chew valley video

Recently I’ve been enjoying shooting little video clips with my lumix lx100 it’s perfect as it’s tiny, has a built in zoom, can record 4k and I can film directly in my favourite ratio of 4:3.

I’m learning as I go at the moment, just trying to focus on small compositions where I can take advantage of scenes with natural movement.

The main thing I’ve learnt is that for this type of videos, I can’t shoot handheld. The stabilisation on the lumix isn’t good enough, and even holding very still isn’t enough to avoid a wobbly video. There are options in davinci resolve to stabilise the footage, and this can work surprisingly well, but I found anything with strong foreground elements doesn’t work, as they stay locked, but the background continues to sway behind, giving it this weird uncanny effect. Plus any stabilisation comes at the cost of cropping and reducing resolution.

A quick comparison to show what I mean with the stabilisation problem, this is from my first visit where I didn’t bring a tripod. First clip is footage straight out of the camera, and the second is with digital stabilisation.

Now that I need to bring a tripod, the small size and weight of the lumix really comes into it’s own. I can fit the camera and tripod in my bag, with room to spare for all the various other bits that a dog and a toddler require, without it becoming unbearably heavy. I’m usually shooting opportunistically on dog walks or other outings, so keeping everything as light as possible is a real benefit.

The other thing I’ve learnt is noise is a real issue, any sort of wind quickly renders the built-in mic unusable. The long term the solution is to buy a dedicated mic or sound recorder, but for the meantime I scouted some suitable sounds from the bbc sound effects archive and used those in place of the recorded sound.