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I covered this event a few weeks back so here’s a link to the San Blas Marathon story. Lots and lots of shots, mostly of runners. If you do a search you will find several more stories and videos relating to the San Blas Half Marathon.
My Video of the 51st Annual San Blas Half Marathon in Coamo runs 24:40 – My Best Time, so far.
My previous attempts at covering this event resulted in me compressing the video timeline by running it at ‘triple speed’.
That way I could include more runners. It was also quite funny. Problem is, they streaked by so fast, you could not tell who some of them were. So this ‘normal speed’ video resulted in editing out a lot of stuff.
I started with about 46 minutes of good ‘clips’ which I whittled down to 24 minutes, 40 seconds. My longest video to date. And it’s just as ‘funky’ as the marathon videos that preceded it.
Editing video in Final Cut Express (V4.0) is very time consuming even on a Mac equipped with a ‘zero raid array’ (used for scratch disk). Video renders (at 1280 x 720) still take hours to do. For those that don’t know, renders are dead time. I do not do anything else while the computer runs the render. Then there is the title graphics, tracking down music and cut transitions to deal with. It took up about 24 hours doing this video, spread over most of a week.
Then there is the YouTube upload to deal with.
I keep my finished videos to 720 x 480 (16:9) to keep the file size down.
Even at that, this one was a fat 1.45 GBs. It took 11 hours to upload, which I started when I went to bed. To add insult to injury, our Claro A/DSL Internet connection failed with 20% of the download left.
Our Claro Internet fails whenever it rains. Seriously. The last 7 times it’s rained, we’ve lost connection.
Because of our ongoing Internet issues, we also have a Virgin Mobile ‘Pay as you go’ WiFi HotSpot. I was able to seamlessly switch over to it without interrupting the upload in progress.
Otherwise, I would have been real pissed.
One render was done at 1280 x 720 since it was shot at 1920 x 1080, but that file is 7.42 GB. Think how long it would have taken to upload that one!
One other interesting point- I have retired my old VadoHD videocam. It served me well. This vid was done with my new Sony HDR-AS10.
It’s sweet!
Too bad I didn’t have it for the Guaynabo Zip-line Run.
The Sony videocam will shoot 1920 x 1080 or 1280 x 720 (which is my favorite format to record in). It can also do 120 FPS (frames per second) for a slow-motion effect and time lapse. The little vidcam records in stereo and sports real image stabilization with a very wide angle lens (which I love). A nifty waterproof housing was included in the kit, with tripod socket and battery, but no card. There is a US nickel in the shot so you can get a sense of the AS-10’s size. I go into more detail about the camera over on a new site dedicated to creative photography.
At $180, the HDR-AS10 is a bargain.
In conclusion, please think of this video as the ‘highlights’ from the day. It was shot along Highway 150 as the runners stream back into town. Many more came by, after the sun set.
ARRG!
