Posted by Russ Shugart on January 2, 2012 at 12:21 PM
My son and I started working on this video and I've finally decided to post it.
I listened to a podcast from Vincent Versace about how when you look at a picture your eye tracks through the picture in a predictable way looking at recognized shapes to unrecognized, sharp to unsharp, high contrast to low contrast, light to dark and so on and I tried to play with that tracking here.
The native size is 733 MB and on anything less than a pretty fast PC it gets a little choppy so I was really interested to see how Youtube would render it. Other than being slighty darker and certainly not as sharp as the native version, I think it turned out okay. I'm not sure what venue, other then maybe Vimeo, where it would show sharp and smooth. Anyway any comments and suggestions are greatly appreciated!
Thanks!
Posted by Phillip Noll on January 2, 2012 at 1:19 PM
Very cool, Russ! I've always wanted to do something like this but can never find the time.
I know absolutely nothing about video production so take this with that caveat. A couple things you might try:
1.) Fade from one image into the next without going to black in between images
2.) When panning across an image, don't change directions, keep going in one direction. If you want to show another portion of the same image, treat it as a separate image and start the pan again
3.) When zooming out, do not go past the borders of the image--in other words, always stay well within the image. Zooming out so that you can see the whole image on a black background looks a little weird to me--not sure why
Just my thoughts upon viewing the video once. Again, great job!
Posted by Russ Shugart on January 2, 2012 at 1:35 PM
Phillip, thanks for taking time to comment. I'm with you, I knew absolutely nothing about video production before this and now I still know almost nothing! When I posted it to youtube, the processing added a lot of black border on everything. I'm not sure how my kid controlled the borders but I do know how he did the zomming and direction changes. I wanted to simulate traveling around in the pictures trying to guess where someone's eye movement might track if they were looking at the whole picture. I wanted to do something different than what I see on almost every other slide show. After watching it on youtube I think you are right about the dark segments between pictures, too much time between them Thanks for your input!
Very nice effect Russ. I agree with Phil and he's being too modest. I do have a question. Are you scanning around on still images or were these taken with a video cam? Well done...I'll have to incorporate this technique into my talk on composition I'm currently updating.
Posted by Bill Speaks on January 2, 2012 at 5:03 PM
Russ, nice work! The second image is a particular favorite. Your style of photography reminds me of Albert Bierstadt's paintings. The images have a wonderful play of light and shadow, enhanced all the more by the panning effects.
Posted by Russ Shugart on January 2, 2012 at 7:33 PM
Bill, flattery will get you everywhere! If there's one artist/photographer I'd like to be compared favorably to its Bierstadt!
Ken, these are all full resolution still images from a D3X. I just wish there was a way to show the native MP4 version. Boarders are smaller and the clarity and sharpness it WAY better than even on the higher resolutions that YouTube can display.
My son did a great job with the editing. I gave him tiff versions of each shot that he edited the tracking through for each picture. He not only did the tracking, the music is actually two songs that he spliced into one. He's very adept at video editing and used those tools to create this video. By the way, he said that he'd be interested in doing the same for other photographers if anyone is interested.
Posted by Bill Pelzmann on January 2, 2012 at 8:47 PM
Well done. My compliments to your son. (and the pictures are pretty good, also. )
I use ProShow Gold to create these videos of still photographs. Looks great when output in a Bluray format on a large HD TV.
No mater how easy ProShow makes the process, it still takes a lot of time to design a good video. It would be great to have a son who did this for fun !
Discussion
6 repliesI listened to a podcast from Vincent Versace about how when you look at a picture your eye tracks through the picture in a predictable way looking at recognized shapes to unrecognized, sharp to unsharp, high contrast to low contrast, light to dark and so on and I tried to play with that tracking here.
The native size is 733 MB and on anything less than a pretty fast PC it gets a little choppy so I was really interested to see how Youtube would render it. Other than being slighty darker and certainly not as sharp as the native version, I think it turned out okay. I'm not sure what venue, other then maybe Vimeo, where it would show sharp and smooth. Anyway any comments and suggestions are greatly appreciated!
Thanks!
Here's the link to Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeuFTPmtEo0
Russ
http://AlpineGalleria.com
I know absolutely nothing about video production so take this with that caveat. A couple things you might try:
1.) Fade from one image into the next without going to black in between images
2.) When panning across an image, don't change directions, keep going in one direction. If you want to show another portion of the same image, treat it as a separate image and start the pan again
3.) When zooming out, do not go past the borders of the image--in other words, always stay well within the image. Zooming out so that you can see the whole image on a black background looks a little weird to me--not sure why
Just my thoughts upon viewing the video once. Again, great job!
Russ
http://www.AlpineGalleria.com
Ken, these are all full resolution still images from a D3X. I just wish there was a way to show the native MP4 version. Boarders are smaller and the clarity and sharpness it WAY better than even on the higher resolutions that YouTube can display.
My son did a great job with the editing. I gave him tiff versions of each shot that he edited the tracking through for each picture. He not only did the tracking, the music is actually two songs that he spliced into one. He's very adept at video editing and used those tools to create this video. By the way, he said that he'd be interested in doing the same for other photographers if anyone is interested.
Russ
http://www.AlpineGalleria.com
I use ProShow Gold to create these videos of still photographs. Looks great when output in a Bluray format on a large HD TV.
No mater how easy ProShow makes the process, it still takes a lot of time to design a good video. It would be great to have a son who did this for fun !