I finally found the time to dig into iMovie a little, and edited down the video I shot back in February, flying over Medfield State Hospital.

I’m finding the process of editing down footage is taking some getting used to. I shot about 15 minutes of footage that day, and I was enthralled by it, but as I was editing it, I kept finding that I could cut down long sweeping shots flying over the campus to little two or three second bits, and stitch the bits together.

As I start to get into editing, I’m just now starting to realize that I need to shoot to be edited. This means that I need to make my camera moves gentler — both the up and down gimbal movements, and rotation of the Phantom. I ended up cutting a lot of it out, and using dissolves to cover the transitions. I’m starting to realize that when I want to pull a chunk out of the middle of a sequence, I need to use a transition to cover it; when I go from one subject to entirely different one, I can use a cut. This is something I’ll need to keep in mind when I’m shooting; I don’t need to keep the video camera running continuously.

One final note. I ran the final movie through the Miro video converter to generate different formats  for different browsers. I chose “iPhone 5” as the MP4 format; and there are quite a few video artifacts; you can see a less compressed version here.

Postscript

The video on this page was marked up using a <video> element and multiple <source> elements to provide different browsers different versions of the file; but the link above goes solely to an .mp4 file. Chrome, Firefox, and Opera, as well as Safari were able to view it. Looks like there’s no need for multiple encoding anymore.