effect, which while it's soft and lovely, you're better off shooting clean video and adding effects in later if that's what you want.
- Watch your rendered video from start to finish before deleting any of the raw clips. You will watch your own videos anything up to a million times. Never assume that because the progress bar made it to the end, that the render actually completed. (I lost a bathurst lap because of this, doh!)
- Shoot your video at the highest common setting all of your cameras support. Trying to match 1080p30 and 1080p50 videos is a pain. Set all of your cameras to the same setting, then shoot.
- Most of the time by the time you're done chopping a video together with nice fades and stuff between scenes, you'll hate it. Upload it anyway. I do.
- You don't need stupidly expensive camera gear.
- When you're buying a camera, do a lot of research and find the one that has the features you want. eg; latest "cube" GoPro sacrifices a whole lot of video quality to be small, if you don't need it to be small, save yourself some money and get a cheaper model.
- Blender is impossible to use initially. There are a lot of video tutorials on youtube. Spend a couple of days following along on those. Once you've got the hang of blender, editing videos is sort of quick.
- Have an idea of what you want to create before you start shooting. A well formed idea, with preferably a plan written down you can refer back to. I never do this, I think it shows.
- Shooting video takes ages. Shooting usable video takes longer. Cutting videos together takes a long time. Rendering videos of any length and quality takes a long time. Uploading videos to youtube takes a long time. It all takes a long time, even for a crappy result. "MCM Quality" results are not in my immediate future.
- Unless you're doing this professionally, don't waste money on the "professional" software (adobe, et. al) the open source (ie: free) software available does the job, you just need to learn how to use it. And you don't have to re-buy it when they decide to release a new version, which is nice. Cameras and SD cards cost enough as it is.
- Practice makes Perfect!
