Hmmm, I am a little surprised that there have been no other comments about this disk. Gee whizz guys I spent over 400 (essentially unpaid) hours working on this disk for your enjoyment, and you can't even stroke my ego a bit....?
Hey, that's a JOKE by the way!!! :-)
Seriously, let me address the 'focus' issues raised by Dave and Corsair67....
The 'focus issues' that have been picked up are actually NOT focus issues at all. What you're really seeing on screen is a 'rendering' issue -- in the original footage you don't see those 'blurry focus like' moments -- they only end up in the final version because of some post processing that I did on the air-to-air footage.
I know that Dave has previously assumed that the air-to-air video shoots were filmed from a chopper and/or with some sort of camera stabilising equipment..... in fact all the air-to-air shoots were filmed from fixed wing aircraft, with hand held cameras!!!!! That is, NO chopper, and NO special mounts. Can you believe it?
What I've done is used a new process available in current high end video editing software which analyses the clips, tries to work out the movement involved and then deals with it in a fairly intelligent way.
What you then end up with is footage that (almost) looks like it has in fact been shot from a chopper with some sort of gimbal mount. :-)
The downside of this is that in order to do what it does, the software moves the whole image around in the frame - - if left at normal sizes you end up seeing black bars at the top, bottom and sides of the screen as the image moves about -- very off putting. So what it does is to enlarge the image, just enough so that this cannot be seen in the normal video frame.
The combined effect of this enlargement and the processing is that it seems to produce blurry frames at times, which you have picked up as focus issues -- which is a fair call, because that is what it looks like. Hopefully over time the software may improve.....
In playing with this new process I was impressed with the way in which it coped with some of the footage, and how the look and feel of the air-to-air material was improved so much, as a whole. So, as an experiment, I decided to process the air-to-air footage like this, and to see if people do pick up on the periodic blurs in the footage. I'm tempted to put a short before and after comparison on YouTube so people can see the difference for themselves.....
My feeling is that the filtering does a fine job, and the air-to-air footage is a lot more enjoyable and watchable. However, the down side of this (apart from those odd blurry frames) is that you can't actually tell how much better it is, unless you get to see the original, un-processed footage. So it is quite likely that we will get some other people who will criticise for focus issues, without realising that what they're seeing (with a few blurs) is in fact a lot better than what they might otherwise be viewing.
I'm certainly going to go back to some of my older air-to-air footage and process that as well.
I have a strong suspicion that if you shoot in HD, then do the processing, and finally ship your footage in SD, that the result will be far better, because the software will not need to enlarge the footage to hide the fact that it's moving the footage around in the video frame. I'm picking that was what was done with the air-to-air footage shot form the ramp of the Hercules on the Wanaka 08 DVD.
As far as the Classic Fighters DVDs (all four of them) are concerned, what you must remember is that they've all been produced on a shoestring budget -- we've never had any funds available to use choppers for shooting air-to-air, and so it's always been a mad scramble to get the footage we can, as cheaply as possible, without any official help from the airshow organisation.
Classic Fighters NEVER put any money into the production of the disks -- it's always been something that we (as Golden Micro) have taken on as a speculative project ourselves -- primarily to help the event out. We've take on all the risk of the venture. At the end of the day the market for airshow videos is pretty limited, and while sales of all the CF DVDs has almost covered the out-of-pocket production expenses, this does not include the time that I actually had to put in to edit the footage etc.
As mentioned at the start of this message, I put in over 400 hours to produce and edit the CF 07 DVD (previous ones took a similar amount of time). I think it works out that at the moment, I've been paid something like $2.20 an hour for that work! Which is OK for a volunteer effort, and that's what this was, but just think of the impact that this (i.e. TEN weeks) has had on our business and social life....! All for your enjoyment!
So please, if the disk is not quite up to the state of the art produced by other shows, do bear in mind there are reasons for that! At least (by virtue of the fact that the disk exists) there is a fairly comprehensive video record of the 2007 show, and it may well be the last of those. I don't think we'll be producing any more airshow event disks in future (for any show). Too much work, too little reward, and no-one (i.e. event organisers) really appreciates it.
Quite happy to hear any constructive criticisms though. We will be releasing some other aviation DVDs in the not too distant future, so always keen to know what people think about the existing disks.
Cheers
Allan
Producer/Editor of the Classic Fighters 2001-2007 DVDs
