Alligator footage

[DirectX]

I was filming a full sized iguana sitting at the shore of a small lake near where I work when a baby iguana jumped into the water. I was crouched down at the edge of the water filming the area where it dove in hoping he would resurface when I had an unexpected visitor............ironically the only thing I could think of with an alligator not three feet from me was "I hope my framing and composition is good" LOL. My first attempt with this camera and filming in general.

Mark

http://hv20.info/yopu/alligator.mov


If anybody can give me a good workflow to get better quality
compression I'd be forever grateful. BTW this is unedited raw footage.

[Gord Armstrong]

I have been watching this site for ages for some samples. I liked yours very much. Camera was held still and seemed to focus quite nicely on the alligator.
I think I would have been much less calm. Good work. Are you using a mac or pc?

[DirectX]

Thanks. Calm. Haha. Yeah. I wasn't as calm at first as the camera appears to show.....I edited the part out where I finally saw the alligator coming into frame and I jumped away. He (or she) came out of nowhere. I recovered quickly though and resumed filming....thank God I had the tripod because my hands were shaking LOL. BTW I'm using a Mac and iMovie.

Mark

[Gord Armstrong]

I have a mac G5 tower with a 1.6 gig drive. I am concerned that my machine might be underpowered to do some editing on imovie. Currently I am running imovie 5. Most of the video that I do relate to my grandchildren. Most edited movies are about 3 to 5 minutes long. Do you think that is enough power for this camera. By the way, I have 3 gigs of ram and plenty of room on my hard drives.

[skinnyboy]

That's some nice footage.
How'd you pull off the focus pulling?

Gord - I have a G5 (dual 1GHz) and do all my editing with it. No problems. I'm using Final Cut Studio 2, also, so iMovie should be no sweat.

[DirectX]

As far as the focus all I did was move away about 6 feet from the alligator and then I zoomed in through some reeds and then switched to manual. Then I focused on the plants and gradually turned the focus wheel until the alligator came into focus.


Mark

[skinnyboy]

Mark
That's some nice work using the manual focus wheel on the HV20. It's not the easiest thing to use...

[Michael Mann]

Good framing of shots. No disturbing camera movements. I like it.

[Captainobvious]

Excellent footage sir. When you saw the gator submerge near the end did you figure it was time to up and get the hell outof there ? LOL

When I saw how close you were at first shot I was thinking, this guy is nuts.
Your shots were perfectly steady and crystal clear. Thanks for sharing!

[DirectX]

Thanks for all the comments! Yes, I was a little creeped out when the alligator submerged because you never know where or when it will resurface. At least when I see it I can keep an eye on it...so to speak. Today at work I filmed a 3 foot juvenile that was under a co-workers car and it was not as docile...very aggressive for a young alligator. I just posted that footage.


Mark