Trail Running-Helicam
 

Some footage from last night. I had a new operator on the camera gimbal, so some of the pan/tilts are a bit too fast and jerky.

Vimeo link-Vimeo often makes HDV playback jumpy at times. http://www.vimeo.com/1478614

The biggest problem wasn't anything caused by the camera operator, but was the too-frequent editing cuts. The runner was slow enough as it was-----you didn't need to throw in a slo-mo segment. Obviously, this was just a rough edit from recent shooting. The open, treeless terrain might have been interspersed with shots showing something more varied. Following a running subject is different than just cruising over an area and takes a more complicated formula for producing smooth and pleasing video. Instead of the viewers being able to look at any part of the scenes, their attention is naturally drawn to the runner, so the beauty of the surroundings is lost to a great degree. It would be a difficult task to showcase both the runner and the background at the same time. I can imagine a tall, lean, gorgeous woman, running swiftly and gracefully------and most people wouldn't notice or care about anything else in the scenes. I liked your earlier heli-video of Aspen a lot, but this one leaves a bit to be desired.

The Vimeo compression quality on this one didn't look good. If you allowed downloading by Vimeo subscribers, we could see your original upload file for greatly-increased image sharpness and few, if any, compression artifacts. I always do this and put a note on the description telling how it can be downloaded. The Aspen Aerials came from a different host as a Windows 5 Mbps file and looked very good. Vimeo downgrades the file to a 1.7 Mbps FLV compression. The Windows Movie Maker 5.9 Mbps 720p publishing option seems very good for uploading to Vimeo, as long as the original file is downloaded by the viewers before playing. There's a checkbox on the Vimeo uploading page that allows you to set it to give downloading privileges to registered subscribers. Those who don't take advantage of the free registration can still watch the more compressed version. Incidentally, I once spent 5 hours editing and rendering a short HD video with an advanced software program. I used double-pass and everything else that would supposedly increase the image quality of a compressed online video. The result did not look better in any way than the WMM 720p HD automatic publishing option, that took 3 minutes to render.

Nice stuff -- what sort of setup are you using?

I was considering doing this kind of work but among the biggest problems is how to dampen vibrations.