357 - A Week in Bali

Day 357. I finally got around to editing some of the video footage I collected in Bali the other week. This was all shot on a GoPro camera on a GoPole (basically a video selfie stick). Music is a Creative Commons track via Jamendo.com and it was edited together using Adobe Premiere Pro.

352 - Bali Bluster

Day 352. There was a huge storm brewing over our hotel room in Bali so I set the GoPro to timelapse mode and took a shot every 5 seconds, then stitched all 118 photos together in Adobe Photoshop and exported it as a 256 colour Selective mode GIF with 100% dither to reduce the posterisation as much as possible. It still has a bit, but you can definitely see how the storm is swirling around.

265 - A Hive of Activity

Day 265. During the Google Teacher Academy today I set up my GoPro camera at the front of the room and let it take a shot every second to create this animation of our working space during a short break in the event. This set of about 400+ images was imported into Photoshop CC as an image sequence, resized to a more manageable size, cropped and exported as a GIF.

150 - Hong Kong Night Walk

Day 150. When I was in Hong Kong last December I shot some footage with my GoPro camera as I walked around the streets of Wan Chai. I was in Final Cut tonight editing something else and found the clip, which I thought it might make an interesting GIF animation loop. I had no idea how to actually do that so of course I just Googled it. I figured out how to change the speed of the original clip, export the resulting frames out of Final Cut, open them as a sequence in Photoshop, convert to a Smart Object, reduce it in size from the original HD1080p video down to a 640px wide graphic, convert it to an adaptive dithered GIF and here's the end result.

080 - He Shoots, He Scores!

Day 80. The glare of the lights, the roar of the crowd, the thrill of the beautiful game. Foosball. This very short video was made using a GoPro camera, edited with iMovie on a Mac, with sound effects from SoundDogs.com.  It was also the first time I've tried using the Action Replay option in iMovie. Thanks to Al for his help with this one.

040 - Release The Dragons

Day 40. The final day of the Sydney Chinese New Year celebrations finished with the Dragon Boat Festival at Darling Harbour. This is the second year I've been part of a dragon boat team, paddling with the HKETO team. This video was shot during our third heat, which we won, from a camera strapped to the head of our drummer Arthur.

I didn't really edit the footage much as I just wanted to share the actual race from start to finish as seen fro inside the boat.  It was shot on a GoPro Hero3 and edited with Adobe Premiere Pro and compressed to 720HD using Adobe Media Encoder.



We ended up coming second overall in one division and third in the other division.

018 - Fun in the Sun

Day 18. With the very hot weather that we're experiencing in Sydney at the moment we decided to head down to Boat Harbour at Cronulla for a morning swim. It was a beautiful summer day, and the nice thing about Boat Harbour is that you can drive right onto the sand if you have an AWD vehicle.

While we were there I took the GoPro out and shot some fun footage, then edited it later back at home using Final Cut Pro X. Nothing too fancy, I'm just trying to get my head around the workflows in Final Cut.  So this is my creative project for today.



PS: To my Canadian friends who are suffering through yet another Arctic blast at the moment, if you think I'm making these videos in a shameless and transparent attempt to get you to come and visit us down under, you're absolutely correct. :-)  What are you waiting for?

014 - Bathing the Dog

Day 14. Two weeks down, 50 to go! Today's Create is a short video I made as I bathed our dog Buzz. I set up a GoPro camera at the end of the tub and shot the whole 10 minute was cycle. The footage was dropped into Final Cut Pro and edited into short chunks to reduce it to 4'30". I also used Adobe Media Encoder to recompress the video before uploading to YouTube (Took it from 235MB to 45MB, so worth doing!)



Short of jumping out of planes or skiing down huge mountains, what other things would be interesting to shoot on the GoPro?

004 - Bike Ride Video

Day 4 and today it's a short video I made by attaching my GoPro camera to my SYM VS 150 scooter and riding it around the block a few times.  I actually had several mounts, two on the bike and and one on my helmet and I alternated the camera between them, did the circuit a few times and then edited the different angles together in Final Cut Pro X. (I think I actually prefer editing with Adobe Premiere Pro CC but I wanted to give Final Cut a go.)