So Wednesday’s morning out at the beach got off to a good start…
… and almost immediately devolved into rain that lasted all day. Worse, it got damn cold too. We spent the rest of the day indoors, muttering over the weather and idiotic gas situations, but at least played games in the evening. This video was about everything that I shot.
By the way, I apologize for pointing out in there the trace of magenta that appeared as the sun separated from the horizon; it was visible in the raw files and as I was editing, but apparently didn’t survive the rendering into MP4. This time around I tried out Kdenlive instead of OpenShot, mostly because the latest version of OpenShot has some serious audio stutter issues during editing. Kdenlive has video blipping instead, but overall, it seemed a bit better and certainly didn’t have as many issues with rendering as OpenShot (which suffers from a million indecipherable options, most of which produce bloated video files.) Still working out the kinks.
Meanwhile, I snapped a pic with my (blerk) smutphone while the video was shooting.
This shows naked eye conditions with reasonable accurately, save for the ‘too wide’ effect, but it suffices.
You can also see some wind vibration during the vid, but seriously, at 600mm with the stiff gusts off the ocean, this is actually pretty damn stable; I wouldn’t achieve better without at least an extra stabilizing arm for the camera body itself (the rig was supported near the balance point by the tripod collar on the lens.) Perhaps it would have been slightly better had I used the tripod at minimal leg extension – the center column wasn’t extended at all – but that would have required plopping my ass on the wet beach just to frame and focus, and may have even obscured things more from the wave height closer to the camera. I’ll cope with the vibration, and hopefully you will too, but there are therapists around if need be.
The idea of doing this came from capturing the green flash in still photos a couple years ago, and realizing that it’d look much cooler in video. Those fishing boats would have also looked better, but no such luck this day.
More video (and naturally lots of still photos) will be along later on – I’m kinda building up here.