Biking videos…dipping my toe

Composite – sorry to keep asking questions but you clearly know a fair bit about this and I’m hoping it’s an easy enough question to answer…

The Drift HD can film in 1080 or 720 – I’m thinking 720 is what I’m after, the lens is 170 degree affair – which I think is pretty much a fish eye. If I film at 720 with 60fps the viewing angle reduces to 127 degrees – this obviously gives a narrower field of vision, but will that also reduce the fish-eye affect on objects closer to the camera?

I’m thinking (just now) that 720 @ 60fps is the way to go and hopefully will show a more realistic sense of speed (or my lack of!).

Sorry for the questions, but figure as the users on this site tend to produce biking films, then it makes sense to ask my questions here…if anyone has another website that can answer my questions in a way a complete idiot (me) can understand then please let me have the links.

I’ve now got on here on a PC is broadband and I’m watching some of these videos…all very good but a huge variety in them.
Thanks.

Composite – thanks for the feedback, appreciated. I used adobe premiere elements 9 to edit, took a while to get the software working well (brand new quad core i7 was struggling to run it, but dont go there 🙂 and also marrying the input footage levels to the available presets) and learning the app itself was a bit frustrating, but seems powerful enough once you get the hang of it.

I was pretty disappointed when i viewed the vid at work today and when i first saw it on my iphone too – very dark. The adobe premiere software allows you to drop preset effects onto each clip which you can then adjust, which is a bind with 28 clips for a 3 min video. I dropped the brightness and contrast effect onto all those clips, so i’m not sure if it has made it better or worse. like i say it was looking fine on my laptop screen when running on mains, so I will need to have a look at some form of calibration or colour correction as the vid looks bad now. I’ll have a gander at the 3 way colour correction though – thanks for the tip!.

just need to get out riding more and get some good footage to edit up…

oh, does anyone know of any 64 bit apps that can take advantage of a new machines power? possibly the most disappointing thing i found about APE9 was that its a 32 bit app, so all that memory and power can’t be used. It does render quickly right enough 🙂

@DickBarton No worries about the questions fella, a forum is for conversation isn’t it? 🙂 To clarify on your camera 1080p is 170degrees and 720p is 127degrees? If this is right then I would imagine the following is true. The sensor in the camera is actually picking up 1920×1080 pixels so to make a 1280×720 pixels image it only uses the middle of the sensor and “crops” the picture. So you lose some of image and so the field of view appears to be smaller. Generally speaking barrel distortion (the fish eye effect) is worse towards the edges of the image but those are being cropped so you should loose the worse of it around the edges. You will still get some distortion in the centre though as its still the same lens.

@davidrussell The problem with brightness/contrast is that when you brighten the image it brightens everything so the colours go grey and so on. You then up the contrast to bring the colours back but then you lose the detail in the picture. You could maybe tweak saturation as well to put the colour back but be really careful and use it subtly. Any sort of colour correction where you can isolate the mid tomes is really what you are after though.