On Tuesday, after being kicked out of the only room where we can actually work due to a class of 14 year-olds coming to visit, our teacher decided that it would be a good idea to give 4 very immature teenagers a £2k HD camera to play with. After showing us the ropes, the four of us were dismissed outside to explore the big bad world of high definition. The word ‘skatepark’ instantly sprung to mind. After marveling at the greatness of this little machine and getting some rather lovely looking footage, we headed back to capture. Capturing went well, and I managed to blag an external hard drive to take the footage home on, blissfully unaware of how incompatible HD video is with everything. Instead of explaining them, here’s a list of problems I encountered:
- The footage would not play on my computer, in any application, and Google was no help.
-The footage would not play on any other Macs in my college apart from the Mac Pros, which were being used by another class today, so I had to get in there at lunch.
-Took about half an hour to find the right settings to convert the footage so I could play them at home, without loosing the high definition.
-Took about 2 hours to convert all the clips.
-Logged out of the computer after the render to go to the car to get my iPod to use it as a hard drive, as all the college ones were booked out. Tried to log back in and remembered the footage is on my mate’s account, who had gone home and doesn’t have a phone that works.
-Had to wait half an hour to transfer it all to my iPod after managing to log in, then had to wait this again when I got home to transfer it all to my PC.
-Premiere Pro froze halfway through editing and I hadn’t saved it, had to start again.
-I finished editing at 8.30, and it’s taken me this long to get the right uncompressed HD settings to export out of Premiere, and the right settings for Sorenson Squeeze.
So after all that stress, here’s some HD footage of Mike King (who recently got his new website up) riding Guildford skatepark. Although this compression doesn’t really do the quality justice, HD cameras are definitely NOT overrated; the uncompressed files look amazing.
Or click here for a smaller version.
I do have some skateboarding footage that I thought I would get up tonight, but evidently not, so bare with me for that.
