Hot Air Balloons (Phase 2)

rat6666

rat6666

Active member
OK, here's the second clip I've put together now that I've learned how to do the basic things in Vegas 6. I've still got a lot of learning to do, but I wanted to put this out here to improve upon my first gnarly attempt at showing a WMV last week.

The video shows a hot air balloon flight through the Delaware Water Gap, a natural gorge cut into the Kitatinny Mountains of Northwest NJ by the Delaware River. It's a pretty amazing place to fly, and this footage attempts to do it justice.

The video is 9:47 minutes long, 45 megs. No music, just on-camera audio. Color corrected in Vegas (thank god for Sony Color Curves!).

I ran it back onto DV tape to watch it on TV and it is AMAZING! Some of these shots will surely wind up in the scenic ballooning documentary I'll be gathering footage for all this year. Enjoy!

http://www.hotairfilms.com/delaware_water_gap_dvx.mp4
 
You may need to install the latest version of Quicktime.

Also, the quality of this clip is definitely nowhere NEAR the full-resolution DV footage. I don't have Quicktime Pro, otherwise I'd have rendered it to a .mov file
 
Looks really great.

My critique: I'd suggest making longer cuts; most of your shots you could easily spend 15-20s looking at. The only other suggestion I have is with your sound. If you want to spend the time, edit the sound so that there are smooth transitions between the shots. Also, it seems not as necessary to hear the torch once you're in the sky admiring the view, so maybe having music would fit better. All purely my opinion though.

Really amazing shots. I look forward to seeing more.
 
Thanks for the feedback! I really didn't concentrate on the sound at all besides making a few cuts and unnoticeable fades based on the start and stop of the burner noise, and I didn't take the effort to set this to music since it was just a footage test for the most part. When it's finished, the documentary I'm working on will be set mostly to music. I've been in touch with a very talented composer from this board that will be working with me to create the score.

As for the longer time between cuts, most of the shots are a fair amount longer than they are shown here, and I cut most of them down to keep the preview video shorter than it needed to be. I shot about an hour and a half of raw footage on this two-hour flight, and cut out all the shaky and unusable shots to wind up with about 20 minutes of good footage. I further narrowed that down to the final 10 minutes we see here.

The compression method desaturated the colors a little bit, and the contrast was washed out a fair amount, so be assured that the real footage is exponentially better than what's shown in this clip.

Anyway, I'd love to hear more comments. Thanks!
 
This is really great :)

One question: does everyone hate the ReMax balloon? Is there a running joke like "You missed the landing site last time so you're stuck with the ReMax..."?

Please keep producing and showing these. Anytime you need a second cameraman let me know...
 
bklyndv said:
This is really great :)

One question: does everyone hate the ReMax balloon? Is there a running joke like "You missed the landing site last time so you're stuck with the ReMax..."?

Please keep producing and showing these. Anytime you need a second cameraman let me know...
Click to expand...
Thanks!

There are about 60 RE/MAX balloons in the country last time I heard any real numbers (there could be more or less by now). I think Remax has done more for ballooning than any company in the world as far as generating awareness in the public eye. There's at least one balloon in every one of the lower 48 states, and a handful in Canada and wherever else Remax does business. A very widespread marketing campaign involving hundreds upon hundreds of balloons over more than 25 years.

I could always use a second cameraperson... Where are you from? I'm heading on a cross-country journey over three weeks this summer to capture ballooning in other spectacular areas... Always looking for traveling crew! I've got my next-door neighbor scheduled to join in on the adventure as a driver/balloon chase person. Should be a lot of fun! :)
 
Longer shots = yeah, I'd love to have done so.

A big part of the editing process this time around (my second time ever) is that a lot of the shots were still pretty shaky, so I had to cut out the worst parts or risk more of the "home video" look. I know in an earlier post I mentioned most of these shots were longer, but the usable parts of the most visually important ones are about as long as what I showed here due to a shaky camera platform.

Does anyone have any opinions on that? I mean, is it better to cut a documentary scene short because of shaky footage or keep it in but risk the 'homemade' feel? I would guess there are a million ways to answer that for all different sorts of productions, but it's a question that I'd be interested in seeing some opinons about. I'm sure this isn't the first time this question has been raised.

FYI: I was shooting at the default F5 preset dial and color curving/correcting somewhat aggressively in Vegas. The curves I used emphasized more contrast in the lows and didn't touch the mids or highs as much.
 
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