The official premier of my first coaster clip!

**link no longer avaliable**sorry! is the link to my first public broadcast. I really dont know how to word it but im pretty excited because i feel that im getting closer and closer to my goals. The clip is of Top Gun the jet coaster at paramount's carowinds. Its a 2 minute 40 sec clip featuring on ride and off ride footage. I tried to be professional as possible! Enough of my babble theres the link and please leave comments and suggestions!

I was gonna enter it into the video contest but I have already made the DVD for that and didnt wanna make a whole new DVD for the clip...but its never too late

Another thing the link is only avaliable until thrusday because the site only leaves it there for transfer for a week so hurry!!

Very nice shots of the ride! How did you get so much footage of empty trains? Do you work at the park?

nah dont work there.....its depends on the times you go sometimes it can be dead im certain areas and other times the line can be wrapped around to the exit. That particular day was season pass holders preview.

That was pretty good. Did you use a tripod?

yeah they help! luckly parks let me bring it in. Its not huge but I do get some slack from the security but they are just doing their job.

I really liked the shots, steady and interesting. My only advice is to look into cutting down that 62 MB file size.

thanks man, I tried to retain a good quality but I dont know at what rate will it still mantain a good quality but be a smaller file. Any suggestions?

If I did I would be putting out my own videos... after I got a camera.

You may want to ask Robb. I hear he has put out a few.

Link's dead.

Crap. I really wanted to see it too (cause anything that makes Carowinds interesting is worth a look!).

The link is fixed and ready for downloading!

I thought it was pretty good. It makes me miss Top Gun. I'd recommend more action with the camera though. More pans and tilts, zooms and such. It adds energy to the video in my opinion.

Don't go with a smaller file size! If you got the bandwidth leave it huge. My 6mb line doesn't mind, and I hate downloading video in crappy resolutions. If its going to be 13 MB already go ahead and leave it 60...as long as you can afford it

EDIT: Great video, but this was clearly the time to feature Take My Breath Away.

thanks for the feedback its really appreciated. I dont know too many coasters that can pull off a slow song like that but hey its nothing like trial and error!

trial and error!

Speaking of trial and error -- if you want to bring down your file size but not the quality, try fooling with MPEG4. I've gotten some very interesting results. Also this week (or next) Apple will introduce a new version of Quicktime. The codec to look for is H264. Its part of the MPEG 4 standard -- its supposed to be up to 4x better than standard MPEG 4 - PLUS its scalable.

As for me, I don't mind high bandwidth sizes at all -- as long as they don't waste megabites (i.e. uncompressed, or poorly compressed).

Nice video, I LOVE that you've got it in good quality. Nice and professional.

I dare you to get an HDV camcorder lol. Those are so sweet! I want one.

Again, great job -- here's what I'm talking about in terms of compression.

I got the video down to 17mb:

Its Top Gun! Me Miss Top Gun!

Beautiful video Jarmor. It made the Top Gun look like a true work of art. Very asthetically pleasing vid.

Becareful what you ask for! I went and did some trial and error to see how you can make one video into a totally different video. I did add a few more clips that wasn't featured in the first video however, I took out the on-ride footage just to see if I can make a good coaster video w/o on-ride footage.

And the tune top gun roars to is.....you guess it! "take my breath away". It was risky but I think I pulled it off pretty well!!

As always tell me how you feel about the video and tell me what could have been better and also what was good about it!!

HERE

sigh...

First I wanted to strangle you for sticking Danger Zone in my head.

Now I have to figure out a way to get to sleep with that damn Berlin song in my head.

Well done. I still question if you made Carowinds interesting (then again, Spielberg probably couldn't make Carowinds interesting to me), but I think you put it all together really nicely. It certainly helped that you had a beautiful day to work with, and you managed to incorporate just enough of the sky to bring that in.

I will deduct a point for using the same shot twice in a row (not the exact same shot, but awful close) at around the 28 second mark. It's the shot where the train passes over the building (which, it must be noted, was a helluva nice shot).

Then again, we're just finishing our first video here, so all criticism must be taken with a big ole honking grain of salt.

But be warned - if you bust out another Top Gun video with "Playing With the Boys," I will have to hunt you down. This town ain't that big.

(god, I'm embarassed that I used to own that soundtrack - I guess the "Karate Kid" soundtrack is a notch lower, right?).

(I lied. I still listen to it while wearing my Members Only jacket with the collar turned up (anyone who gets that obscenely obscure reference gets five points)).

thanks for the feedback. the reason for the seemingly double clips is that I wanted tthe clip to coincide w/ the song. Notice how during the "climatic" point of the verses it features the fusing/fading clips together whereas on the rest of the video it has fade out/black/fade in. It sounds a bit confusing but I wanted to be like that coaster was "dancing" with the song!.

Yeah, I definately noticed how you were very consciously changing the transitions based on what the song was doing - a very nice touch.

And I completely understand what you're saying in regards to why you used the double-takes - my problem was that it felt a bit like a jump cut for some reason. Ultimately my problem is that I have traditional editing techniques wedged in the back of my head and sometimes I have a hard time cutting it off (this almost led to an argument while editing our video - we were using two separate sections of the same coaster back to back, and I didn't like it because it wasn't ride-accurate (one was from the beginning of the ride, one was from later in the ride). Finally, my girlfriend just had to smack me and tell me to stop thinking so damn linear).