This is a commemorative video of Mt. Lebanon's 30th High School Reunion of the class of 1978. This event took place at PNC Park, home of the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Our reunion also occurred on the same night of the 250th birthday celebration of the city of Pittsburgh, and we found ourselves right in the middle of one of the largest fireworks displays in the history of the United States. In fact, the display set a world record for the highest number of discrete launching sites.
The video was shot on my recently purchased Canon Vixia HV30 HD camcorder. I have been very happy with the performance of this unit. My decision to stick with a tape-based camcorder (Mini-DV) rather than purchasing the newer generation of solid state memory (HDD, Flash, etc) camcorders revolved around my concerns for quality over convenience.
This camcorder uses the HDV compression scheme which is a tried and true, mature codec, that has a solid reputation for high quality recordings with minimal compression artifacts. The downside to this approach is these camcorders have a maximum resolution of 1440x1080 (using rectangular pixels) versus the true HD spec of 1920x1080.
The solid state camcorders do achieve the full 1920x1080, but to achieve that, they are using a newer, more aggressive compression scheme called AVCHD. This codec has proven less than stellar, and many reports abound regarding some problems with quality, especially surrounding motion artifacts.
So the trade off here is slightly lower resolution with less artifacts, versus higher resolution with more artifacts. I chose to sacrifice some resolution to get the cleaner video.
Regarding the pros and cons of tape. Because the data is recorded to tape as a digital bitstream, there is no loss in quality of your recording from one playback to the next until you wear your tape down so far, the data finally becomes corrupted. So HDD does not have the big advantage in this arena as some might presume.
However, if convenience is important to you, navigating and searching your video within the camcorder is much more cumbersome and HDD camcorders have an advantage here. For my part, I shoot video, and offload to my computer, so that aspect is insignificant to me.
Finally, I also like tape because you have an automatic backup copy of all your work - your tape. If your computer storage ever dies, and you lose all your archived video, with a Mini-DV camcorder, you simply reach up to your shelf and grab your backup tape.
I thought this camcorder performed well in low-light conditions. Beyond the standard 60i frame rate, this camcorder offers two other frame rates which perform even better in low light... 30p and 24p. 30p is marginally better in low light, and it has the extra advantage of being very compatible with most online video websites. Most sites play back video at 15fps and since 30p is a multiple of 15, the pull-down is a simple dropped frame from every other frame. This minimizes the negative impact on quality. I used 30p at this event.
24p obviously produces even better results in low light, but it also gives the video a Hollywood Film look to it. If you happen to like that, then the 24p is a double bonus.
Finally, I edited this using the desktop application, Pinnacle Studio 12 Ultimate. This software has a very easy learning curve and is fun to use. It now has several professional plug-ins from Boris, Red Giant and Prodad. While this software still doesn't rise to the professional ranks, especially with only two video tracks available, for those not aspiring to be a professional, nor spend big bucks and a hundred hours on a learning curve, this is a very satisfying suite of editing tools.
Footnote: Speaking of computer crashes, I actually did experience a meltdown of my computer shortly after I finished this project. Fortunately I had burned an HD-DVD of this video, and I was able to de-multiplex it and get the video back into Pinnacle to render another file for this upload. But because I had to render this project a second time, that also means it was compressed a second time. So some artifacts may now be visible that would not have been if I had my original mp4 HD file of this project. But I still thought it was worth posting.
Enjoy,
Eric
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Mt. Lebanon Teacher Who Trolled For Girls Online Gets House Arrestby wtaetv1,878 views
AWESOME !!!!!!!! It must be very emotional. Seeing old old friends. Old sweethearts. I wonder how many people hooked up after not seeing each other for 30 years.(well i hope they were still single LOL) WOW. Thats GREAT !!!
dawson660 1 year ago
cool
MoonlightMaskMan 2 years ago