dispatches

Contra Sutra does Lake City

Contra Sutra Does Lake City from Doug Plummer on Vimeo.

The hot contra dance band Contra Sutra plays at Seattle's Lake City dance.

This is another composition from the same footage from which I made the Nikon contest entry video. It's more focussed on the band, which was the original favor I was fulfilling for my friends in the group when I brought all this gear to the dance.

The trick with Vimeo videos is to click on play, then stop it right away and wait a couple minutes. You want to let the video download most of the way so you're not hitting the buffer limit all the time. 

The Lake City dance video (including the the amazing hat cam footage!)

Here's the link again to the Lake City contra video and Nikon contest: http://bit.ly/Xr8UI. I want this at the top of the blog for a few days so that you dancers can see it and comment on it if you're so inclined. The real push for voting actually will actually occur in mid-December after the judges have their say. 

The commenting function is a bit onerous, as you have to register on the site (so they can mine your data), and then respond to an email. Be sure to uncheck the opt-in mailing list boxes. I won't take it personally if you want to skip the commenting. 

Syncing external sound with the 5D

Well here's a pickle I got myself into today. I've bought an external recorder to capture sound for my video work, a Zoom H4N. It seems to be the consensus best device out there for this sort of thing, but it's a complicated thing to figure out (first time I used it to record a consultation, I totally blew it). But that's not today's problem. Today's problem was harder to fix. 

It turns out that the 5D records video in a non-standard frame rate. Standard is this odd US thing of our broadcast frame rate being 29.97 fps. The Canon is allegedly a 30fps camera, but there's considerable dispute about that. 

I don't quite understand why, but it explains a problem with using external audio. At last week's dance I recorded the band with the Zoom, and synced it together in Final Cut with Pluraleyes. Over the course of several minutes the external audio drifted out of sync with the sound recorded with the camera. It was driving me nuts, and I couldn't understand why. 

One fix is to select the audio track and change the speed (Cmd-J)to 99.9%. The other is to make a Final Cut sequence setting specifically for the 5D, and use only that. You set the frame rate at 30fps, and, supposedly, time and space and sound obey the same laws again. 

I tested it with an online metronome, loaded both data streams into Final Cut, and sure enough, it works. Details on how to configure Final Cut here.

My Nikon contest entry

Here's my entry into the Nikon video contest. The theme is, "Document your day in under 140 seconds" (it's a Twitter thing, I guess.) The winner gets $100,000. Go comment on it so it can rise to the "Most Popular" page. Please? (warning--they make you register on the site and wait for an activation email)

This is the dance where I wore my "hat cam." You can see how that worked out in this video.

Direct link here: http://bit.ly/Xr8UI

iPhone vs Flip Smackdown!

I was at a party, and one of my favorite local fiddlers, Devon Leger, was about to play a tune. I just happened to have two video cameras in my pocket: a Flip Mino HD, and my iPhone. 

I leaned both cameras against the door frame, one in each hand. The one with finger in the frame is the iPhone, which I held steady for one long take. With the Flip I got fancy―I got multiple angles, I zoomed, and I panned.  

In Compressor, I cropped the iPhone footage to match the 16:9 format of the Flip when I converted both to ProRes. In the first two cuts I alternated the sound―the clips with the captions have sound from just that camera. After that, I ran both audio tracks together. 

The sound is better than I thought it would be, particularly from the Flip. The video quality is about what I expected―the iPhone is a toy, not a camera. The Flip looks a lot better. 

I'm keeping the 5D's though. 

The Shepherdstown Dance

The Shepherdstown Dance from Doug Plummer on Vimeo.

The Saturday contra dance held during the Cape Breton Fiddle Fest in Shepherdstown, West Virginia in October 2009. Anna Rain calls a dance by Dean Snipes. Wendy MacIsaac from Nova Scotia plays the piano.

Here's the latest personal video, from Shepherdstown, West Virginia. The contra dance was held during their Cape Breton Fiddle Fest, so the music was stunning. 

I edited the music track first, then found the most interesting bits to illustrate the dance. I had 8 and a half minutes of footage to work with; the final piece comes in at 1:43. One trick I use is to tap out the beat on the "M" key, which puts in markers on the clip and on the timeline, depending on which is selected. The tempo was solidly even throughout the medley.When I lined up the beats on the timeline the music overlapped perfectly. 

A Halloween video

Halloween on 28th Avenue from Doug Plummer on Vimeo.

A house on our street puts on an elaborate Halloween skit every year for the trick and treaters. It's always gross and spectacularly creative.

The house down the street every year puts on an elaborate and truly gross Halloween skit that's a hit with the trick & treaters and, especially, their parents. Here's the video. 

Two years ago, when I was exploring the hot format of the era, audio slideshows, I composed this piece on the event. 

The latest video

The Quebecois Session from Doug Plummer on Vimeo.

My next door neighbor Sue regularly hosts a Quebec music session with some of Seattle's finest musicians, and invites me to listen. Here is the video.

The making: this was my first video with the new Zacuto finder, which snaps onto the LCD screen and magnifies it. It allows me to actually focus the 5D. It  This almost makes the 5D into a real video camera. 

I shot with a plan to do cutaways. The great thing about when musicians play in a session is that they repeat the tune again and again. I put markers on the beat and layered them in the timeline. It was fairly easy to align the markers so that in any track I picked the playing was in sync with the master audio track. 

Having things like this happen on my street makes me feel spectacularly lucky to live where I do. 

The latest video

The Thursday Dance from Doug Plummer on Vimeo.

Seattle's Thursday contra dance at the Lake City Community Center. Jennifer Youngman calls, music by Ryan McKasson, Marni Rachmiel, Dave Bartley and Russell Smumsky.

I've been trying to figure out what to do with this footage for some time. It's from a contra dance last June where I tried using my HV-30 on a homemade steadicam. That part didn't work so well, and I also shot in aperture priority, which means my shutter speed frequently dropped below the frame rate. Fine if you want that effect, but it looks funky no matter what. Nonetheless, I decided to try the full Blair Witch treatment with this sequence.

At the outset I intended a very different piece. I have some great, steady shots done on a tripod, which turned out to have little feeling and no place in this sequence. Where I thought I was going and where I ended up turned out to be very different places. Kind of like my whole career path, come to think of it.

A wedding video

Caryn & Rhetick's Wedding Weekend from Doug Plummer on Vimeo.

A video documentary of Caryn & Rhetick and their wedding in British Columbia's Pemberton Valley. This was fun to do. As with every video project, I learned to make do with what I had, and mourned what I wish I had done but didn't. Most of this I shot on the Canon 5D, though I had a second camera (a Canon HV-30) that rolled through the ceremony. It was also my first field test of the Beachtek audio splitter for the 5D, which worked like a charm, but made the camera that much more unwieldy. With control of audio it means I now have to monitor audio--one more thing to keep on top of. Someday it will become fluid and unconscious.

If you're having bandwidth issues, the YouTube version seems to be easier to view.