Taekwondo

Some Pictures

I shoot with what I have. I just used my Nikon 18~70 mounted on my only DSLR, that's the lowly D70. The camera can be a noise machine. Oh well, what you going to do. I needed a faster shutter speed in low light so the only option I had was to crank up the ISO which inevitably introduced noise to the pictures. The D70 is a general purpose DSLR for photo enthusiast, the AF is fast but not like D3 or D300 kind of fast and by today's standard, it's rather feeble. Anyway enough excuses. Sometimes, I do think, may be it would be better off just to switch off the AF and focus it myself. Given the subject distance from the camera and the focal length of the lens, I don't believe focusing is that critical. And I think I did get away with some lousy focusing without making the pictures too bad. Of course, that's my opinion. I didn't bring my Nikon 80~200 so there is no close-up shots.

Taekwondo

note: with repeat slow motion and zoom in.

(52 second video with audio, if you use Firefox 3 or even 2 under Ubuntu 8.04, it may crash your browser. Notice that it takes two guys to hold the board when Harry strikes, he generates so much force with his pint sized body.)

This is done by Kino. Unfortunately the interface and functionalities leave something to be desired. I was trying to mix a sound track, but alas, it wasn't doing it right. The video was slowing down even I didn't check the speed and the sound became garbled. And when I went back to edit mode, the speed of the whole project went up. So that was weird. I closed the entire project and re-opened and it at least then played normal. So forget about mixing a sound track and do the opening and closing credit, I just rendered the the dv to MPEG. I did the first run IN MPEG1, which gave me a smaller file 8MB but longer rendering. And this MPEG2 took shorter to render but got a much bigger file, 23MB. Enjoy.

Taekwondo

Mom, this is especially for you.

(The video is about 1:27 minute long, the audio is kind of loud I think, maybe because I am using a pair of earphones to edit ....)

Just whipped up this short video using Windows Movie Maker. The original was shot using a Canon G3. I can't suck the video out using Vista as there is no driver for my old G3. Ubuntu is my friend, so it sucked out the AVI video OKAY. But unfortunately kino can't edit the AVI. So I just have to move the AVI back to my VISTA notebook over my wifi by dancing some samba and did some quick and dirty video editing on my notebook. The Windows Media Maker wasn't all that bad for what I tried to do, until I tried to render or what Windows call publish the video. I just clicked publish and the notebook started thinking ... then I went to take a shower. When I was done showering like 10 minutes later, it was still thinking and then I noticed the title bar says not responding. Good thing I saved the project first before publishing. The second time I tried to publish, it went okay but the only format I can publish to was WMV. I was like where is my mpeg? Anyway, Google is okay with wmv. So wmv it is. Enjoy.