Tourism and Bonn, complimented with a range of excellent chocolate. What could be better? Come to Tourismumcamp BRSA in July and find out!
We’re supporting the TourismusCamp Bonn Rhein-Sieg Ahr event and had the chance to visit the Coppeneur Chocolate factory for a tour. What an amazing event location.
Armed with a smartphone, gimbal and mic we spent about an hour at the location and pulled together a little promo video. More on the tech, below. More on the event, at the #tcbrsa17 website.
Quick videos from a backpack.
We bought a Huawei P10 recently and have been really impressed. Self-stabilized 1080p videos and the ability to run 60 fps full HD or 4K at 30 fps. 64 GB of internal storage is enough to get plenty done and the battery life isn’t bad either although do remember that recording video is one of the most battery-intensive operations you can do on a phone. 2 hrs is about all you’ll get out of a charge so take a battery pack with you.
Unstabilised video means you either keep very still by using a tripod or a steady hand wedged against something solid, or you use a gimbal.
This is the CamTech One gimbal for smartphones. I’m not going to give it a 100% recommendation but it’s been working well for me. The main problem is that it’s not that strong which means it can turn off under heavy loads, especially when not perfectly balanced. The whole video above was taken with the CamTech One gimbal though and I only had two or three ‘fall out’ issues. We bought it second-hand for just over 200 Euros which is a real bargain for what it does.
As for the Huawei P10, the video isn’t perfect. I see the occasional frame-jump but for social media-focused video it’s fine. Colors are good, dynamic range is good and there’s a pro setting for when you need to keep settings stable. 2 X non-degrading zoom is also available. If you’re interested in 4K mode on the P10 there are a couple of things to note.
The video below shows 4K footage edited in PowerDirector with a bit of software zoom and stabilization but remember, every shot was taken by hand while sitting or standing. If you want to move and shoot 4K, get a gimbal! The second point is that it records in HEVC which is an advanced coded that not many PCs will be able to handle. My 3 year old quad-core laptop doesn’t have HEVC-capable hardware so it was a very slow process. Look to the latest Kaby Lake Intel processors (2017 models) or a mobile graphics card like the GTX 1060 for the best mobile editing capability.
In terms of audio we used a relatively low cost Audio Technica ATR 6550 and Zoom H1 recorder along with a mic spider to keep everything decoupled from hand movement noise. Editing was done in Power Director 15.
Huawei P10 4K video stabilised, zoom and pan in PowerDirector 15.
We hope to see you at TourismCamp BRSA. We’re looking to prepare a talk on 360-degree tourism walk-talk videos with the Bonn Greeters, another oranization that we’re supporting in Bonn. Buy tickets for Tourismuscamp BRSA here.