Well, this is the last of my recent Hawaii videos. One great thing about Hawaii is that there always seems to be a rainbow after a bit of rain. I did post some rainbow video after my last trip earlier this year but as rainbows always seem to bring a smile to everyone’s faces, I figure no harm in adding one more rainbow to the collection!
As promised, here’s another video from my recent trip to Hawaii. This was one was taken at the beach outside the hotel Hale Koa, where I was staying. I had planned to make it a timelapse with the sun slowly dripping over the horizon but the beach was too busy and people kept walking in front of the shot so I eventually gave up and just filmed random scenes instead.
I had two versions made up with different background music but eventually decided on this one as it caught the mood better. Choosing the right music is always a big deal as it can really change the atmosphere of a clip. I have a big collection of royalty free music from Music 2 Hues, which is great as then I can choose music that fits the length of the video almost exactly – all I have to do then is choose which conveys the right mood for me. And that explains why you might sometimes hear the same piece of music on different video clips!
All the shots were filmed with a very lightweight travel Manfrotto tripod that I have but it’s really only good for static shots as there’s not enough accurate control for any other type of shots that I might want to try. It would be great if I could bring a slider with me on these trips but that just takes up too much room and I was already overweight with my luggage anyway!
Hi there! I’ve been a little inactive recently because of numerous overseas trips, with little opportunity to do much filming. I have, however, just come back from another trip to Hawaii and thanks to the jet-lag, I managed to wake up early enough to film a couple of morning timelapses to go along with the one’s I did during my last visit in April this year.
As always, I just let the camera run although I used a higher resolution this time as the morning colours looked fantastic and I really wanted to capture that. For some reason, there was a bit of stutter in the shots this time which I guess may have either been wind shaking the camera or perhaps the occupants of the next hotel room shaking the balcony when they went out to look at the sunrise too. I know it wasn’t me as I went straight back to bed after setting the camera to record! I managed to iron-out most of the stutter in iMovie with the stablization function but it’s still there if you look closely.
I’ll have a few more videos to add from Hawaii and my trip to the UK in the summer over the next few days once I add the final touches to the edits and post them up on Vimeo.
This is the last of the Hawaii videos that I did, and was filmed mostly while visiting Kailua Beach Park, with a few additional clips from the beach facing the so-called Chinaman’s Hat, about 40 mins out of Honolulu..
Although I have another trip planned to Singapore in May, I doubt I’ll have much chance to do any filming so the next big trip will be in July when I visit the UK, so posts may be a bit sporadic for a while unless I can get out and about at the weekends here in Hong Kong.
Although I mentioned in the last post that the weather could have been better while we were in Hawaii, that did have an unexpected benefit, because almost everyday at around 5pm, there was a thunderstorm over the hills and this created some amazing rainbows.
To be honest, the wide angle lens of the Canon XA10 wasn’t quite wide enough to capture the full majesty of these spectacular rainbows so I ended up using my Gopro HD 2 for that (except that I couldn’t really use the footage as I did it hand held and it was far too shaky to use). It did make for a great photo though!
I finally finished all my editing for both the China and Hawaii trips yesterday so I was able to take some of the more useable footage to put together a few shorts for the blog (the family Hawaii video actually lasts more than an hour so is certainly too long to put up on the web, never mind the privacy issues involved).
Waikiki was really a pretty photogenic spot and the Canon XA10 managed to capture the colours pretty well (particularly as I usually have it set at Vivid level 2). The weather could have been better as the water really does become bluer when the sun comes out (it’s still pretty cold for swimming in though!).
I shot this while visiting the Great Wall during my one week visit to Beijing and Tianjin. It was a business trip so I didn’t get as much time to film as I’d hoped but I was lucky with the weather as the day before the pollution in Beijing was so bad that visibility was probably about 20 metres! On the other hand, if I’d gone a day later, it might have been even more impressive as there was a heavy snowfall during the night that blanketed Beijing in a thick layer of snow (in March!).
I’ve been to the Great Wall a few times but this was the first time I got to the Wall by cable car. It was a nerve racking trip (this is China after all!) and I sure wish they cleaned the cable car windows once in a while (most of the opening shots are of dead flies on the window!).
While I was doing some timelapse filming at the beach (see last post), I found out there was a regular fireworks display on the beach every Friday night so I decided to stay to see what it was like. I’m not a big fan of fireworks as I see them so often in Hong Kong but I decided to stay to watch and I’m glad I did as it was a pretty impressive display.
I sure wished that I had two Canon XA10’s though, as filming things like this with a single camera is a bit limiting as you need to miss some good shots either when you zoom in or when you change the camera angle, neither of which you necessarily want to see in the final version. In the end I edited the video and used the zoom transition in iMovie as it (sort of) looks like fireworks. The effect might have been better if iMovie allowed you to do insert editing, which I found to be a really useful function when I used the Casablanca System for my edits.
I initially used “music enhance” for the video to make it sound better but that gets distorted when you upload it so I had to redo the video with standard sound so as not to spoil it. As usual, I used Music 2 Hues, which is royalty free music (once you’ve paid for the collection!) that seems to have enough sound clips with enough variety to fit most videos that I do.
Just got back from a week in Beijing and ten days in Hawaii and I managed to get quite a bit of video footage that I’m now (slowly) in the process of editing. In the meantime, I took the opportunity to do some quick timelapse filming from the hotel balcony in Honolulu, Hawaii and as these are much quicker to edit, I’ve decided to post these up first.
I’ve put all the timelapse shots together but if you want to see slighter slower versions (with different music) of each of the clips you can see them at:
I’ll post some more when I finish doing all the editing 🙂
Just got back from a few days in Singapore and although I didn’t have as much free time as I’d hoped to get out and do some filming, I did manage to shoot a couple of time lapses from my hotel window.
Both were shot at 5bpm to ensure faster downloads and then speeded up in iMovie, with music by Music 2 Hues.
Next stop will be Beijing next week and hopefully there’ll be more chance to get some filming done, so watch this space.
xa10user 