Whitby Regatta 2009

Here's a video I did of whitby Rowing Regatta:

Whitby Regatta 2009 from Steve Green on Vimeo.

I took nowhere near enough cut-away footage so I ended up having to do dissolves between a lot of the takes. It was really difficult to get the right balance between the interests of the participants, who want to see the race develop and other people who want a bit more going on. I'm hoping to add some background music to the video, hence the claps at the start for a sync point.

Charlie playing in the sea

Here's my first video: it's our dog Charlie playing in the sea.



I shot this in low quality (3MB/s) cos I did it before I got my new graphics card and the motherboard graphics couldn't cope with the highest quality session.

You can hear the wind noise - a decent mic is on my Christmas list! You can also see the auto-aperture pumping at one point. Otherwise not bad

My Equipment

I have a Canon Legria FS200 camcorder. I looked into getting an HD camcorder but figured out that if I started working with HD I would need to buy a new PC (or at least upgrade the motherboard), adding about £500 to the price of the project. I bought the Canon mainly because it was one of the cheapest I could find that has a reasonable amount of manual control and, most importantly, an external mic input. In the end this turned out to be a wise decision as you get a lot of wind noise off the internal mic on anything but a still day.
The reviews I have read criticize the low light performance which I suppose is fair enough although I don't really have anything to compare it with. I wish you could select non-interlace as I am extclusively working on a pc so it looks rubbish until you have converted the files to something else.
The colour rendition is fabulous. I thought it was a bit brown at first but then when I went back and looked at the scenes I had shot I realized that the colour rendition is in fact incredibly accurate.

I've got an old pc (1.6GHz AMD processor). I downloaded the Sony Vegas editing software as a trial as it was the only one that didn't need a 3GHz processor and a dedicated hard disk. Vegas is fabulous! It is so fast and immediate. Don't believe the people that say it's hard to use. They are just used to using Adobe Premiere. If you don't have any preconceived ideas about how to do something then Vegas is very easy to use and the "Show me how" mode is brilliant.

I bought a new graphics card, an nVidia GeForce. Because my pc is so old I basically had a choice of one. I was a bit disappointed until I downloaded an nVidia driver that optimizes MPEG replay. Everything plays really smoothly now.