So, just did my first paid action sports gig (well, I didn't just do it, but it just got online) with my FX7, an amateur BMX contest for Gatorade/Alliance of Action Sports up in Petaluma.

I'm linking to the version on my Vimeo account, because the geniuses over at the ALLI website converted my 16:9 HD video to a horizontally squashed 4:3 SD video (2nd link). Ingenious.

Alli Sports: Gatorade Free Flow Tour at Ramp Rats on Vimeo (http://vimeo.com/5949723)
Ramp Rats BMX Recap | Alli — Alliance of Action Sports (http://www.allisports.com/videos/ramp-rats-bmx-recap)

Anyway, let me know what you think. The worst offender in my opinion are the fast horizontal pan/fade, with all-too-noticeable skewing. I really need to make a mental note that that doesn't work nearly as well with a CMOS cam as it does with a CCD cam. Second worst would probably be the owner's intro clip, since I had to film it in poor lighting indoors and left my lights at home; I had planned to shoot it outside, but the sound from the freeway killed that idea.

Thought it looked pretty decent - didn't really notice any skew except for one whip pan. More close ups/tight shots might have been nice - hard to do with one cam though, the pacing of the cuts felt a little off to me until the music kicked in, but all in all a good summary of what looked like a fun event! I'm sure the organizrs were happy!

It was nice to see a "X"treme sport video without the crazy special effects, but you might want to slip some in next time for the intended crowd <wink> - things like "paint splatters" and neon colors and shifted color schemes seem to be trendy and go with the fast jump cuts.

Thanks. I actually had a lot more close-ups/lifestyle/etc (and riding, of course) footage, but they wanted it condensed to around 3 minutes, with closeups and whatnot being centered on the top 3 riders and people drinking Gatorade, so I had to throw a lot of it out.

As for the special effects, I've done... like 45-50 of these things now (prior to this and a test video, all of them were with a VX1000), I've never done anything like that (aside from quick cuts, but I usually do that only in cases where the rider is consistent, so there's no confusion over who's who). That being said, everything I've done prior to this was either for my own use or a BMX company's use (ex: Volume Bikes: Joey Cobbs Edit on Vimeo (http://www.vimeo.com/5603473) ), so it was really directed at a completely different market (Riders, as opposed to observers, I guess you could say?).

Chris, the 4:3 version looking display will be because someone used the same old encoding setting that they have always used since the beginning.

For beautiful 16:9 using regular ol' square pixels, they need to encode to something like 500px wide x 280px high.

Andrew

Nice job. I've been really pleased with my FX-7 and can't see where anybody would be unhappy with that footage.