The first time I went to St Hilaire du Touvet was for the Coupe D’Icare event which is held every September. It is a mountain film festival and parapente competition. The second time I went was with Glocals friends to climb up the via ferrata. There are two routes up. One is an easier one. The second is a hard one. What makes the second one so hard is that it’s vertical, up a chimney of sorts. What made me uncomfortable was the friable nature of the rock. I thought that if I fell the spikes would not hold. A few weeks later I found out that this is one of the hardest via ferrata, supposedly the hardest via ferrata in France.
The video above is nothing like that. They’re climbing up the beautiful waterfall that the via ferrata goes along. I was attracted by the width of the water fall.
Six thousand steps later and I’ve created yet another track via the Sports tracker application for the N95. What’s fun is that within a few seconds of arriving home I can bluetooth the KML file to my laptop, open it in google earth and I’ve got an arerial view of the wintery walk I took
If I could get a wintery map then it’d be perfect as the ground is covered in snow.
Update: I tested the “upload to service” and that’s interesting too. All the tracks are stored there and you can upload images and more. If you know a few people using the service you can compare your tracks with them. Failing that you can share with the world and see what they’ve added.
A few years ago I said that I would upgrade my mac book pro when apple came out with a dual display laptop where the keyboard is a touchscreen display that changes to suit the application in use.
Two days ago I had a change of heart. I do not expect Apple to come out with such a device. I have set my sites on a different idea. An edit suite which requires VR goggles to use. The edit suite could be used either by standing people or sitting people. Turn your eyes to the left and you see the rushes. You would have a choice. The rushes could be shown as keyframes on a board or as film strips. Motion feedback gloves would be worn that provide tactile feedback. Double click and the selected clip appears in the player window. With current editing systems keyboard shortcuts are learned and memorised by editors to avoid using the mouse. In this case specific finger positions would be short cuts. You could trim, splice, insert, overwrite, make multiclips and more. Sound and vision could be faded as if using physical controls.
Imagine multicamera editing in Final Cut VR. The setup would be like in an OB van except that you’re in an edit suite or in a park. You could even be sitting in the back seat of a car. The beauty of such a setup is that monitors and displays could eventually be removed from the desk to be replaced with goggles and a pair of gloves.
This means that the same edit suite could have a virtual 64 channel audio mixing board for sound technicians, colour correction wheels for colour graders, vision mixing console for vision mixers and standard video editing controls for video editors. In theory we could go back to the jug/shuttle controls from linear editing days.
I now look forward to seeing whether Avid, Apple or Adobe come out with the first virtual audiovisual creation suite. Imagine how immersive the experience would be. Enjoy the notion that this virtual environment will allow you to stand or sit down.
Rain and the Gear 360 are well suited to the weather we are currently subjected to in Switzerland. For the past month and a half we have had rain almost every single day. As a result of this it has limited the number of opportunities to go out and get 360 footage.
360 camera rigs are not designed for rain. Most 360 rigs involve at least six non weatherproof cameras and rigs that are designed for dry rather than wet conditions. To go out in this rain would drown the equipment. With additional funds you could film in these conditions with weatherproof gear but the cost increases. Add to this that camera systems like the Ricoh Theta S prefer clear skies and nice weather for taking video and you see that it is not really worth the effort.
By the end of September the Samsung Gear 360 should provide us with a simple to carry, weatherproof 360 camera which could be fun to take canyoning (if they make a specialist housing) or hiking for doing other sports activities where weather proofing is a useful feature. The trend to make devices at least splash proof is good.
Another nice feature of this camera is the ability to use 200 gigabyte SDHC cards. with these cards you can record for hours. When the card is full or when you’re changing location you can change cards in seconds and continue working on a project. With the Ricoh Theta S you can record for 45 minutes before you need to transfer the footage, clear the memory and start recording again.
With 200 gigabytes of storage one concept that I would love to test is 360° time lapse videos. You could fix the camera to your bike, to a canoe or to some other object and set it to take a picture at regular intervals. So far I have not seen a mention of an interval recording mode but with 200 gigabytes you can record for hours without worrying about storage. You could change the speed in post production.
This camera records in UHD rather than HD quality. Video recording is at a resolution of 3840×1920. 360 videos taken with this camera should be more pleasant to view as a result.
The 360° video eco-system is still in it’s infancy and most 360 video solutions require people to use a number of cameras. Both Samsung and Ricoh provide all in one solutions along with software to stitch the images ready for post production. They are helping to democratise the medium both by making production cheaper but also by enabling people to produce content. This increase in content will encourage more people to get VR goggles which in turn will justify increasing the budget of 360 video production budgets. It will go from being a niche product to being mainstream.