Tips for Shooting and Editing Your Track Videos
This page describes a number of things I've learned or done shooting video at the track. I hope you find them useful.
- Hold the Camera Still
- Shoot People
- Recording the Audio for your Track Video
- Using Photos in Videos
- The Ken Burns Effect
- Video Transitions
- Blanking Out or Blurring License Plates, Faces, etc.
- Adding a Track Map to your Video
- Overlaying PASS replays in your video
- Insert Blank Spaces at the Beginning and End of your Videos
- NTSC Colors
- Filtering your Audio Tracks
- Working with the Video from Bullet Cams
How many Youtube and Streetfire videos have you seen where the person recording it simply cannot hold the camera still and cannot follow the action? Worse, can you hear the camera's operator breathing, and the camera seems to move as the operator breaths! We've all seen it so often that some of us have come to accept it. Here are some tips to help avoid this problem when recording your own videos.
- Use a tripod. This should be obvious. If the shot requires
that you hold the camera still, use a tripod. Use a tripod. Seriously, use a tripod. It won't hurt you to use a tripod. If you don't have a tripod, place the camera on
something that is still, like a stack of books, or the the roof of
your car.
- Lean against something. People simply cannot stand still,
especially when they are trying to stand still. Stabilize yourself.
Lean against a wall, or a pole, or a car, something. Again, this
sounds obvious, but it seems few even bother.
- Follow the action using the viewfinder, not the LCD screen. You're
less likely to wiggle the camera all over the place if you are using the
viewfinder like a gun sight.
- If you do have to move about while filming, try this. Attach the tripod to your camera, close up the legs and retract them, and shoot away. The weight of the tripod hanging below the camera will reduce a lot of the camera shake and especially the tendency to tilt it.
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Driving, racing, motorsports, it's all about the cars, right? Not really. It's about the people doing things with cars. There's a person driving that car your camera is in, a person in the car ahead of you, and the people in the paddock with you are half the fun of a day at the track. So, get video of people and put that in your video. Capture the smiling faces of the person who has just run her first ever lap at a track, the swearing of the bad sports who take it all too seriously, even clips of the driver's meeting and download sessions. Put a few people in your videos and you might even be able to get your significant other might sit through the whole thing with you.
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3. Recording the Audio for your Track Video
Audio is important, even if it is just the engine sound you'll be hearing, and especially if it is the engine sound you want to hear. Not only does it add to the fun of the video but it contains valuable information. You'll be able to hear how you are shifting. Were you releasing the clutch correctly in those high G turns? You can hear your blips when you downshift. Were you getting everything matched up OK? And of course you can hear the tire noise, which can be nice, unless you were abusing them. Audio is important and good audio is essential.
There are a couple of problems with recording audio in your track videos. The most annoying is wind noise. Once you get above 30-40 mph it can drown out all other sounds. On my system the noise builds and then suddenly everything goes silent. Obviously wind noise must be minimized and the only way to do this is to mount the microphone out of the wind. You'd think that they'd work well in the passenger cabin, but if you drive with your windows down, which is the rule at many tracks, the buffeting of wind coming into the car will ruin your audio recording.
There are two places where you can mount your microphones and get good sound. One is behind the car where the bumper and trunk lid meet. You'll still hear some wind noise, but only enough to add to the overall recording. You'll also hear the rear tires and the exhaust, among the things you want to hear. Of course, you'll also hear the car coming up behind you and riding your bumper, something you usually do not want to hear.
The other place to mount your microphones is in the engine bay. Sure, that is a pretty noisy place, but you'll hear mainly the engine, including the sound of it breathing in air, plus you'll hear the front tires.
If you have a particularly loud engine or exhaust, the sound levels may be too high. Assuming your microphones are capable of handling these sound levels the problem could be in your recording equipment. An easy way to solve this is to install a potentiometer between your microphones and recording equipment. A simple dual, audio-taper potentiometer should do the trick for stereo mics.
Once you're up to speed recording good audio you'll start to notice other noises. Have you ever watched an autocross video and heard an annoying knocking or gangling sound? That was probably keys and other items on the key ring knocking around. Is there anything else loose and knocking around in your car? Maybe the cables to your camcorder, or a lens cap. You probably won't notice these noises while you are out on the track, but you'll sure hear them in the videos.
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4. Using Photos in Videos
Many of my videos include photos taken of other cars out on the track and around the paddock, plus people shots, plus basically anything interesting I managed to catch on camera. I use a 2.1 Mpixel (1600x1200) and 10 Mpixel camera (3872x2592) and both produce images that are much larger than I can show in a normal video. But that is not a bad thing. It gives me the opportunity to crop them without sacrificing image quality, and it allows me to apply animated pans and zooms.
When I am using photos I do usually resample them to reduce the pixel count. Adobe Premiere, and I assume other programs, can have a difficult time with large image files. At the other end of the size range, I am often given a low resolution image file to put in a video and I am constantly surprised at how good they can look in a video. Obviously this is because the image quality on a TV is not that great, certainly no where as good as what modern printers offer. Even so, I prefer to resample these images in Photoshop to scaling them in Adobe Premiere. After all, I am already using Photoshop to adjust the photo's other image qualities.
This bit of information might help. The NTSC (North American television broadcast standard) screen format is 640x480. The title-safe area, a practical maximum) of this screen is 512x384, and the effective viewing size, after considering overscan, interlacing, and viewing from a distance, is 320x240.
A final note, when resampling photos to be used in videos the routines Photoshop uses are usually fine. But, when the resampling is drastic, or if the image has a lot of high contrast areas in it, I prefer to use OnOne's fractal-based utility.
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5. The Ken Burns Effect
If you've ever seen a Ken Burns documentary you've seen how he can almost make old photographs look like video clips. He does this by panning and zooming in much the same way that a person on the scene holding a video camera would have done. While achieving the Ken Burns effect involves more than simply panning and zooming (It is done in such as way that gives the illusion that there is a camera on the scene.) panning and zooming itself is easy to do using Adobe Premiere. The essential steps are:
- Drag your photo to the timeline.
- Click the photo to select it then find the effects editor (top center
panel in the screen shot below).
- Move the "current time indicator" (vertical red line in the timeline) to
where you want to start using this effect.
- In the effects editor, expand the motion option, then the position and
scaling options, and click the little stopwatch icons to enable zoom and
pan animation. A small dot will appear to the right the position and
scaling options. These dots represent key frames.
- Right-click each dot (key frame) and select "Ease Out" from the
drop-down menu. This will tell Premiere to use a smooth motion to
start the pan and zoom.
- Move the "current time indicator" to the next point where you want to
stop the pan and/or zoom.
- Click the small "Add/Remove Keyframe" buttons for the position
and scaling to set new key frames then adjust the scaling and position as
desired.
- Right-click these key frame dots and select "Ease In" from the drop-down
menu. This will tell Premiere to use a smooth motion to end the pan
and zoom.
Screen shot of an Adobe Premiere project that pans and zooms an image.
(Click to see full sized.)
Now that you more or less know how to pan and zoom in your videos, how will you use it? I look at the photo for a while and try to decide which way it draws the eye. Left-to-right? Towards the center? Or are there two things in the photo that catch your attention? Apply this effect accordingly. In the example able the clip starts out zoomed in on the Lincoln in the background, then zooms out to show the Dodge Demon.
Note that you aren't limited to using Premiere to achieve this effect. Windows Movie Maker, Sony Vegas Studio (and Movie), and others can do this. Apple's iMovie and iPhoto have actual Ken Burns effects built in and other photomontage programs offer something similar to this effect.
An excellent tutorial on how to do this is available at DigitalMediaNet.
For more information about this effect see the wikipedia article.
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6. Video Transitions
Everything that goes into your video should be there for a reason. Everything in your video should help create the effect you were after. This includes the transitions.
I've seen many videos online where the creator went crazy with transitions. Most were distracting, and they seemed to be so random that you never knew what to expect next, which ruined the continuity of the video. I have also played with transitions a lot, to see how they worked to to see how they made me feel. Gradually I settled on a few simple rules:
- Keep things simple.
- The transition should "work" with the scene, or change of scene.
They should make sense.
- Think long and hard before using a wipe, page turn, dissolve, or any
kind of transition that would draw the viewer's attention away for the
subject.
- The transition is a part of the video. It should contribute something, even if the viewer barely notices it.
With these rules in mind, here's what I generally do:
- I use cuts in scenes where more than one thing is going on, or more than
one subject is involved, at the same time, in the same place. For
instance, a conversation where two cameras are being used.
- I use cross-fades when the scene is changing views but the action itself
has good continuity. For instance, I use these when switching between
different cameras that are looking down the track, or where you jump ahead to another section of the track. What I am trying to
do is move seamlessly from one to the next without making the viewer reset
their brain to receive the next view.
- I use fade-to-black transitions when I want to create a pause in the
action and create the impression that "that is over, now let's do something
different", or it's like closing your eyes momentarily. I'll use this between what would be chapters if videos
were books.
- You can use jump cuts to create the effect you'd see showing a
number of photos shot in quick succession, except in this case the subjects
in the photos are moving. It can be a nice way to speed up the action
and to skip by the obvious or mundane parts. Someone walking towards
you for example. Using three or four one-second clips to show 15
seconds of someone walking towards you can be more interesting than the
straight 15 second clip.
- I only use page turns when I really do want to say, "We are turning the
page now. We're putting that behind us and now we'll do something
completely different."
- I only use slides when I really, really, really want to give the video a left-to-right, or up-to-down, you get the idea, feel, as if things were coming to us from one direction and leaving in the other direction. Like, in one door and out the other.
You may not agree with my rules, but at least do this: be consistent. It doesn't take the viewer long to get the feel for how you are handling the clips and if you up and change how you are doing things you'll loose them.
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7. Blanking Out or Blurring License Plates, Faces, etc.
How fancy do you want to get? It's easy to black out the plates or place a smiley over someone's face. All you do is place an image of the smiley or whatever in a track and use animation and scaling to move it to keep the plates or face covered. See tip #7 on adding a track map which includes a description of how to move a dot around on the screen.
It takes a little more effort to blur the plates or use some other effect. It basically involves creating a mask and then moving that around. For an excellent tutorial visit the Wrigley Video.
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8. Adding a Track Map to your Video
You can do it, and you don't even need a GPS, a GTech Pro, or any other data acquisition system. You just need an image of the track map and a video that lets you see where you are on the track.
This may be tedious but it is not difficult. Here's how to do it:
- Get an image of the track.
- Rework this image as desired. For instance, remove all unnecessary details, turn it into a white track map with a drop shadow and a 2 pixel thick red line marking the start/finish line. Also, make the background transparent then save it as a gif or psd (Photoshop) image.
- Use your image editing software to make a small colored symbol that you will use to indicate your position on the track.
- Import the track map and symbol images into your video project and place them in your timeline.
- Resize and position the track map as needed and move it in the timeline to where you what to start showing the track map.
- Change the duration of the track map track so that it spans the section of the video where you want to show it.
- Resize and position the position symbol on the track and locate it in the timeline so that it is visible at the same time the track map is visible.
- Turn on animation of the symbol.
- Go through your video and every so often, the more often the better, and move the symbol to your new location on the track.
- Set the key frame options to ensure the dot's movement is smooth.
- Do this for a single turn, or a straight, then replay that part of the video to see how everything looks.
- Continue for a lap or two, or until you can't take it anymore.
The video below shows a track maps. Fast forward to about 11:30 to see one lap at Thunderhill Raceway with a track map. By the way, it took me about 45 minutes to grab the track map, clean it up, add this to the video, and get a dot to follow the car around for one lap.
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9. Overlaying PASS replays in your video
This is an easy one.
- Load your run into PASS and select the part you want to replay
and put in your video.
- Start up your screen video capture program (1st Screen Recorder,
Freez Screen Video Capture, Camtasia Studio, others) and define the
area you want to capture. The traction circle, for instance.
- Review your video and recording options. Turn off audio
recording, set your frame rate (at least 15 fps), and select a
codec, even though it is likely to default back to Microsoft Video 1.
- Start recording, and a few seconds later start the replay.
Stop recording after the replay is done.
- Import your track video and the PASS video into your video
editing program.
- Place the track video in the timeline and the PASS video in the
timeline above it.
- Crop and resize the PASS video and move it to a corner of the
screen.
- Make the PASS video track partially transparent, if you prefer.
- Export the video.
Important note - If your system has a lot going on in the background your screen capture program may miss parts of the replay. It's a good idea to close all other applications and turn off any services you don't need.
The video below shows an example. It turned out pretty well considering the audio difficulties I ran into in the third run, and I didn't get video for the last run. You might also notice where a number of times my screen video capture program missed some of the action in the traction circle.
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10. Insert blank spaces at the beginning and end of your videos
I've begun inserting a 2 second blank titles at the beginning and end of my videos. I like to give the viewer a second or two after they push the start button to sit back and grab a handful of popcorn before the action starts. I include the 2 second blank title at the end so that the video player software doesn't reset or close at the instant the action in the video ends. It just feels less abrupt that way.
By the way, I had been using blank video clips, a feature in Premiere, but on some sites the compression seemed to cut them out and my videos lost the leader and trailer.
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11. NTSC Colors
Your computer monitor has a wider color range than what NTSC broadcast standard can handle. (NTSC is the North American television broadcast standard). Bright and dark colors, plus reds, and more, that look great on your monitor may flicker or bleed on your TV. For more on this see Tom Buehler's article.
For more helpful information on creating videos for NTSC TVs see this short article and especially this article.
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12. Filtering your Track Audio Tracks
For a long time I was having bad luck getting good audio in my track videos, and then once I got that under control I found there were times that I wanted to improve on the audio I had captured. Normally I don't alter the audio. Even if it is not the most pleasant sound if it is accurate I leave it alone. But occasionally I get some hiss or a high-pitched whine that I think must have been electrical in origin, and this I wanted to remove. Adobe Premiere offers a number of audio effects tools and I have been successful using their low-pass and band-pass filters. If you don't have Premiere you might be able to export the audio track so that you can edit it separately from the video. I've played around with MAGIX Audio Cleaning Lab and AVS4You has some interesting looking audio editing software, but so far Premiere's offering have been adequate.
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13. Working with the Video from Bullet Cams
My DV camcorder captures full-frame 720x480 video, something that makes creating DVD-quality video easy. My bullet cam gives me full-sized NTSC video and sends it to my camcorder using composite video. Once I import this video into my computer the image is a little smaller than my camcorder's normal image, plus it is shifted slightly. This bothered me a lot at first but I got over it and now I routinely simply scale it up by 4% and move it down and to the left a few pixels. The images below show the before and after results.
Click the image to see full sized.
