I love checking out holiday lighting displays, and the Big, Bright Light Show in Rochester, Michigan, is one of the biggest and brightest displays around town!
Big Bright is one of the brightest spots in metro Detroit these days with over a million twinkling LED lights blanketing Rochester's Main Street and as part of several animated displays.
Regular readers of Midwest Guest may remember my Photo Friday feature on the Big, Bright Light Show earlier this month, but I believe it is definitely worth visiting more than once during the season!
I've been playing a bit with my own early holiday present, a Flip video cam, and, as promised, took a bit of footage in Rochester the other night. I thought I'd share a couple of my very early results here.
This show draws streams of traffic through town. Listen closely to this clip and you'll hear a talking traffic signal admonishing pedestrians to "wait...wait"!
One of my favorite displays is an animated show of about 70 giant lighted snowflakes dancing across the face of a former knitting mill building. The clip below hardly does the display justice, but I thought it was fun to see the synchronized patterns formed by the flakes in this display.
I've obviously got a bit to learn about video, but taking a bit of footage, setting myself up with a YouTube account, and learning to do simple trims of my footage seemed like good first steps.
Anyone have some good resources or suggestions for those of us just beginning to play with video and use it in their blogs?
Here's hoping that everyone has a beautiful and bright holiday season, and that the New Year brings better days ahead for all of us!
© Dominique King 2009 All rights reserved
Beautiful! I actually don't toy with video often, but I've heard that Vimeo is a great site... http://www.vimeo.com/
Happy Holidays!
Posted by: Susan | December 24, 2009 at 08:26 AM
Dominique
Thanks! I thought the light show was a good subject to experiement with--too bad the weather was so wicked that night. The video turned out OK for all that, though.
I know people who like Vimeo as well. I'm not sure what the differences are between that and YouTube...but I do know YouTube seemed pretty easy to deal with as a beginner :)
Posted by: Dominique King | December 25, 2009 at 07:19 AM
Happy Holidays to you too!
Posted by: Nomadic Matt | December 27, 2009 at 02:26 PM
Love the snowflakes!
And hope you had a nice holiday. :)
Posted by: gypsyscarlett | December 27, 2009 at 09:46 PM
Matt-Thanks for stopping by! Happy travels.
Gypsy-I love the snowflakes, too. I'm hoping to get up there one more time to try and take a little more footage on a better day. It was pretty wet and miserable the night these clips were shot.
Hope your holidays are going great :)
Posted by: Dominique King | December 28, 2009 at 08:33 AM
I love the snowflakes too. so I began with YouTube too, but am going to transfer my videos to Vimeo too.
The videos look great. I found that my Flip is easy to use for short clips and little editing, plus it's HD and already formatted for internet. When I made my first videos for TSM I was using my video camera (with tapes!) and then using the iMovie editing software on my laptop. That editing software lets you put together multiple clips together with better transitions, and more text where ever you want, or to do narration. The narration is the trickiest, that's why I rarely do it. And I don't feel comfortable in front of the camera. I'm still learning a lot about videos, but felt very empowered when I made my first one.
Posted by: Carolina | December 31, 2009 at 08:25 AM
Carolina-Sounds like I need to check out Vimeo. How is it different/better than YouTube?
I'm with you about being hesitant to get on camera myself. I so see where certain subjects lend themselves to video even better than still cameras--the snowflakes display is a case in point.
I've heard about iMovie, but have yet to try it. I just did the simple trims in the Flip program.
Ambient noise seems to be one of the biggest problems with the video I've done so far. I did one small clip with a friend who wrote a book, but noise in the room overpowered our conversation-making the clip pretty useless. Fortunately, I took a couple of photos at her book-signing...so I'll use those when I do a story about it (mystery series set in northern Michigan).
Posted by: Dominique King | December 31, 2009 at 01:41 PM