Hi I am pleased to announce that I have finally set up a YouTube site for BrainBeat Productions where I hope to post videos to from jobs as well as other things I happen to video that I think might be interesting and show what I can do. I may also post some reviews of cameras and other accessories that I have bought but will have to wait and see on that. I did reserve the space many years ago but I was not sure what I wanted to post on it then. I currently have only 2 videos up there so far and will add more in time. Please feel free to comment here or on YouTube about them and I would be happy to take any feedback.
Star Time Lapse Video
The first video is a short time lapse video I took recently over the October long weekend where I was also planning on using the same images to stack and make a star trail which I will post on here soon. This was the first time I had ever attempted doing either and shot it with my fairly recently purchased Panasonic G7 camera. It turned out a lot better than I thought I might and was extremely easy to do with this camera once I worked out how to start it. The Video was even created in camera but I later have slowed it down by half on YouTube as it was very short. In it there is at least two airplanes that cross the frame as well as I think what must be a satellite.
Things I learned from doing this video are.
While using my 25mm f1.7 (50mm equivalent in 35mm) lens to make this it is nice and fast and allowed for a much shorter capture time for each frame and a lower ISO, it was not really wide enough to capture the sky properly at least to do a typical star trail image as It only got about one quarter of the circle.
The next thing I would do would be to try and take where there is no other light interference as there are a few times where torches were shone on the trees in the bottom corner.
It would also have been good in a way at least for the Star Trail image to have not had any wind as the windmill blades have been eaten away a bit.
If I plan on putting the video on YouTube I should have taken it in 16:9 aspect ratio to start with which would have meant there were no black bars on the side.
I would have liked to see if my Yi action camera could have captured anything too as that is a great camera for time lapse video at least during the day but I forgot to bring it with me.
Car Fire
This is a partly edited video of a car fire that happened near my old house on an evening in 2010. It was shot on my Nikon D5000 which does not have great low-light or stabilisation so the original footage is very shaky and visually noisy. I have stabilised it and cut the worst parts out using the YouTube video editor. I could have edited it before uploading but wanted to try out what the YouTube editor could do. Considering the YouTube editor is online it was very fast at doing what it can do and has enough options to use to make a basic edit but I think in future I will just edit before hand.
Parts of this footage was shown on most of the local nightly news bulletins that evening as well as being hosted on the local newspapers community contribution website where I think it was one of the most viewed clips for some time after the event.
This was one of the first videos I ever shot with a DSLR and if I had the option to take it again I would have done a few things different. Firstly Either the lens its self or the filter I had on it did cause some green ghosting which ruined the picture in some places. I would also have ideally used a tripod to stabilize the image more but I did not think of it as it was int he middle of the night when it happened. I was also a bit concerned of things exploding so did not want to get too close. I probably also would have been better to use my video camera too for the video and take some picture with the DSLR but did not think of it at the time.