Tales of wonders and woes - UC25
 

The good, the bad and everything in between. Sharing is gold!

Bring the stories, and always remember:
Rule #11 must be stricktly followed at all times. :)

Good luck, everyone!

Re: Tales of wonders and woes - UC25
 

I just got the email... My new UW housing will arrive on Monday. A few days on getting it set up and go for a test run. Than it is of for cave expedition... Expanding the horizon, pushing it deeper and longer.

Re: Tales of wonders and woes - UC25
 

Very interesting, Markus.
I look forward to see what you come up with.

Re: Tales of wonders and woes - UC25
 

I have an idea. It’s one I had thought about for an earlier round that should work for this theme. The window to shoot it is early in the month, so if the stars don’t align I’ll still have time to come up with something else. Right now I’m borrowing a page from Kevin’s book and choosing the music first.

Thanks to Chris Hurd for once again providing prizes for this round, but we all know what we’re really playing for- bragging rights! Take a look. I have up-dated the UWOL Digital Trophies originally designed by Mat Thompson for UC18 and, with a nod from Lorinda, placed them with the appropriate videos on the UWOL Vimeo site. Check them out! I will provide copies to any of you winners (Bill Thesken, Finn-Erik Faale, Simon Wood, Per Johan Naesje, Ruth Happel, and Geir Inge) for your personal use- put them on your personal website or blog, make a T-shirt or coffee mug- whatever! Just send me an e-mail (log in to dvinfo, click on my name and choose send Mike an e-mail) and tell me if you prefer a vector file (.ai or.eps) or raster file (JPEG, TIFF, PNG), what size and resolution and whether you want a white or transparent background. I will also provide up-dated copies to any of the winners and runner-ups from earlier rounds (for example, Steve Siegel, winner of UC20). Just let me know.

Re: Tales of wonders and woes - UC25
 

Mike,
I've been listening to music all day long today. :)
Hearing the music first lets me "see" the film even if I have no idea what it's going to be yet.

Re: Tales of wonders and woes - UC25
 

Just noticed the old UWOL website has gone AWOL?

Mike, I'll take a couple of those Digital trophies if you don't mind (png with a transparent background).

I think I got UWOL 21 & UWOL 23, (plus the DVC/UWOL Charity Challenge 2011)?

Thanks!

Re: Tales of wonders and woes - UC25
 

My pleasure, Simon. Just send me an e-mail as outlined above so I’ll have your address in a form that I can send attachments to. I have your PNGs ready to go as soon as I get that address. I’m just hoping someone has back-up files from the old site so the film archive can be restored in future.

Geir Inge- Your JPEGs are on the way.

Anyone else?

Has anyone taken a look at the UWOL Vimeo site yet? Let me know if you think there is a better way. I have the trophies appearing on the individual video pages but they don’t show up when those videos are played through the Portfolios. Perhaps one of you Vimeo experts can show me the error of my ways…

Re: Tales of wonders and woes - UC25
 

Thank you Mike :)

Re: Tales of wonders and woes - UC25
 

Found a track I'd like to license but it's more money than I've ever spent before on music. Still don't have an idea but you know me, I like to find my music first.
Will have to sleep on it a few nights to see if I can justify spending that much money.

Re: Tales of wonders and woes - UC25
 

Nice theme which I think will suit me well! Going to make something which involve shooting through the night.
Ordered a new lens today, Samyang 14mm f2.8 which I hope will give me the wide angle sequences I have in mind.
As a update about my current gear, I use mostly a Canon 5D Mk III + 24-70mm f2.8 L II usm lens. This is a amazing peace of gear, but for some special shot I found that I need something wider than 24mm even on a full format house!
My plan also involves the Dynamic Perception Time-Lapse Dolly
Interesting to see how I come out with my plan A this time, starting to shoot the upcoming weekend if weather conditions play on my side :0

Re: Tales of wonders and woes - UC25
 

Sounds like you're going to do a Tom Lowe type of TimsScapes shot Per!

Re: Tales of wonders and woes - UC25
 

Previously I have been alone on the job.
In this round I will have help from the son of my best friend.
He is 19 years old and he will shoot a part of the recordings.
I will explore my new GoPro camera attached to a Phantom quadrochopter.
Now working on the script, and looking for good shooting locations.
This is exciting and a new experience for me, working this way.

Good to see you're back Per Johan :)

Wish you all the best.

Re: Tales of wonders and woes - UC25
 

Per Johan- Ha! I’ll also be trying a “timescapes”-like night shot with my MX2 slider in the same time frame. It makes me wonder if we may be chasing similar shots. I’ll only be using the 550D and 28 f1.8 but I’ll try to add some interest by doing a three axis move with the Merlin head. If that works I’ll try again with my new fourth axis to add a time-lapse rack focus. As I mentioned elsewhere, this will also be my first time using GBTimelapse to handle the day-to-night exposure ramping and two MX2s for the motion so I’ll have a lot of chances to get it wrong! Fingers crossed. The shot isn’t essential for my story but I had been planning this shot for a couple of months before the contest was announced and I just moved the location to correspond with the rest of the story. Best wishes for your shoot. I’m sure it will turn out spectactular!

Re: Tales of wonders and woes - UC25
 

Good Morning,

Sunday Sheila I ( between us we make a whole personj) and I were talking about the theme for a bit and then whe started tinkering in the kitchen. she was humming a song and I thought," thats it! ".

So for the first time I will try building to the music instead of the other way around, Guess I'm "Kevinized".

I have a bit of a plan but as usual, wondering how I could possibly get it into three minutes. Kind of a sortened version of one I was going to make for my younglings that aint so young.

If That one fails I have a last ditch effort one that may work. Starting to set up for some of the shooting today but will get after we get back from taking our son Ryan to specialists up north on Friday.


hold to rule 11!!!!!

Re: Tales of wonders and woes - UC25
 

Hey Dale,

While you've got Rule #11 down pat, you must have missed the memo on Rule #4! :)

4. Production – Submissions should be no more than 4 minutes in length. Entries exceeding the 4-minute limit can be posted on the site but will be disqualified from judging. Credits are excluded from the 4-minute limit but please, keep them short--no more than an extra 15-20 seconds.

*******************

But remember, everyone. Longer isn't always better! Cut, cut, cut to create a good flow and tell the story without bogging it down. It may mean leaving precious footage "on the cutting room floor" but will make for a better piece.

Re: Tales of wonders and woes - UC25
 

Glad to see everyone's wheels turning on this one. After noodling on it for a few days I have my concept down. Now for the execution...

Per Johan, I have that 14mm also. Fun lens, but be sure to check your edge sharpness. Mine has a soft lower left corner. I've seen others comment about this problem as well.

Good luck everyone!!

Re: Tales of wonders and woes - UC25
 

David, thanks for your head up about the Samyang.
Received the lens yesterday, have only looked at it briefly. Yiiik it´s very wide even on a full format house. Looking forward to experiment with it next weekend!
I also heard about some edge softness. The good thing is that I need to crop a bit into the raw picture to get 16:9 footage, so maybe I can avoid some of the problem?

Last week I was visiting Røros, one of unesco world heritage sites we got in Norway. Attached some sample footage below. Even if the footage is crisp and nice, I feel I am missing the real close perspective with the 24-70mm lens. Particularly in the sequence of "the bell and church" and the "close-up night shot of the church", I was not able to get more wide view because of obstacles behind. I think the 14mm will help me out in situations like this?

Looking forward to try out my new lens, weather forcast looking good :)
and good luck to you all!

Re: Tales of wonders and woes - UC25
 

Nice time lapse film PJ. I love the last sequence, did you know/plan the moon to pass right behind the tower?

I got the Samyang 14 and used it on a shot last week, if you are shooting around houses, walls will not be straight. They will lean, on the side of the pictures.
I have modified my lens a bit, I have cut the sun hood of to make it fit in my UW housing and also declicked it. The video version was not on sale at the time I got mine.

Re: Tales of wonders and woes - UC25
 

Nice video of Røros, Per Johan!
Like Markus said, the timelapse is really cool!

Re: Tales of wonders and woes - UC25
 

A question for those of you that do timelapse sequences with DSLR's; do you use RAW or JPEG photos? Do RAW photos cause a lot of delays with editing?

Re: Tales of wonders and woes - UC25
 

Hi Simon!
Here´s my workflow about doing DSLR time lapsing.
I always shot in RAW. Found that it´s essential to have max quality when starting the post process!

I´m on mac so I use Aperture for the initial tweaks to the raw photos. After adjusting one of the photos (adjusting levels, add some sharpness etc.) in the sequence, Aperture have a function called Lift Adjustment which I use to add the adjustment to the rest of photos in the sequence. This can take from half to one hour regarding how many photos in the sequence.
I shoot mostly from 600 to 800 photos in one time lapse sequence.
After the sequence is adjusted I do a export. Here I always use the tiff format in 16 bit, which I think is better than jpeg. This process is quite time consuming at least on my computer, often 2+ hours for 800 photos.

After exporting, I then import the tiff sequence into Quick Time Pro (v7) as Image Sequence. Choose a suitable frame rate (25p, 30p etc) and then export it as a quick time file, compression Apple ProRes 422, dimensions 5760x3840(original raw image format). Which end up in a huge mov file of some GB in size!
This process often take 30min to 1 hour to process.

Then finally I import the quick time file into Final Cut for for final adjustment to 16:9 format in a timeline. When having a 5760x3840 video you are able to crop (recompose), zoom or du a pan without any quality loss to the finished 1920x1080 video.

This is my workflow. I´m aware and tried other, but I found that this workflow give me the best result for quality to the finished video.

It is time-consuming as the process of post processing one sequence (20 seconds) will take you 4-5 hours + the shooting time on location which could be another 3 - 6 hours. I don´t think I have managed to finish more than 2 sequence in one day.

One other thing is that time lapsing require much more hdd space than regular footage. One raw photo from Canon 5d Mk3 is about 28Mb in size add 800 photo and you end up with 22GB. Then add 130Mb for each tiff (yes the 16 bit tiff are huge in size!) added by 800 = 100GB
And finally the exported mov file from Quick Time Pro which are 3-5 GB in size.
You end up with about 130GB of files for every single 20 second time lapse sequence!
Note that you don´t really need to save the tiffs after finished the Quick Time Pro exporting which free up quite much disk space.

Hope this helps you out!

Re: Tales of wonders and woes - UC25
 

Yes, that is why I live with the bit of edge softness in my lens. Only problem is if I want to add a vertical move in post. In terms of the distortion mentioned, using the lens correction tool in Photoshop Raw or Lightroom solves the problem pretty well. Yes, you do loose some resolution by having to crop in, but when you are starting with a 5K image I don't think that's too big a deal. Just remember to compose your shot a bit looser keeping in mind you will loose about 5-10% from the edges of your frame depending on how much correction you use.

It is not a lens I use everyday, but is definitely handy to have in the bag especially if I find myself with just my less than full frame 60D with me. On the 5D it is huge!

Re: Tales of wonders and woes - UC25
 

Well, still no clue as to what I'm doing yet. No story idea has come over the horizon.
But, I am totally gob smacked as Mat would say that I licensed a track from Helen Jane Long!
It's the most I've ever spent on licensing music but it just mesmerizes me.

So I've certainly stayed true to form and picked my music first. Now I have to see if I can pair it with something.

Looking forward to all the timelapse sequences. Should be one hell of a challenge if everyone finishes!

Re: Tales of wonders and woes - UC25
 

In this weekend I'll do a test run with the new housing to my 5D3. I've done some tweaking on the housing and transformed a menual focus gear from another housing I got for my 7D. It will be a test in the pool with my son. Next week the expedition starts... expeditionbjuralven.se

Re: Tales of wonders and woes - UC25
 

Thanks Per! Interesting workflow that; though I think it might be too process heavy for my laptop. Are you using FCP7 or FCPX? It looks like Quicktime Pro is no longer available for purchase; I wonder are there any other options for assembling the pictures into a movie?

Anyhow, I had two good ideas that would suit the theme, but it looks like they have both fallen through as one potential subject was not interested in taking part, and the other subject is too difficult to pin down due to scheduling problems and the timeframe involved....

Re: Tales of wonders and woes - UC25
 

Simon,
You can download previous versions of Quicktime here: Apple - Support - Downloads

You need QT7 which has the "Open Image Sequence" function. They eliminated that with QT 10.

Re: Tales of wonders and woes - UC25
 

Ugh....cloudy and rainy yesterday and it looks like today, also...hopefully we'll get some decent weather next weekend, or I'll have to go to plan "B"...

'course I'll need to come up with a plan "B"

Re: Tales of wonders and woes - UC25
 

Uggh. The weather has prevented me from getting the shot that I have been thinking about for months. It looks as if I may have missed my window. The storm last night brought down two of my trees and I will have to deal with them just as soon as I recover from the late season flu. Right now I’m as sick as a dog and just trying not to think about UC19 where I got sick and couldn’t finish. There is very little Rule 11 around here at the moment. Phooie! There is still plenty of time left and I am determined to finish something. I hope you are all well and making great video. I’m going back to bed…

Re: Tales of wonders and woes - UC25
 

Ouch...take care, Mike. My wife has been down with a late season flue for the last four days....she is suffering...

Re: Tales of wonders and woes - UC25
 

Hope you're feeling better soon Mike!
Bad part about the flu is that you feel so crummy you can't even think about ideas for a film while you're laying in bed.

Bob you're getting the leftovers after it passes my house on the way to you. :)
Luckily we're only looking at 3-5 inches of snow if the current storm doesn't change it's track.

Re: Tales of wonders and woes - UC25
 

Nothing quite like bad weather and flu to scuttle the best laid plans - hope you get better quickly Mike and that the weather improves over there so you can all get out a filming. It is really good to see so many familiar faces back again so it would be a real pity if the weather forces you out again!

I hope that this doesn’t mean you are giving up Simon. You have a real flair for putting together an entertaining story and I am absolutely sure you are up to the challenge of making one without those guys!

My story requires quite a lot of short shots of different things so I have been out both weekends so far making the most of the good weather while it lasts. I am not sure if I will stick to this story and use the footage I have so far or not but it is progressing steadily! Next weekend will be the test.

Re: Tales of wonders and woes - UC25
 

Thanks David, will look into that now.

However, it looks like time-lapse wont be necessary as my original 2 projects fell through.

Thanks Marj; I appreciate that. After the first 2 projects fell through I had a fantastic idea for a project that really suited the theme. I contacted the people involved, and once again they were not interested (seemingly they have a policy of not interacting with the media). Drat! Three good ideas in row!

However, just now I have come across another interesting story. I just called the guy up, and success! He wants to meet tomorrow to discuss it. This might work, though I feel I may be 'forcing' the theme a little bit with this idea.

Still; a badly themed video is better than no video at all!

Re: Tales of wonders and woes - UC25
 

Good afternoon,

Well, my first idea plan is dead in the water sense Sheila told me it was more of a blog than a film, she was right again.

As I stood staring out the window into the northern abyss it finally came to me what to do. I actually shot half an hour of video this morning and the idea is starting to fall together. If the weather holds up I might even finish this one!!! But I have to get after it. And, it should be easy to keep under four minutes!! At least a shortened version!!!
It been a long tough winter here is what I saw out my window. Inspiring eh???

Re: Tales of wonders and woes - UC25
 

Mike I hope you're on the road to recovery, I got the late season flu on Feb. 25 and am just now back to 98%.
Simon I went through a star timelapse phase in November of last year and tried all different methods. The RAW photos were about 22Mb each and I needed to convert to JPEG to edit in Vegas. The resulting JPEGs turned out to be 16Mb which is what I can get straight from the camera. I found that for my purposes filming JPEG was the easier route. My big hurdle for stars is my lens which is f3.5, whereas f2.5 and faster is needed for prime results.
I have not been able to wrap my brain around this theme, it seems too big (the theme, not my brain), but I have an inkling of a thought, so we'll see where it takes me. I have a camera, and the great outdoors is waiting to be filmed.

Re: Tales of wonders and woes - UC25
 

UWOL Challenge is a challenge for sure.

Finally I am able to walk normally and to carry my camera gear again, so hopefully I'll be able to film my idea during the Easter week.
The morale is:
Do not fall uncontrolled. It might rip apart your back's muscles, and then it's game over for the next couple weeks. :)

Re: Tales of wonders and woes - UC25
 

Hope you're getting better Trond!

Well, I'm at the location now and will get out to the cave area today. During this week I'll shoot not just one film, that will be two films produced (atleast the shooting). The other film is pretty cool, it will be projected on a 180 degree dome, so everything will be shot with a fisheye. I did some test in the dome yesterday... Freaky.
So one week, one location, two totally different films!

Re: Tales of wonders and woes - UC25
 

Hello everyone.
A misfortune never comes alone.
First I had a trip to the hospital (fortunately on my feet) but ...
Then we got a leak in the living room ceiling.
Attaching a picture of the leak and repair work in progress.
Do not know if I can complete Uwol 25, but will try to deliver something.
I do not know what you are allowed to say in this forum, but leakage is a piece of s....
What Uwol 25 is concerned, I have been working on the script and looked for good locations.
The weather has been fairly good, but after a whole winter without snow,
we suddenly got a snowfall now in the beginning of spring.
We'll see how I get out of this dilemma.
I am very eager to give my contribution to this round.
Hope everyone is doing well and is on track with their contributions.

Re: Tales of wonders and woes - UC25
 

Seems like we got more woes than wonders at the moment.

Geir Inge, hope you get the ceiling repaired real quick. That's a real pain.
Markus, you have an interesting project. I look forward to see the film.

Re: Tales of wonders and woes - UC25
 

Well, I hope you all get better soon!! As well as get something together!!! I always look forward to your submissions!!!!

I actually am capturing some footage I shot this week. We have had a pile more snow and the wind is whipping it around today!! Good day to be in the computer lab!!!



Dale

Re: Tales of wonders and woes - UC25
 

Well, I have a script, a timeline, some archive footage along it, and my subjects in place. I now need some good weather to film the remainig 90%. Fingers crossed that the sun comes out over the next few days. Still smiling though lol !