Ottawa By Night

[RSS users, please click through to the blog so you can view the video.]

As regular readers of the blog are aware, I’ve toyed around many times with time-lapse videos made with my DSLR cameras. This past weekend in Ottawa, I decided to be a bit more ambitious and make a video with a little variety instead of the static scenes I usually shoot.

The majority of this video was shot in about three hours on the grounds and surroundings of Parliament Hill. Over 4,000 frames garnered me about 90 seconds of footage, which I edited down to 1m25s including intro and outro titles, music, and a few seconds of regular non-time-lapse HD video.

The big swath of fire in the video is known as the Centennial Flame.

Everything was shot on a Nikon D300S with battery grip, set on a Manfrotto tripod. As good as the tripod is, the wind kicked up some fierce gusts that night, which resulted in some video jitter on the longer (200mm) shots.

After tweaking the photos in Lightroom and cropping to 16:9, I pulled each batch of JPEGs into QuickTime Player 7 Pro, which output my working movie files. I used iMovie to glue the whole mess together with movies and titles. I’d never used iMovie for anything more complicated than adding a soundtrack to existing video, but I found the whole process incredibly easy.

Now that I’m a lot more comfortable with the editing process, I have a strong inclination to make one of these vids featuring Toronto… We’ll see.

Music: “Yeah (Pretentious Version)” by LCD Soundsystem

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