Monday, December 25, 2006

My first video production

Close up of temple ritual at Dizang Nunnery

I rarely use the video function on either of my digital cameras. However, when I went to the temple festival in Xinzhuang on Saturday I determined to capture some of the events on video. There is so much action at these events that it is impossible to convey the entire experience with photos. The beating of the drums, blowing of horns and explosions of fireworks all contribute to the atmosphere.

Lined up in front of the temple

I took a little over four minutes of footage in four separate takes using my Nikon Coolpix 5200. None of the videos on their own were really very interesting and all included some messy bits. I decided to try and edit some of the better footage to make a short video.

I had never done this before, but it wasn't so hard. I have Windows Movie Maker which is included with Windows XP, but before I could start editing I had to convert the .mov files to .avi. I did this by downloading a free program called RAD Video Tools. The conversion was fairly simple although the .avi files had an extremely large file size which made the editing a little cumbersome.

In Windows Movie Maker I simple chose the better segments of video and put them in sequence. The software was user friendly and intuitive. I added a title to the front and credits at the end. It was a lot more straight forward than I thought. I could have spent some more time making it look more professional, but I was already pleased with the results. The movie was 1:47 and the .wmv file was a manageable 10.8 MB.

You can download it here (10.8 MB file) or watch it at Youtube or Google Video.

Close up of giant god

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Saturday, December 23, 2006

Sonic Youth



Few bands can claim to have been as influential as Sonic Youth. The video clip is for the song Incinerate. It is Sonic Youth at their best -- a perfectly crafted song that you could almost sing along to. Their latest album Rather Ripped was released six months ago. You can listen to it for free via streaming here.

Few bands can claim to have been as influential as Sonic Youth. I just wanted to post this as a tribute to a band who have created brilliant music for over two decades.

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Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Capturing the light

Random shot

I took the above shot in a Taipei cafe with my Fujifilm Finepix s5500 digital camera. It didn't even compose the shot, I mainly took it just to test how the shot would come out in low light. Even though the shutter speed was 1/4 second there is not much camera shake. It takes a little practice to do this and I can't say every shot at these low shutter speeds is free of camera shake, but you can take good pictures in low light without a tripod.

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Sunday, December 10, 2006

Amazing documentary from Mongolia



The Story of the Weeping Camel is a truly amazing documentary. The way that the life of the nomads is captured on film is something special. There is no narrator, the story simply tells itself. In its simplicity there is something profound.

Highly recommended.

Links

The Story of the Weeping Camel - National Geographic World Films
The Story of the Weeping Camel - IMDb
The Story of the Weeping Camel - Rotten Tomatoes

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