Making your own skydiving movies

[CanuckInUSA 0]

Well last night I took the first step in a series of very long steps towards making my first skydiving movie. And despite spending many many many hours in front of the computer capturing skydiving footage, I realized a few things:

1) This is not going to be easy.
2) This is not going to be quick.
3) Hard disk space gets eaten up quick.
4) I may need a better authoring tool than VideoStudio (version 6.x)

But I have great expectations (at least music wise) towards making my first skydiving movie.

Question: When people are setting out on this sort of project, do they break their movies up into separate sub-projects based around a song? You see I was planning on using a very short but up beat song for my intro. Then one, maybe two upbeat songs (depending on how much footage I can capture) of some bad ass amateur freeflying. Followed by a short bloppers song and ending with a nice mellow song for my credits. So each sub-project would be centered around a song. Does this make sense?

Try not to worry about the things you have no control over

[sheldond 0]

Sounds to me like you have already answered your question yourself. You will find that if you break up your project into smaller little sequences, it will be a little easier to work with. Especially if you are trying to cut along the beat of the music.

I would suggest make up a shot selection list to correspond with the song, work on that song, and then move on to the next. Once you have all of them done, it should be a matter of just cut and paste. If you try to work on the project as a whole, you will begin to feel overwhelmed. You also run the risk of deciding to tweak an in point or an out point of a clip earlier on into your project, only to find it has now offset your edit by the equal amount later on in the project. Nothing worse than doing your final review and discovering that the clip you spent an hour on trying to get the beat just right, is now off by 15 frames (half second).

Something else that would be adventageous, if you edit in segments, you can make sub-clips of your edit. If you like to use a lot of dissolves,transitions, special effects, keys and supers; this will help when it comes to rendering. Render out your clips at the end of each edit season, usually right before you go to bed, and then save it to a sub-clip. That way it is all inclusive and this will allow an almost real time final edit.

Remember to keep your drives clean and always at least 10% free space. And if you don't like Video Studio, consider Adobe Premiere, or any of the numerous video editors out there. Non-Linear is all the same...only the box that is different.

[slayer21016 2]

Sounds good

I put this video together wednesday night as a test project and it's sort of what your looking to do. this video is in the Quick Time format and you'll need broadband to view.

Choppers

[jdhill 0]

You sould also consider that you will neen a lot more video than the actual length of you final project... A few years ago, I made a part of the DZ's year end video... my part was about 15min long... I captured somewhere around 3 hours of video... I started with 15 hours of footge... granted it was more of a music video style of edit, not really story telling... lots of short edits... very fast pace stuff... I focused on one song at a time... then found some good ground/ party stuff with good audio content to tie them together.

Good luck.

As far as what system to use... if your on a PC, Premier works very well, on a Mac - premier, Final Cut Pro (or express) should do about anything you would want (I think iMovie will leave you wanting more... like your current program).

Josh

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. - Edmund Burke

[jimoke 0]

nice stuff with the choppers video. I was checking out the swoop-n-hawaii video and started having my mac crash over and over.....this is unusual. I have a cable connection and never crash on web sites?
anyways is that your vans ted was chewing on? I spent winter of 02 at skydive hawaii slutting for clarence.
keep up the good work
jimoke

The ground always, remembers where you are!

[czechbase 0]

Man, tell me about it! I went out and bought a new external harddisk (120gig!), got Adobe Premier and had to learn how to put everything together.

Then I had to run all my footage into my harddisk through Adobe Premier, then cut and cut and cut clips to my liking, write an intro and ending and put the music in. And then wait somemore to export!!

But I must say, the finished product is sure worth it!

I just got a new 0.5x wide angle lens that is bad ass (and really cheap too with no black bits!!).

Man, doing video stuff is a high time and money investment. But it sure is well worth it (especially when you can start charging money for it)

www.motavi.com

[LouDiamond 1]

Here's what I've found to work pretty good, at least for me. I don't work on a PC based system, I use a Screenplay by APPLIED MAGIC but the overall principal should still work for you. I usually DL my footage as soon as possible becuase I still know what is what on the tape and what jump it was etc. I do a bit of my editing on the camera, meaning I roll through the tape to the part that I want to DL and then DL that clip to my machine. It saves me time when I put the clips on the story board as minimal if any trimming is required. For sake of ease I name the clips something I can remember about the jump so that I can quickly look at the clip bin and know what I want to drag to the story board next. It also helps me if I start off in a linear process of setting up the whole movie and makes it appear normal when viewed. it looks funny when you have a shot later in the day in the beginning of your movie and later on it's earlier in the day. Continuity is key for seamless looking footage. One of the things that I personaly think some people overuse is the transitions or special effects that some systems have. It looks cool and there is some neat stuff that can be done but you have to be careful to not cross that line of "look at my neat effects movie with bits of skydiving in it".
The other drawback is that PC based systems have render times that can take hours, especially once you start using all the special effects and so on. That is one of the reasons I prefer the system I use. I can drag and drop clips and transitions, etc on a story board and view it instantly to see if I like the way it looks or flows without rendering. If I'm happy I can merge all the clips which takes at most takes a minute even for a 20 minute long movie.

When I use music , I pretty much have a list of cool tunes in my head and I look for an opportunity to use them. I find that building your storyboard first and tweaking the clip sequences to the point where you like the product makes it easier to drop music in and trim the music to fit. I think it's easier to do than to try and tweak clips to fit music. I never lay the music down first and then try to build the storyboard. I also find it easier to change the music if it doesn't have the right feel for what is going on in the clip than vice versa, hence I can have several versions of the same footage but with different soundtracks and pick the one that I think is best suited.

One of the other things I have found important is to capture your video in the highest quality possible. It does eat space but in the end it is worth it. I have found that once you use the compression software to make your WMV or MPEG or whatever format that image quality can suffer. If you start off with a mid to low quality and then squash it even more with compression it just gets worse on the output end.

"It's just skydiving..additional drama is not required"
Some people dream about flying, I live my dream
SKYMONKEY PUBLISHING

[CanuckInUSA 0]

Well I did it. I got all my hardware issues resolved (I bought a new 120 gig external USB hard drive plus the USB 2.0 adapter as my motherboard was only USB 1.0 compatible). And then I installed the Video Studio version 7 upgrade and proceeded to complete the first song of my skydiving movie. I must say I'm impressed with the result first time out. I did well. But it's a big file (a 4 minute song rendered in the DV format equals 1 gig of diskspace in the AVI file). I still have enough raw footage to make a couple more songs before my project is complete (I will be looking to make a WFFC song as well as there should be plenty of footage to be had during that event).

Anyway, I'd like to share, but this file is big. Maybe when my project is done I can send some DVDs and/or VHS tapes to some of you.

Try not to worry about the things you have no control over

[PhreeZone 20]

Go grab this and compress the file down: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/9series/encoder/default.aspx

Yesterday is history
And tomorrow is a mystery

Parachutemanuals.com

[freakydiver 0]

Compression is key my friend...

-- (N.DG) "If all else fails – at least try and look under control." --

[dsbbreck 0]

Ok, let's ask the really important question.

Am I in it?

David

"Socrates wasn't killed because he had the answer.......he was killed because he asked the question."

[CanuckInUSA 0]

Quote

Ok, let's ask the really important question.

Am I in it?

Dude you're one of the Stars!!! It's a Bellas video and you're an OGB. You'll see it soon.

Try not to worry about the things you have no control over