More video experiments...

[GaryHinshaw]

Love the revised version too, especially in full screen.  It's really hard to believe this is N scale!

BTW, I didn't mean to suggest that getting larger DOF was *easy*, but you probably knew that.  If you could pull it off, it would transform an outstanding video to a truly stunning one.

-gfh

[milw156]

When I saw Daryl's comment about a crash at the end, I was sure it was going to involve Nate! sound effects were pretty cool, wanted to slap that alarm clock into next week!
Rick

[Dave Schneider]

Who makes that gas station?

As mentioned earlier, Depots by John. It is the only commercial kit from the very cool Zachow Historic Project.
http://www.depotsbyjohn.com/Zachow/zachow_historic_project.htm

Extremely cool video Jamie! Would have looked better with a Milwaukee Road engine, but very nice!

Best wishes, Dave

[sirenwerks]

Jamie,

Excellent work! The sound was great; but you missed a couple opportunities that would have a foley artist pulling his hair out (the shop and stream). More!

[BCR 570]

Depth of field is an issue that is hard to overcome for the same reason we have to use Helicon focus to overcome the depth of field issues in photography. I did a number of experiments using a digital SLR, a standard video camera, a GoPro video camera and a point and shoot. It is possible going wider angle to get some improvements in the depth of field but then you end up with a lot of extraneous crap on the periphery getting into frame. The other way to try and improve depth of field is to adjust aperture down to F22 or smaller. However that means the amount of light coming into the camera sensor is greatly reduced which manifests itself in lots of noise/artifact in the shadows and dark areas. So with the 35mm 1.8 that I filmed this with, I settled on F14 as a compromise between depth of field and low-light noise. This is an improvement over the 60mm Macro lens I shot with in the past. I'd also like to experiment with a few other lenses that I have.

This is the biggest drawback for most model railway videos I have seen to date, so I was interested to read of your experiments.  The best solution might be to stop down as much as the lens will allow and put lots of light on the subject (which probably explains why you always see professional film and video people using so much additional light).

This not withstanding, your modelling and videography are very nice work.


Tim

[bbussey]

Very nice.  The depth-of-field is going to be a tough issue to resolve no matter what methods are tried.  The slider is neat, but at $600+ it's a budget-buster for home equipment.

[lashedup]

Just added an A/B comparison video of the color graded footage versus the raw footage out of the camera. Some people were curious, so I stitched it together.

Not a valid vimeo URL
Also, the original video has been replaced with a slightly newer version without the theatrics at the end.

- jamie