Catch up!
lets kick off with something from last year: Panoramic Movies
No Expense Spared
After spotting this on YouTube I decided to have a go myself. I’ve already had some fun making HiDef panoramas using Autostitch (which i will show off here at some point soon) and had thought about making movies by stopmotioning together panoramas, but this launched me into a new avenue entirely:
First test on a tripod in my front room. Music is ‘A Mother’ by the Herbalizer
Second test in my local park. music is by 3YE (that’s me in another incarnation) first tune is a remangling of ‘Skin Deep’ which was used for Loreal’s ‘Touch of Pink’ adverts and I felt compelled to subvert. this is not a new idea and is admittedly pinched from the ever chipper Deathboy. the second, more excitable number is ‘h3YEker’. The light is poor because it was midwinter and the sun was setting.
Some online tutorials that helped me with the more technical aspects:
automating photoshop for batch processing of an image sequence
the process:
1. tape a pencil to your video camera and bluetack a bauble to the end of the pencil. the bauble should line up with the centreline of the camera lens and you should zoom the camera onto the bauble so that the top and bottom edges just about line up. you will also need to set your camera to manual focus otherwise you will get great footage of the surface of the bauble and not much else
2. go wander around somewhere, filming as you go. experiment with different angles and putting the camera through gaps
3. capture or import the video into your computator
4. render that video as an image sequence
5. open the first image in the sequence and start recording your actions in P’shop. crop it down to just the bauble, then apply the polar cordinates filter in such a manner as to ‘unwrap’ the circlular bauble reflection into a rectangle. save that rectangle and then stop recording your actions
6. create the droplet from the action, as per the tutorial mentioned above, and then drop the whole folder with the image sequence in onto the droplet.
7. now go have a nice hot cup of tea while P’shop munches it’s way through the bazillion images in the sequaence. i’d also recommend Ginger Nuts for dunking at this point. They’re solid performers, holding a good amount of tea before melting, and the ginger will give you a bit of extra zing for the rest of the days activity
8. When the ’shop is done, import the first of your new image sequence back into Vegas. vegas will recognise that it’s one of a bunch and supply a tick box for importing the whole lot as if it was a single media file. nice
9. rotate, crop, stretch to fit or whatever you please to get a satisfying end result and export.
I should also mention a little word on aspect ratios as panoramas make very good viewing for widescreen (my first run was right before Youtube introduced widescreen, the second right after, i felt compelled to make the best use of this innovation) basically, you should still output in your regular format of preference (mine’s PAL/DVD because it’s slightly bigger and slightly better than NTSC and because i live in blighty) but changing the pixel aspect ratio to a wider setting will avoid the problem of the black bars which you see in the first video (wasted data, wasted screen real estate), and ensuring you get a good full screen output whatever the medium
will that do you?
M@
