I shot a bunch of photo’s on Friday last week, one of them is up on magicseaweed now, and a few more will feature in my forthcoming post about the new manual control script I used to make sure I got in focus shots from my 28mm f2.8 lens. But I also shot a whole load of video using the GoPro hero 3+ Black edition camera on top of my housing.
This time around I was using it in 1080p, 60fps mode with the medium field of view option, this gave me an angle which was a bit wider than the 28mm lens offered, perfect for capturing some video whilst I shot stills.
I purposely tried to keep the camera housing as steady as possible when shooting video but still managed to swing it away from the subject after the still the sequence was done a few times, when you’re looking through the view finder taking photo’s it makes it harder to remember to keep filming even after the moment has passed, to make sure you get enough of a clip for useful editing.
After looking at the footage it was clear I wasn’t going to be editing a masterpiece with it, but I had an idea this morning when browsing Instagram that I could probably pick out 15 seconds worth of footage for my first Instagram video, so the footage wouldn’t go to waste.
Here’s the result of a quick edit in Adobe Premiere, there’s a good tutorial here so you can dial in the best settings, but I had to tweak it using some of the settings in the comments from Matt V to get it to work with my android based Nexus 7 tablet: http://whoismatt.com/instagramexportsettings/
I also wanted to give it the nice white letterboxes that you see a lot on widescreen Instagram videos, I chose to do this by creating a simple 640 x 640px file in photoshop and making white bars for the top and bottom with a transparent 16 x 9 gap in the middle, that way I could manoeuvre my 1080p file underneath it to get the best possible portion of the image in frame.
Here are the exact export settings I used to get this video up using my Nexus 7 tablet:
That gave me a 3.8mb file that I downloaded to my Nexus 7, then I had to navigate to the file and “share” it via instagram, I couldn’t upload it via the button inside the app for some reason.
I’ll probably do a few more of these videos now I’ve figured out how to do it, it’s nice to use the footage from a session as well as the still images and it’s a nice challenge to convey the spirit of a session in the 15 second format.
TIP: if you’ve spent a while getting it to look right in Premiere, don’t be tempted to add a filter to it, the one I chose blew out all the highlights, so I had to delete it and re-upload.