"Our Secret Garden" (Video, Still Images)

Another project of monumental proportions (post-production time-wise), since I'm still learning how to create multimedia short subjects. Proper training would have been a good thing to help save time, instead of working through trial and error.

Somehow, the thought of capturing my father's floral garden dropped in my head, as my older brother and I helped Dad with work on our homestead. As we trimmed back the branches the orchard trees, I was attacked by a band of yellow jackets. Thinking about keeping my Lumix TZ1 close by, in case I was stung, thoughts wound up focusing on the flowers, which Dad grew to appreciate by grandfather's love of gardening.

Between chores, I paused to shoot some footage, trying to capture the butterflies that visited. Somewhere between chasing a butterfly with my camera rolling, and not wanting to help with discarding the large prickly holly branches, I started grabbing some images along with the video. I worked into the dark, using a digital Olympus DS-2 voice recorder and a Sennheiser K6 shotgun microphone, recording audio of the birds and insects around the home. Audio recording can be a struggle if one needs to capture sound near an interstate and along the flight path of an international airport.

Last night became this morning, with very little sleep as I worked using iMovie HD to help with the "Ken Burns Effect" of adding motion to still images, since I haven't yet mastered it in Final Cut Pro. Since the TZ1 can be set to capture images at the same resolution as high definition video, working with the footage in iMovie was a no-brainer. After finding some unobtrusive and excellent piano clips by Herbert Boland in the Freesound Project website, through creativecommons.org, the costruction of the short was finally complete.

Keep 'Em Charged!

Monday mornings sometimes bring surprises at work. So was the case, when I arrived to learn that I had a job, one hour later. It was called "Build Playground Day," at Collington Square School in northeast Baltimore, in a neighborhood that's been forgotten and neglected. The Baltimore Ravens, along with Kaboom! and volunteers through the community and a host of organizations banded together, building a playground in one day.

Reaching for the Firestore FS-100 external recordable drive to mount to the HVX200 camcorder, I noticed that it faced the other way. Plugging the unit into the charger, I knew the battery hadn't been charged. With the prospect of having to shoot a great amount of footage over 5 hours of construction time, I decided to use the Lumix DMC-TZ1 and it's slightly bigger sibling, the Lumix DMC-TZ3 cameras as my visual arsenal.

Gaining access to the roof of the school, I clamped down a Nikon D2Xs camera outfitted with a Sigma 10-20mm zoom, to get as wide an aspect as possible. Calculating the frame rate of a movie against the time I had to shoot, I figured on setting the camera's interval timer to fire an image every 30 seconds, which yielded about 20 seconds of footage. At several stages, I clamped the small cameras onto different objects, gathering some interesting POV shots! You can't do that with an HVX200.

Starting the camera around 7:30 A.M., I returned to ground level, grabbing 5- to 10- video clips and switching on-the-fly to shoot still images for the web updates and for print publication. By 10 A.M., I started sending still images, then returned to the field to gather more footage. Gathering more still images for a picture package for the web by noon, I finished most of the ground-level recording just in time to return to the roof and take what was shot with the Nikon camera.

The nurse's office became a multimedia center, as I created a Quicktime movie, sent more images and the 20-second time lapse clip, and edited the main package for today's web update. Oh, working on the Macintosh platform is great in my eyes. While I write, Groove Salad cranks out tunes in my headset, while Magic iDVD creates a cool DVD disk of the whole project, for the school, complete with animated menus and a hip audio track.

Brightcove Posting, B-Roll Cameras

This is a Brightcove Post


I've found a website that can better display the video that people share. I found www.brightcove.com, while searching for some video of a singer throwing a boy off a stage and loved the quality and options of being able to view the video in full screen. While you can see some pixelation, it isn't nearly as bad as the popular video sites such as Youtube and other video sites. So I'm returning to resize the prepared videos and upload them to Brightcove.

I've also purchased two Lumix cameras. The TZ1 and big sister, the TZ3, are great little cameras to shoot B-roll. I've used it to capture alternate angle shots of Cal Ripken and also placed them on the ground at a dangerous crosswalk in east Baltimore, giving me the luxury of focusing my attention on shooting with the HVX200. Both TZ cameras shoot in widescreen at 848 x480 pixels, which is the same format as high definition video. The TZ1 shoots at 5 megapixels, while the TZ3 captures at around 7 MP, and also has a larger LCD view screen.

The videos they shoot now can be seamlessly integrated with Final Cut Pro 6, which we're upgrading to, at work. There's a setting that allows the user to import footage from various cameras without that rendering red line, which kills any chance to output a finished product with efficiency. At least, that's what I'm told.