Still Video

One of the things that I have been experimenting with lately is editing video and timelapse photography (two things I guess). Video has always intrigued me; I am the guy who watches every bit of extra footage on the DVD as well as watch the movie again with all the commentary. I find cinema to be the perfect unity of image, sound and story. It was always a working goal of mine to eventually purchase a descent video camera along with some video editing software. Somehow I recently discovered that my computer came with Apple iMovie, simple but perfectly good software for editing basic videos. At the same time I also discovered that I can use images taken with my still camera as frames in my movies.

If you don't know what that means check out this bit of technosmarts: a movie is a series of still images presented in rapid succession to give the appearance of motion. Video cameras do almost the exact same thing as still cameras. A still camera takes a high quality image every once in a while. A video camera takes lower quality pictures constantly. Once in a while & constantly, and high quality & lower quality, are all relative terms. But you get the basic idea.

Practically speaking a "movie" is a sequence of about 25 images displayed in succession every one second. At that speed the human brain is unable to distinguish the transition from one image to the next. When recording motion in "real time" our camera only needs to be able to capture 25 images per second. Because each image is viewed for such a short period of time it is unnecessary for the image to be of a very high quality. This explains a typical video camera. But just because we want the viewer to watch a movie at 25 images, or frames, per second does not require us to capture those images at 25 frames per second. If we are taking pictures of something that does not move it makes no difference how long we take to capture our frames. And if we capture something that moves very slowly we are able to speed it up significantly by playing it back at a faster rate than it was captured. Imagine I take a picture of myself each day for 25 days. The first day I shave right before taking the picture and do not shave for the remainder of the project. At the end of the 25 days I make a movie using those 25 images. The movie is only one second long but in that one second I have grown a full beard! The creative potential is endless.

Over the last few months my mind has been spinning with the myriad ways I can utilize this technique. Over the next few months I will share with you snippets of many project that I am working on, many of which utilize timelapse photography. Below is a video I wanted to share with you today that demonstrates how I embellish a limited edition giclée canvas print of one of my paintings. I believe timelapse is the perfect way to showcase the amount of effort that it takes me to transition a print from start to finish.

Please let me know what you think. Let me know if you can even see the video below. If you can't please click on the link to watch the video at it's source. Let me know exactly how smoothly it runs on your computer. I look forward to your feedback.

Thanks!

Embellished Giclée from M.Kruter on Vimeo.