Bday weekend boys trip TR
Probably boring the pants off everyone with these but anyway.
Headed up the coast with a couple of mates this weekend just gone ostensibly to celebrate my Bday as it fell in the middle of last week. I had already done the family dinner on the day and did a romantic dinner with the girlfriend at Barrenjoey House the previous weekend so a boys trip was an easy sell. The forecast looked pretty good for both weather and surf a few days out but arriving on Friday arvo both were basically shit. It actually pissed with rain a little bit on Friday arvo and the surf was small and onshore.
We elected to amuse ourselves in other ways that started with what we like to call “technical” tracks in my fourby, basically attacking a very steep quite sandy track that’s on the way to Seal Rocks. Despite my best efforts we were unable to make the top of what we dubbed big white and having gotten a little rad I persuaded myself that breaking the car was not in my best interests and quit while we were ahead. We did do some other exploring and found a couple of cool little tracks that lead to semi- secret campsites for future reference so there was some benefits to be had.
Next up on the amusement agenda, surprisingly enough, was alcohol. To this we added fire building and to round it out, a self made drinking game named R and L’s. R and L’s involves a ball catchable with one hand, player numbers of 2 or more but not 5 and less than ten, throw the ball with the right hand to the person to the left for four throws, on the fifth it must be caught with the left hand. It continues being caught and thrown with the left hand until the tenth catch when it must be caught with the right and the direction of throwing around the circle changes. Sounds fairly simple but our record with more than two playing is only about 40 odd consecutive throws, catches and direction changes without someone stuffing it up. Obviously not catching the ball, catching with your wrong hand, not reversing the direction on multiples of ten and plain old shit throws result in a skol. To play this game you must have shitloads of beer as the amount of skolling is brutal.
After an amusing night we woke the next morning and headed off for a surf, surprisingly not feeling that bad and the change in weather to a beautiful summer style day was a welcome one. I was a little disinterested in surfing as number one it was small and number two I wanted to test out the Sony POV cam my girlfriend bought me for my bday. I ended up swimming around with it for the entire morning surf, didn’t really get much in the way of usable footage as it was so shit but got a good idea of the camera and how easy it is to use. I will have to look into ways to avoid lens fogging as this became an issue pretty quickly and renders anything shot when the lens is fogged basically terrible.
After a surf we had a drive into Blueys and went to Moby’s for brekky and a decent coffee, the Bungwahl take away is on the black list for coffee, they have everything that a normal café does to make coffee but excel in managing to make it still taste like international roast or blend 43. After a post brekky check of Blueys and Boomers we headed back down to Sealy’s and went for a surf out the front of where we were saying, it was shit again, barely able to move my substantial bulk so we gave up and made some lunch about 1pm. About lunchtime we decided it would be a good idea to start drinking again so we bought more beer and started a long and involved game of R and L’s. Some of the local wildlife wanted to join in too.
To say that we were shitfaced by dinner time would be an understatement of monolithic proportions, somewhere along the line we managed to create another fire and I took this pic and to be honest it looks like a well behaved campsite, the camera never lies…………….
Not entirely sure how but I think we cooked some dinner, I have some video footage from the night that followed and all of us were basically dribbling drunken shit by that stage.
The next morning we woke up and I felt very ordinary, very very ordinary. Murphy’s Law kicked in hard and the surf had improved considerably although still quite small. Got a little bit of footage from that morning, unfortunately the best bits suffered the fogging issue again.
Fun little waves, mate getting stuck behind on one and me taking off, I should been way deeper to make the most of that one.
The fog spoiling a tiny little barrel I managed to stuff myself into, I was basically sitting on my arse to get small enough and when the wave ran out of steam I wasn’t coming out.
All in all a good weekend, need to sort the cam fog issue out and then hopefully get some decent footage.
Nice one NTHN…. as always..
Great T.R.
Was your barrel shot in 720 with higher frame rate?
You edited it! was under the assumption you didn’t have that capability due to hardware.
:applause:
Nah Spaz, no edit, that was done with the 720p 120fps setting, it plays the footage in slow mo right off the bat. I will upload a non foggy 720p 120fps vid so you can see what it looks like.
Spaz this is how the slo mo comes straight out of the box, Vimeo seems to have dropped the quality a bit, do I need to get on Plus to have more vids in HD or something?
Vimeo (and youtube) compress any file to meet their format.
For the best quality you have to compress it yourself (with editing or compression software) and export it to Vimeo’s settings (audio and video).
This prevents them doing a compression and compromising the quality.
Disclaimer: It’s been a while since I tested this but it was the case 18 months ago and Vimeo suggest uploading files that equal their settings. Last year higher fps footage wouldn’t play back (over 30fps).
Vimeo compression guidelines https://vimeo.com/help/compression
I’m going to copy them and create a sticky thread in “photography and filming”
Vimeo seems to have dropped the quality a bit, do I need to get on Plus to have more vids in HD or something?
Thanks for the trip report nthn. Looking forward to some more surfing videos with your new camera.
To answer your vimeo HD question. Yes you are only allowed one HD clip per week ok the base account.
My HD video did not convert to an HD version on Vimeo, what should I do?
Vimeo allows Basic members to upload one HD video per week, so if you upload two HD videos within the same week, only the first will show in HD, the other will appear in SD.
I ended up paying my $9 for a Plus membership last night as I was trying to load up a 6min edit I made with the footage I have. What a headf### that’s turned out to be, 6mins is 340mb in mpeg2, would get to 50% and then fail. I have re produced it in H.264 but thats at 600mb, currently having my last shot at U/Ling in Mpeg2 and for some reason it’s gone all the way to 85%, fingers crossed it makes it.
Ok so here’s my effort with the edit, still lost some quality in the upload process but you get the idea, U/Ling the H.264 version now to see if there’s a diff.
Awesome TR and loving the footage, your stuff will be a must watch when you really start getting the footage you want 
Keep it up mate 
Cheers Azz, it’s going to be getting the combo of decent surf and mates that have a clue about shooting to get something decent of myself. Not that I got amazing stuff of them but there’s one shot of me where the lens isn’t fogged and thats from behind the wave ha ha! I would love to have seen the last two clips of me without fog specially the teeny widdle barrel I didn’t really make, actually I would like to see the last clip where I attacked my mate fins first too ha ha!
Very cool mate. Looks like a lot of fun. Enjoyed reading it.
Read this yesterday but couldn’t stream the vids!!!!! Storm last night?????
Nice TR dude!!!!! The footage looks sweet!!!!!
The fogging looked minimal compared to my first experience with the GoPro!!!!! The anti fog strips that ya get for GoPro should work fine in the SONY too!!!!!
And I found that Rain-X is awesome at preventing water from stayin on the lens housing too!!!!! (Works at the snow also)
That edit came up sweet!
Did you check my post in the photo/film section?
There are tips on reducing file size.
What isn’t mentioned is getting mpegstreamclip (free software for mac & pc) you can use it to re-compress your finished edits. It is easy to set data rates, file size and file type with it. It allows you the opportunity to do use the original export and try to get different results.
If you are getting larger file sizes your quality is being compromised because your creating data (be it video, audio or other).
Ideally export from your edit program at it’s highest setting then use Mpegstreamclip to encode a smaller file (to Vimeo’s settings).
AS will will see in my “how-to” you can create SD content that’s as good as HD.