Biking Video

Back about a month ago, I wrote about our two year old grandson getting a new bicycle from Gee and Papa for his birthday.  Liza and Ace spent the morning with us before we all headed to a local park.  After eating some breakfast, we went for a walk while Ace rode along on his new bike.  I shot a lot of photos during this relatively short outing and I shared about two dozen photos here in another blog entry.  

I decided to revisit all of those original photos that I captured that day to see if it would be worthwhile trying to put the photos together as individual frames of a video.  I actually got this idea for a video while looking at images of one of Kenzie's figure skating sessions.  As I was scrolling through these images, I noticed that when I scrolled through the photos quickly, it was just like watching an old home movie.  "Hmmmm....  I wonder if I can put these photo together as a video?"

I opened up my video editing software to see if I could figure out how to line up all these photos as individual video frames and then run through the frames as quickly as the relatively low framerate of an old 8mm home movie from the 1950s through the 1980s.  I knew that the old home movies had a relatively low framerate (only in the 16-18 frames per second) so that was good because that would be easy to come close to replicating.  This lower frame rate tended to cause some flicker and jitter (or maybe jumping would be a better term) from frame to frame.  If I could get the framerate just right and add some extra filmic features such as skewed color (or black and white), flicker and jitter, then I could make the stack of images look just like an old home movie.  I thought that would be kind of cool for something that would be a family-only type of video anyway.  

I also understand that for those who didn't grow up in the 1950s through the 1980s, this sort of video would probably come across as defective or just plain bad.  I did grow up in that time period and I shot a lot of 8mm footage (as well as Super 8) myself during that time period so, for me, this is nostalgic.  Don't get me wrong, I still prefer today's digital video but there was something about the simplicity of those old 8mm movie cameras...  then physically cutting and splicing film footage to create the finished home movie.

As far as putting all these high resolution still images together to create a video, it is also worth noting is that these images were each 24 megapixels in size (compared to the usual 2mp of Full HD video)...  so this would create a 12K video resolution.  Those are HUGE files for video.  I knew this would put a tremendous strain on my computer (and it did) but it was worth a try.  I figured I would render the video(s) in 4K by downsizing them.  Going from 12K down to 4K should provide some nice video.  

I did render two videos in 4K but the resulting video file sizes were still a bit large (a two minute video ate up half a gigabyte of data space) which could cause some problems for some people's computers, tablets and phones so I decided to render them in Full HD instead.  Almost all of my videos on Vimeo are in Full HD anyway so I figured I should stick with that.  The few videos that I have previously rendered in 4K didn't stream so smoothly on many devices so I wanted to avoid that... well, for now, until the average processing power is more significant.  Eventually, everyone will have devices capable of streaming upwards of 12K video but that is definitely not today.  In the meantime, I'll continue with Full HD video. 

So, late last night, I put together a video comprised of solely 24mp still images of Ace on his new bike.  That took a bit of time and was a bit tedious but the results were surprisingly good so, this morning, I started working on a video of one of Kenzie's latest figure skating lessons and practice sessions.  By lunchtime, I had both videos completed and rendered.  (I'll share the video of Kenzie in another blog entry.)  

For this blog entry, I'll add this newly created type of nostalgic video below...  sort of like a stop-motion animation of Ace on his new bike.  This is certainly no replacement for standard digital video footage at a smooth motion picture 24 frames per second but it is a nice alternative with a nod to nostalgic 8mm home movies.  I'm liking this old home movie look!

Here is the video...