Aside from gaining familiarity with the camera I also want to practise some freehand shooting, filming without setting up a static tripod rig. Most of the filming I have done in the past has been of the fairly static interview format, so I haven't had a lot of experience filming hand-held.
I thought I would prepare for my next outing with some video tips...
And if all else fails, there is software stabilisation.
So, I trotted down to the harbour and snapped some handheld sequences. I tried my best to keep the clips as steady as I could - following some of the tips from the above video tutorial - but I obviously need more practice and ended up applying stabilisation in PowerDirector...
It was a bit of a dull, grey day so I probably over-compensated in my colour adjustments. But I'm still enjoying the novelty of playing with PowerDirectors settings.
I'm not entirely happy with software stabilisation, occasionally it can be a bit glitchy and jerky when you add it to a sequence that includes a pan or tracking movement. So the moral of the story is, try and take as steady footage as you can so you don't have to add stabilisation.
One other thing I noticed was how the wind affected my audio track. I hadn't thought it was that windy, so left off my Rode mic and it's windshield, trusting to the X-T2's integral microphone. The wind buffeting was noticeable when I got my footage into the editing software, so I had to remove the soundtrack.
From now on, if I'm doing any outside work, I'll fit the Rode mic and windshield by default.
