4K gyro-stabilized aerial video of San Francisco

http://fstoppers.com/teton-gravity-research-shows-off-most-advanced-4k-gyro-stabilized-camera-platform

by sheri • 13 years ago

151 54 13 years ago

fstoppers.com

lawsonia• 13 years ago

That is looking beautiful.

madiator• 13 years ago

Now imagine this is put on a drone!

chups• 13 years ago

great imagination :)

dutchbrit• 13 years ago

Quadcopters for the win!

cup• 13 years ago

What makes you think it isn't already?

olex2• 13 years ago

The article below the video, that clearly shows the system mounted on a full-size helicopter.

ynniv2• 13 years ago

The gimbal is 95lbs, and the camera another 5.

Also, photos of JetRangers.

olex2• 13 years ago

Modern brushless gimbals actually deliver really good stabilization - probably not as perfect as this and maybe not good enough to carry a Red, but take a look at this for what is possible with a GoPro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ch2iRCWZfKc

gokhan• 13 years ago

Very very impressive stabilization. This video shows motors in action at hand, close up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BW1ElgkBiAw , crazy.

minipark• 13 years ago

There is an entire movie that was shot using this technique:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40U5D2eI7_8

Aloisius3• 13 years ago

There are many, many, many movies shot like this. The company who shot this, Teton Gravity Research, along with all their competitor snowboard and ski movie makers, use it. Nature documentaries like the movie Earth used it.

This is one of the first though, to do it in 4K.

ptio• 13 years ago

link to video: http://vimeo.com/62831216

verytrivial2• 13 years ago

4K camera + http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wescam ? Very pretty, but I am not seeing innovation here.

rimantas• 13 years ago

What is with that obsession with innovation? What's wrong with maturity? Too often I come across the comments of a "no innovation there, it's a crap" kind and I wonder where does this attitude come from.

ynniv2• 13 years ago

People come here for news about unexpected change. Maturity is great but predictable, and will be reported in other channels.

verytrivial2• 13 years ago

Hardly. If the article was title "Captivating 4k images of cites at night" it wouldn't have garnered any HN traction. The implication here was that either 4k or the image stabilisation was note-worthy from a technological point of view. 4k is new/hot-ish (the low-light sensitivity is quite impressive in these shots), but those stabilisation rigs have been around for decades. At first I though someone may have put a Red onto a drone .. (someone still can!)

nobodyshere2• 13 years ago

Where can I get it in 4k? I don't really care about the fact that it was taken with a 4k cam without being able to download it in said quality...

SammoJ• 13 years ago

Didn't hunt for the source of this one but I did find some true 4K examples here:

http://media.xiph.org/video/derf/

CTRL-F 2160p

Aloisius3• 13 years ago

RED posted this to vimeo which they say is 5K: http://vimeo.com/25424362#at=0

guelo• 13 years ago

Might have been more interesting without the annoying Hollywood music. Or maybe it would still have been boring. I'm confused why this is top of HN right now.

nobodyshere2• 13 years ago

Especially with in fact misleading title. Where's 4k here?

lenazegher• 13 years ago

The corny music along with the establishing shots of SF really, really reminded me of the opening of cult so-bad-it's-good hit The Room [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Room_(film)

kalms2• 13 years ago

I actually enjoyed the choice of music. Where is it from?

moogleii• 13 years ago

Nero - Two Steps From Hell

enginous3• 13 years ago

Let me get a little whiny and off-topic here: the video is beautiful, but I wish people mostly stopped using Vimeo until they make their player more resilient.

It doesn't seem to degrade video quality if your bandwidth is low, it seems that my bandwidth to Vimeo is generally lower than with YouTube, it handles buffering very poorly, it's jittery on some less powerful computers, and the player itself loads noticably slower than YouTube.

For this reason, I hesitate to share the video with others, even if it's great. People going through their feeds have better things to do than wait and give up on content I attempt to share.

jvzr• 13 years ago

Well, I have the exact opposite experience. I guess it depends on where you live on the globe. :)

treelovinhippie• 13 years ago

And ironically it's the higher-quality, higher bandwidth-intensive artsy videos that are uploaded there.

Google should buy them out, though I'm sure they've already gone down that path.

btipling3• 13 years ago

Vimeo is already owned by IAC.

petercooper• 13 years ago

Agreed. When I had 12Mbps down, Vimeo was a real borderline PITA to use and it seemed jumping to points in a video took 10+ seconds to actually occur whereas with YouTube you could jump around the video quickly. Now I have 70Mbps down, Vimeo is somewhat more bearable, but it's still not as good an experience as YouTube.

All that said, Vimeo's video always seems better quality to me, even if it slow to load or cumbersome to control. And I suspect that, like me, you're in Europe.. so that might also have a part to play.

enginous3• 13 years ago

Agreed on all counts, and I'm in Iceland. I also know that local ISPs have dedicated caching servers for YouTube videos, which gives them an advantage in my region.

I realize that it's very expensive to have great connectivity in all regions, and I definitely think they should focus on player improvements (which might of course involve considerable sever work, too) since my main beef is with how slow connections are handled by the player.

wklauss• 13 years ago

Are you visiting the site from US, EU...? My experience is the opposite also. Youtube experience is good, but Vimeo doesn't show any buffering problems and bandwidth seems fine.

The last think I'd want is for Google to buy them, honestly. I think its good for everyone that theres an alternative platform to Youtube that revolves around a different style of videos.

janinge• 13 years ago

Same (opposite as OP) experience here in one of the Scandinavian countries (on TeliaSonera's network). Buffering and seeking always happens almost instantly with Vimeo, and they deliver better video quality.

YouTube often fails to load videos here, and I have to switch between bandwidth settings (up/down, doesn't matter) to get things going.

netcraft• 13 years ago

Like others have said, I have had the exact opposite experience - youtube buffers and moving around in the video (even inside of what seems to already been buffered!) will restart the buffer completely. Vimeo always seems to work perfectly, even over my mobile connection.

oatmealsnap• 13 years ago

I think that what you are perceiving as a "bad player" comes from Vimeo's focus on image quality over other factors. YouTube's compression algorithms are more lossy than Vimeo's, so there is less data to send. This is great for serving Justin Bieber to millions of people every day, but less good when you are a photographer showing off a macro photography reel. Longer load times are a fair tradeoff for most of Vimeo's customers.

I should add that I am in the US, and had no problem running that video on a modern computer, so I don't really how badly it was running on yours.

enginous3• 13 years ago

I think you're spot on that in general, the speed-quality tradeoff creates a legitimate case for content producers to choose Vimeo.

However, that's not really my complaint, but rather how slow buffering is handled by the player. In my case, the player responds to my low bandwidth by repeatedly attempting to play fractions of a second of choppy video at a time. When the player is struggling with buffering, I believe it should either downgrade the video quality or make me wait until I can watch the full video (or at least a few seconds of it) without interruption.

Strangely enough, even when the buffering progress bar makes it seem that I've loaded the next few seconds of the video, I'll get jittery video (as if the indicator is just wrong).

These are mostly player issues, and they're mostly what's putting me off about Vimeo. Now, I've been experiencing this for years on various computers and connections (of course, I don't remember the times where everything worked fine), but perhaps this is only affecting a fraction of users that I happen to belong to.

BHSPitMonkey• 13 years ago

If I'm going to need to let a video like this one buffer for about an hour (on a very good connection) before hitting play, why doesn't the content creator simply find a place to host the original file and give me a download link? Otherwise, if their intention is to allow the public to stream it easily, they should probably just use YouTube.

jfb2• 13 years ago

That's what youtube-dl is for.

incision• 13 years ago

Personally, my Vimeo experience has been consistently excellent for as long as I can remember from all manner of devices.

On the other hand, I find YouTube to be maddeningly inconsistent at times, particularly via Android devices.

Aloisius3• 13 years ago

I have what is possibly the most jittery internet access in San Francisco and Vimeo works just fine. YouTube on the other hand, works terribly half the time and fine the other half.

Frankly, for videos like this, one shouldn't degrade the video quality if their bandwidth is low. The whole point of this video is the epic shots. If it low quality then, what is the point?

reeses• 13 years ago

Vimeo has room to improve, but I think it's a smart move to take the "premium" route compared to YouTube. I don't like publishing to YouTube unless it's recorded on my phone.

If they tried to compete with YouTube toe-to-toe, they'd probably not be doing as well. Think of it as 500px vs. Flickr or Facebook for photo sharing. You'll get fewer eyes on your work but they'll tend to be more discriminating eyes.

hnriot• 13 years ago

You can't blame Vimeo for you having a slow computer and a slow Internet connection. Vimeo is targeted at people who want a better quality experience than YouTube and it is assumed that you can keep up.

webmonkeyuk• 13 years ago

I particularly like the way that the Jet Ranger changes colour in the photos

rockyj• 13 years ago

SF is beautiful, being a programmer I wish I could live there. Oh well :(

btipling3• 13 years ago

San Francisco is not beautiful. There are nice residential parts, and it isn't a boring place, and there are lots of great technology companies. But this city is not beautiful. Have a walk around the civic center if you doubt.

jfb2• 13 years ago

I disagree. There are parts of the city that are terrible, but there's so much that's lovely, and the physical environment is almost peerless. Corona Heights park; Glen Park canyon; Ocean Beach; the Embarcadero; Holly Park in Bernal Heights -- gorgeous.

jrockway• 13 years ago

This reminds me of the intro to Law & Order.

joonix2• 13 years ago

There were many shots like this in the Dark Knight Rises of Gotham (Manhattan). They were fantastic.

cwe• 13 years ago

Totally off topic, but wasn't that shot in Pittsburgh?

adpowers• 13 years ago

Parts were shot in Pittsburgh, LA, Manhattan, and London. The Freedom Tower under construction was obviously visible in some skyline shots.

In one scene Batman and Bane were fighting on the steps of Wall Street. From one angle the shot was filmed in front of the Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh and another angle was actually on Wall Street.

http://moviemaps.org/movies/7y

joonix2• 13 years ago

Parts were, but there are tons of gyroscope helicopter shots of Manhattan in the film.

4K gyro-stabilized aerial video of San Francisco

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