Juhanis Blog

My Athens trip turned out very nicely, although I do feel bit sad of economic situation of Greece. So I do feel that There is something that I can do. For my it was no nice to see good people struggling on several jobs just to get so income. Special thanks goes to  Aqua Divers Club that picked me up from the center of Athens and took me to their dive center just to make two dive and I was the only customer diving. The dive center is located about 35km from center of Athens. We ended up misunderstanding of the second day scuba diving and I missed the underwater car cemetery, but then again that day was raining all day so somehow I don’t think missing so much. Also special thanks to Virve who lives currently there and showed me the city.

Scuba diving was actually very nice in the Greece. The equipment’s were very good shape and the water was clear. Although there are not so much live in the sea as like red sea has but at least comparing to Finland, well almost everything is better There are parts of my video from it. They are filmed with GoPro HD heroes, I’m starting to love these small cameras.

In the city there are lot of cultural activities but somehow I didn’t end up watching those, because somehow I have learn that where ever I go. I’m more interested of the people and what they do. Athens is a big city, people are very busy. Day to day jumping from bus to metro is not for me in long term but for a while it’s ok.

Nowadays it seems that where ever I go, I end up shooting pictures and video. They are different way of expressing oneself and don’t exclude each other.

You can find my portfolio from Athens here.

And what comes to video, It’s filmed mostly with GoPro cameras, but there are used Canon 5Dmk2 with Canon 100/2.8L Is macro as well. You just can’t do all with GoPro cameras.

I love 3d movies and as soon as I figured out that I could start shooting 3d video I started to study how to do it. As many know, I also shoot underwater stills and videos so my need was of course underwater possibility. So as I had already one GoPro HD Hero camera and I noticed that GoPro had announced a 3d-housing for their camera, it was time to buy a second camera.(Please check NAB 2010) After many failures with different types of rigs I soon figured out that the simplest solution is the best. Until I really have a 3d-housing I need to use something else, this is what I made. I just connected the two cameras with iron barn.

First I used Cineform NeoHD program with Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 to edit my 3d videos. I did get some nice videos with this solution but because of some odd software problem(NeoHD crashing), it was really difficult to get any good example file.

I had to gave up from Cineform because I got info from them that it’s known bug. Cineform was able to pinpoint my problem in their software and provided me an update where this problem was fixed. I need to test it separately.

I found easy way to watch my 3d movies. First I open them in QuickTime, edit the file so that it will start from my sync point and then I save as reference file. I can play them directly in Nvidia Vision 3D Player just by opening two videos, though FullHD was too much for my hard drive, now I need to update my computer

I will update the workflow of editing 3d footage into here

Anyway I found much more simpler solution. I edited the video directly in Premiere Pro CS5. I made an sequence that is double the wide of my footage and imported all video in there. Then I just offset right video to the left side and left to right side, YouTube wants it in this format. After this I edited it, added sound and exported it. Here is the final solution.