Making Movies

I’ve been wanting to try make some simple documentation videos for a while now and as I’m generally a Mac user I’ve been attempting to learn how to use the basic features of iMovie. Luckily enough, I recently managed to capture Tom Wyatt and Thomas Greer showing off their Nerf gun project so used that as the basis for my first video as it seemed like a nice easy starting point.

I was using a Samsung Galaxy Nexus so it’s not the best quality video out there and it’s a bit shaky despite my attempts at using post processing video stabilisation but I think it’s not too bad for a first attempt at using the software and making videos. It’s definitely worth noting though that if you attempt to use iMovie’s video stabilisation on a mp4 format video file it will error during the last stages of the process so you have to first convert the file to another format if you want to make use of that feature, which is a rather annoying and a major time waste (especially as the error doesn’t tell you why it didn’t work and you end up having to Google the problem).

After that I turned to something I thought would be a little harder, turning some older pictures I had taken using a GoPro HD Hero2 into a time lapse video. The GoPro comes with a configurable mode for taking time lapse shots and I had used this set on an interval of 30 seconds to capture Heather constructing her Ice Tube Clock. It was a bit fiddly getting the resulting pictures to work properly in iMovie since it defaults to crop and transition over any used photograph rather than just simply display them and the software seemed a bit flaky when telling it to “Fit” (what you have to set in order to prevent the croppy-transition-ness) on a large selection of pictures but I got it to work in the end. In all, the build took about 3 hours and the resulting video was roughly 1 minute 10 seconds long.

There are probably better programs out there than iMovie but, for now, it does what I want so the learning continues…