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Chicago Botanic Garden Cosplay Gathering 2012 Video 1

I went to a small cosplay gathering last weekend and took photos as well as video clips. I always talk about trying to spend more time with video, but it usually takes a back seat to my photography. Now that I have the Pentax K-01 mirrorless camera with full video control, I have a bit more motivation to try. This time I think I was moderately successful at getting enough content to work with as well as assembling a solid “cosplay music video.”

I eventually transitioned a lot of my cosplay and convention videos to a different YouTube channel. Here is a compilation…

Various videos spliced together with music compatible with YouTube.

I have enough source material that I should be able to make another one.

Now for some background information…

All of the clips for this video were:

  • Taken with the Pentax K-01 camera.
  • Some clips were with a monopod attached and others were hand held.
  • Clips were recorded in 720P at 60 FPS.
  • With the 14mm f2.8 lens attached.
  • Using Aperture priority mode… I believe around f5.6 to f8.
  • Processed in VirtualDub 1.10.2 with the unofficial FFMpeg driver along with the Deshaker v3 plugin using high bitrate FFMPEG MJPEG compression as the intermediary format for editing. I also down converted the videos to 29.97 FPS.
  • The black bars on the side were necessary. On the right there is an odd vertical visual artifact that’s a few pixels wide that Deshaker adds to all of the clips. I was unable to get rid of it, so I just cover it over with the bars. I think it looks decent and adds my own unique aspect ratio to the video.
  • Once I had a reasonable amount of source material processed with VirtualDub (it takes a long time… 1.5 FPS for the first of two processing passes), I started up Kdenlive to get editing.
  • The song was part of a 77 song pack I licensed from http://danosongs.com.
  • This overall method degrades the source quality and excludes a good deal of the original clips due to various issues. It also changes the original framing a bit depending on how shaky the video was. That being said, the result is somewhat close to what some people spend thousands to achieve on “steady cam” camera rigging setup. I think with more effort in my capture technique, I can improve the good clip rate. I was pretty sloppy with the monopod, but it was my first time using it in this capacity.

Overall I’m pretty happy with the result. 🙂 I have one of the other licensed songs in mind for the second video.

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