I have to agree the After Winter video is just great. Loved the winter to spring transitions. Care to give a little tutorial on how its done or point me to a youtube video on the process?
Read the youtube comments including the replies. He mentions "how" there.
I would like to learn more, though, like you.
Thanks for your comments. I know this topic is outside the original post, but I'll respond to your request for "how did he do that?" I revisited my comments on After the Winter on YouTube and I don't think they are descriptive enough.
I love the challenge of producing scene transitions over a long period of time. After the Winter took about 6 months to produce.
1) For high altitude shots (> 200 ft), I used a waypoint mission to establish a starting location. Then manually set my camera yaw position and elevation by placing the center cross in camera view to a chosen, repeatable, distant land mark (hill, tree, whatever). Then proceeded to record and manually fly forward. For other locations where I was flying sideways or on an arc, I used a multipoint waypoint mission entirely, hoping for sufficient alignment. There is significant variability in using waypoints and so a lot of shots were unusable.
2) For low altitude shots (< 100 ft) where I was filming trees, bushes, country wooded road, and the barn, I established a repeatable starting location by putting a stake in the ground... something I could easily find later on and did not interfere with activities on the property. The most obtrusive one was a 3 foot painted stake in the middle of my neighbors yard near his barn. For each location, I then recorded via a screen shot on my iPad the alignment of the center cross with a repeatable landmark. Before each flight weeks later, I referred to these screen shots to setup each shot. Then I hovered over the stake, set my camera angle and yaw direction, I put it in tripod mode and flew manually. I would take several shots at each location and select the one that offered the best alignment.
3) At one or two locations, I flew manually based on pure memory of what I flew a few months ago. Pure luck that they matched good enough.
To produce a fade transition in FCPX, I would overlay one clip upon the other and perform an XY repositioning transformation to align objects in the field of view, ignoring any black borders that may be created due to shifting of the image. After matching the series of clips, I would then create a compound clip (merging everything in a single clip), then zoom in to remove any black boarders.
If you are so inclined, I have other examples of transition videos that you might like. On the "RadioFlyerMan" YouTube channel, take a look at "The Catch", "Breaking Green" and "Flight Through Time". They are not to the same caliber as After the Winter, but good enough.
Aerial Videography
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