James Stier

On one of our latest project we have been testing out some new equipment specially geared towards vehicles. This has been in preparation for and up and coming adventure project but its also been an ambition of mine for some time now. We produced a promo for the new Seat Ibiza SC Sport using some new suction mounts from Manfrotto and some supports provided by Hauge.

Hauge are a UK based company who supplied the jib, mounts and the cups.

One of the rigs we used is the double suction mount. We shot using an SLR, allowing us to keep the weight down which was fixed on to a plate attached to the main bar of the rig. The cups can can be attached to any flat non-porous surface, we could run with one or two mounts but for added safety I would recommend using two any external shots, we used a single mount for some of the interiors.

Speaking of safety, we hooked up the camera to the mount using carabiner clips as the weakest part of the rig is the plate. The mounts themselves, as expected are solid and are made by Manfrotto, as long as the surface is clean and flat removal of the mounts is near impossible until you break the seal intentionally.

The camera plate is a good size which supports the camera over a greater area preventing any movement in the camera’s plastic casing. A double ball bracket, along with the tubular structure, enable the camera to be mounted in a variety of positions with relative ease. This does depend on the vehicle, a Land Rover Defender for example would be ideal, as was the old style Honda Civic Sport we used as the second car, the Ibiza was very curvy and proved to be more of a challenge to get the angels we required.

Overall the mounting solution performed amazingly well. More info here.

There has been a problem with exporting H.264 from QuickTime (QT) for a few years. The issue hasn’t been addressed directly by Apple, however a few work around do exist. While in the process of updating some older video footage to H.264 for web distribution I experimented with x.264, a faster and more versatile codec for QuickTime and Final Cut Pro Conversion.

You can download it at MacUpdate , I found it wasn’t that much faster, actually quite slower by some margin but it does prevent the gamma increase.

Some other solutions can be found at www.videocopilot.net and at the www.provideocoalition.com

Any questions give me a shout, thought it might be useful :)
James.

Just through I would bring together a few links to showcase some cool little the videos that are cropping up all over the web.

1st up, a great little project by Tom and Mark, thanks guys.

HP – invent from Tom and Matt on Vimeo.

Wolf and Pig is Stop-motion coolness by Taijin Takeuchi who sends 2D frames scampering all around 3D space.

The main video player I use is by far VLC, its been a beta version for an eternity but finally has been released as 1.0 with a predicted 4 million downloads within the first month of release.

This major release introduces many new features, new formats and new codecs to the VLC multimedia framework and fixes a very high number of bugs that were present in the 0.9.x or 0.8.6 versions.

The VLC project only lives with volunteers and would love help from new users and contributors: time, code, hardware and money would help us a lot. You don’t need to be a developer to help.

More info can be found at: http://www.videolan.org

Recently we began working with the NFP group, Youth Momentum. During the course of the project we got to know the management team and their ambitions; what was inspiring to see was the motivation, commitment and drive each of them had for the development of a young person. They aim to support young people from all communities by forging international links and programmes that promote understanding, creativity and respect, all of which will eventually filter into the communities the participants are from.

For a better explanation of what and who Youth Momentum are check out: www.youthmomentum.org

James.