So the ident turned out okay, not exactly amazing, but a quick spruce up of the original one, I have an idea for something much more funky, but it’ll take a while to sort it.

It was a lovely sunny day and the kids bikes were liberally scattered round the garden. It doesn’t help that we have more bikes than children (and we have 4 of those!), but that’s because they always seem to be growing into the next one.

Bright sun and dark shade are hard to reproduce in video cameras, unless you pay serious money, so that was one of the things I was testing, how far can you go? The end shot is a little blown out, but I wanted to keep some information in the shadows.

I also wanted to practise some focus pulling and creating smooth ‘dolly’ shots with with my Glidetrack slider (http://www.glidetrack.com/) – I’ll be reviewing some of my kit at some point soon.

The video was edited and coloured in Sony Vegas 8 (The link is for version 9, which I haven’t upgraded to yet). I like this program for editing, audio and quick ‘treatments’. But Adobe Premiere and After Effects are much better for more complex video alteration/creation – the ident was done in After Effects CS3 (Again I don’t quite have the dosh to upgrade yet).

Testing cameras, techniques and your own capabilities is really important. You get good at something through practise, whether that be music, photography or video. So what am I doing writing this? Better get creative…