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Saturday, September 25, 2010

Slow Motion Waves

Yesterday, I took my Kodak Zi8 down to the Point Loma tidepools to try to capture some wildlife videos. Those were less than successful, but more about that in another post. I was able to set the little camera up on its flexible tripod and capture some (very tiny) waves hitting the cliffs. Knowing I would want to do some time alterations later, I used the 720p, 60 frames per second setting. Here's what I ended up with, after playing with it for a bit in Premiere CS5. I uploaded it in 720p, so I recommend that setting on the embedded YouTube player. It makes a big difference.


A few observations:
  • Normal speed makes the waves look pathetic and puny, which they were. Half speed gives them a bit of majesty. Quarter speed looks weird.

  • I tried allowing the sound to retain its original pitch, but that didn't work out at all. At a quarter speed it echoed terribly. Allowing the sound to go down in pitch as I changed the speed of the video adds to the feeling of majesty.

  • In another video, I shot some waves at 1080p, 30 frames a second. Reducing those down to quarter speed gave me obvious time artifacts. The Zi8's 60 frames per second mode is a godsend for doing slow motion.

  • I wish I'd had bigger waves.
The Zi8's small size and the flexible mini-tripod I bought for it make it an ideal tool for capturing nature videos. I've got a 32GB memory card for it, so the only limitation now is battery life and I never came close to running out of that yesterday.

More videos to come in the future.

3 comments:

  1. If you can lay hands on a waterproof housing for your camera, maybe even puny waves could be made more impressive by getting right down near (or in) the water!

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  2. KT: You obviously haven't gotten the memo. We are no longer racist... just uninformed, scamming, crazies.

    Or that seems to be the new Journolist meme! :)

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  3. Tim, I looked into that before I went to Hawaii this summer. The waterproof housing all had plenty of "it leaked and ruined my camera" reviews. I suppose I could stick the think inside of a glass, watertight container ....

    ReplyDelete