Night Time Bicycling Best Practices

For my draft Video Story, I chose to shoot my story from Vancouver, WA at the new waterfront area that was recently developed and opened to the public. 

My blog topic this semester is related to bicycling, road, mountain, cx, road racing, loaded touring, gear, components, best safety practices, etc… 

This project relates to my course topic design as it relates to “anything bikey!”

The topic of my draft Video Story is, ‘Night Time Bicycling Best Practices.’ 

Dusty Johnson accompanied me on the project and it was an honor to work with him again. Dusty shares the same passion for cycling that I do. He rolls a mountain bicycle, while I typically roll a road-bike. Whatever you bicycle ride, safety is IMPORTANT. 

From the beginning of my two video clips taken earlier in the week, I gathered about 8 minutes of live video. Crazy. Then I used Premiere to edit the final product to meet the 2 minutes. My title fades out in the beginning with a still pano and “The Dramatic Music. Wav” from https://freesound.org/people/xtrgamr/sounds/331624/ 

It was hours of work and would run me well over 300 words required for this project. But I will share in the best way I know how to explain. I learned how to work with the video effects control opacity and position, scale, volume leveling for the audio. In part of the editing to discard what wasn’t desired, I right clicked on the specific clip and it brought up a menu that allowed me to  uncheck the enable box and drag off the video feed to a different bar. This ‘grays’ out the portions not wanted. Also, it allows me to not completely lose the footage if I changed my mind and want something back. 

 I work a lot with “video effects.” For example, on my still image pano at the beginning of my story with ‘effects control’ panel it was fun to use the add/remove key-frame functions. Working the position horizontal, left clicking and dragging very slowly to find the end of the frame and then for my final end point, dragging slow to the left. In addition, I was able to control the velocity to slow the frame down or increase the speed of the still shot. I picked a 4pt fill gradient for the title and used 4 different colors, as well as shadows and outer stroke.

I hope you enjoy my video. I look forward to viewing all of my peers work over the next couple of days.

Kathleen Hellem

I decided for my Final Audio Story, to make some adjustments to the cuts. I created 10 seconds of silence in voice recorder and moved it to my second track in audition, and created more space in between the interview to create more smooth transition. 

My peers advised me to lay a soundtrack of music. I selected Gameloop.wave from the Freesound site. I liked the upbeat sound of it. I think it was good background music. I downloaded it and dragged to my files window in audition.Then I dragged it to the fourth track, then duplicated the music track to make sure it was long enough to cover my interview with Dusty. I did some editing to it the music track too. I played around with the volume and tried to make sure my music track didn’t overshadow my interview with Dusty. While it’s not perfect, it was an authentic interview and a challenging and rewarding process. Because I had more time to meet my 2 minutes, as my actual interview piece was about 1:15, I added more music track to give a nice introduction and nice transition to the conclusion. 

I learned how to make the wave-form larger in order to make editing more precise. Adjusting the decibel levels on the two tracks was a learning process. I really over all like the way this turned out! Over all, this is a time consuming process. I found myself changing my mind a lot. For example, what music track should I use? It’s really interesting to me how many different tracks people have contributed to Freesound.com. There is a lot of different options and it took time to decide what will mix well with my story. It’s been fun using AU, Freesound, and soundcloud. I’ve learned a lot. Thank you for listening.