Video of classic Mini Coopers

I shot this in Nashville TN during a track day on Oct. 2009.

I wasn't able to do what I wanted which was to make a promo video for Phil Wicks and the mini driving school. We had too many last minute students sign up. It didn't leave much time to play with cameras.

Mini Coopers in Nashville TN with Phil Wicks on Vimeo

The weekend of Oct 10, 2009 we were doing a driving school in Nashville as a fundraiser for the Minnie Pearl Cancer Foundation. I thought it would be a good venue for shooting some video with the 7D since the classic minis are so photogenic.

I wanted to shoot more with the camera but the number of last minute entrants kept me running around crazy all day. I got maybe 30 minutes to do some shooting.

The video was shot in 1080p24 using manual mode with a shutter speed of 1/30. Focus was also manual. ISO was 100. The shots in the garage was between f/2.8 and f/5.6. The track footage was shot at f/5.6. I used a set of stacked polarizers to control the light and keep the exposure in range. Everything is NAT sound using the internal mic on the camera.

The lenses were the Canon 24-70 f/2.8L (garage) and the Canon 100-400 f/4.5-5.6L IS (track). I did have the IS on for some of the track shots. The camera was on a basic tripod for the track shots.

There is no processing of the video other than to convert it to 720p for upload to Vimeo.

I apologize for the shakiness of the video. This is not an easy camera to hold steady when shooting video and pulling your own focus.

[Richard Gooderick]

Thanks Chris

What did you use to capture the sound?

Also I wonder if you could briefly describe your workflow, if you used Liquid? I've got a 5Dmk2 which is why I'm asking.

Thanks.

[Chris Medico]

Hi Richard,

The sound was captured using the in camera mic. I will be using a Zoom H4 in the future for audio capture.

The workflow for that video was pretty straight forward. I copied the video from the CF card to a USB hard drive and opened it using Pinnacle Studio 14. All the editing was done in Studio. I exported the video to file using the MPEG4 720p output profile for upload to Vimeo. The only thing that I had to do is manually set the frame rate to 23.98. It was trying to export it as 29.97.

For editing H264 video in Liquid I'll be running it through Studio and transcoding into a format that is Liquid friendly.

[Richard Gooderick]

Many thanks Chris. I didn't realise that Studio will handle the native files.
And yes, it did sound like the on-board mike.
I stick a Rode Stereomic on top of the 5Dmk2 for wildtrack sound and it works pretty well. Those exhausts would have sounded good in stereo.