First Windsurf clip I've seen with Matrix style "Bullet Time":



Nicely put together too.

Raising the bar for home made videos:

this is actually pretty easy to do... it's a morphing effect between two shots of the same sailor shot at different angles.

In the case of the windsurf video it looks like it was actually two different shots that happened to line up nicely for the morph.

In the case of the kiteboarding video they shot it from the beach with a crane and from the water. You can see the camera operator from the opposite shot in frame.

Either way, the kiteboarding vid uses some nice effects just a shame it's tacky...

On a different note, I wonder how much they paid to license the Tool song. Actually scrape that, I guess they just stole it for use in the video given that Tool generally doesn't license music.

I guess the second song isn't really stolen... given that Trent Reznor allows you to use his music as long as you don't use it to advertise your own products...

hey,
I can offer a bit more on the way it was done...i do a fair bit of on water filming and a bit of cutting for a few surf companies.
It's not quite a morph but more like a down the line cut which mixes a hi and slow speed shot with a stretch filter..

The Matrix stuff is slightly different in that it uses "temp mort" (dead time) photography where a bank of digital SLRs are set up in a chain and fire off one after another with say 1/25th of a second delay between. If you then take 1 frame from each of these cameras and edit them together (25 of them make up one second of footage) you get the impression of extreme slo-mo as well as a shift in camera direction. I've heard of a guy in the Us who has a bank of waterproof SLRs and is playing around with some surfing shots....would be awesome to follow a gybe through 180"...... the killer is always gonna be getting a steady horizon when tonnes of water is crashing all around you

Select to expand quote

drift said...
It's not quite a morph but more like a down the line cut which mixes a hi and slow speed shot with a stretch filter..

I dunno man, the angle is changing dramatically. Note the background. Note Victor. It's definitely not a morph, morphs can't calculate perspective.

Easiest way to achieve this would be to have a string of cameras lined up down the beach with each operator following Victor. One person triggers shot on all cameras at once. ie "Bullet time". Looks like about 15 cameras.

Anyway, it looks sick
Makes me wanna go for a sail,

Select to expand quote

evlPanda said...




Nicely put together too.

Raising the bar for home made videos:

Wow, now that's a level of film quality to aspire to.

I checked the Aussi price on that Sony camera he was using, $9460, nice to get some change from 10k.

And its not waterproof!

Nothing that a couple of zip lock bags wouldnt fix.

Agree that its an awesome look....
Would love to do some similar stuff with some Aussie sailors...
I've been thinking about how they did it all day and Evl's frame by frame answered it.
Its only 2 cameras..take a look at the tip at the sail and you'll see where the image changes.
The editor has match cut the two images and used two layers to get the direction shift. the top layer is a cross dissolve of the manouvre and the second layer is a 3D push and additive dissolve between the two scenery backgrounds.
Thing is, no one ever really looks at this stuff that closely...we might spend a day or two coming up with something that lasts 2-3 seconds........but it's worth it!

it's essentially pseudo morph... After Effects comps would be setup as follows:

Group 1:
Layer 1: Shot 1, sailor doing flakka
Layer 2: Shot 1, sailor doing flakka masked
Layer 3: Shot 1 left hand side, background masked and streched

Group 2:
Layer 4: Shot 2, sailor doing flakka, different angle
Layer 5: Shot 2, sailor doing flakka masked
Layer 6: Shot 2, right hand side, background masked and streched

Transition from Group 1 to Group 2 is done via move along the x axis.

This can be done even more convincing if you shoot a number of still images as a background between Group 1 and Group 2.

In this case they might have been lucky enough that the sailor was doing two flakkas in different locations but the actual movement looked identical enough to allow for the trick to be applied. I'll have a look through the windsurf footage I have kicking about... if I find two shots that this can be applied to I'll tried and do a quick mockup of it.

I have seen about 4 or so Tutorials that demonstrate how to do this effect. It was heavily used in the recent action film Wanted. In particular in the beginning of the scene were a shot is fired from a sniper rifle and the camera follows the bullet exiting the rifle and then traveling towards another building.

just my 2 bobs worth - as much as i love this stuff and appreciate the time it takes to make it, i sure hope we don't start seeing a whole lot of this used in up coming windsurf dvds. the fact that windsurfing vids show windsurfing for what it really is, is what sets it appart from it's sister sport. not sure about you guys, but i personally don't think windsurfing needs this to look good

used every now and then on the right clip looks cool

^ It wasn't the best bit of the clip, but was a great parting shot. I'm glad they did it only once at the very end, the last thing we need is everything looking like the new Star Trek (google: "i made old star trek look like new star trek", quite funny) or a Rap video (cut-cut-cut-cut-cut).

Following you all on masking Victor and playing around with the background...

... but how is Victor shown from a dozen or more angles?
Look at only Victor in the sequence, forget the background. I still reckon

(That is not every frame, just what I could grab from pause/unpause/pause so is not very "even")

Might have to ask the owner of the vid.

It is two shots. I sees it now. Complete lack of spray, too hard to mask.

Windy tomorrow

evlPanda,

Victor is shown from a dozen different angles because he is a "freak". He seems to be able to pull of the same move over and over again without it looking any different. I actually think he is one of the most technical sailors on the PWA.

as for the visual effects... my fav windsurf dvd at the moment is the Mistral promo DVD - "Comitted". Great action and it doesn't really on any technical gadgets other than a bit of color grading and slow mo.