Control Geek

Welcome Gothamist and Severe Studios readers!

As of midnight NYC time, there have been almost 1600 unique visitors here, and over 4200 views of the video!

Wow, while I was at two parties (one my own) yesterday and doing some christmas shopping, I started getting emails from friends in London and Las Vegas who had seen the video!  It made it onto Huffington Post, and even Gawker!

And WCBS TV 2 here in NYC contacted me yesterday and they aired it on the 6pm news!

As of this writing, the video has more than 28,000 views, and this page has had more than 3,000 unique visitors!  That's in about two days, and is almost equal to my Seeing Sound Waves video which is now up to 35,000 views.

33,000 views!

Wow, 45,000 views!

"Rickey Yaneza" emailed in and asked how I shot this time lapse.  I've done a lot of experimenting, and have come up with the following method:

• I shoot individual medium size JPG files on two different cameras.  I let the camera auto-expose, but I set the focus manually--otherwise, there are weird image size changes that come up. I have a Nikon P6000 which has a built in interval timer when shooting in "P" mode.  The only problem with this unit is that its minimum shooting interval is 30 seconds, which is too long for things like thunderstorm development.  I also have a D90 and use a separate intervalometer for that, but I just bought it a few months ago and haven't had time to shoot any storms with it.
• I take the individual frames and assemble them using a program called Handy AVI and using the PIC Video M-JPEG encoder.
• This creates a large but very high quality file, which oftens looks "steppy".  I then open the file in Quicktime Pro and then save that using Quicktime Pro's H.264 encoder.
• For this video, I then used Windows Movie Maker to add the titles and posted it to Vimeo.

I've arrived at this process after a lot of experimentation, but this is WAY too complicated; if anyone has any suggestions to streamline it, let me know.