An Experiment with Lightning

[JimFox]

When I put together my other video, my little short story of that evening with all of the lightning. I thought, maybe it would be cool to see some of the lightning in Slow Motion! The Night of a Thousand Lightning Strikes | Focal World

So I just pulled a few clips, and slowed them down. Now I do apologize as the quality will be poor at best.... but hopefully I can get a few points for effort.

I have never tried this before. First off the GoPro is horrible in low light, so next time I won't use it. And Second, I would try to switch to a higher frame rate, so it has more frames to use to slow down. I think this one was at 30fps, and most video that's used for slow motion is at 120 or 240fps.

Hopefully you can enjoy it despite it's flaws.

The FocalWorld YouTube Channel is up to 190 Subcribers!!! Please help it get to 1000 by subscribing and sharing!

Thanks so much,

Jim

 

[Ben Egbert]

This is really neat, did you notice how many of the strikes seemed to repeat? Fun to see this in slow motion.

 

[AlanLichty]

Interesting result and an amazing number of lightning stokes to play with.

I am curious why you used the GoPro instead of your iPhone. Your iPhone 11 Pro has a mode for fast frame rates that could handle the slo-mo presentation quite readily and this lightning show would be amazing with the higher frame rate.

 

[JimFox]

This is really neat, did you notice how many of the strikes seemed to repeat? Fun to see this in slow motion.

Thanks so much Ben. Yeah, there was a bunch that repeated in an area, I wish I had zoomed in tighter on those.

 

[JimFox]

Interesting result and an amazing number of lightning stokes to play with.

I am curious why you used the GoPro instead of your iPhone. Your iPhone 11 Pro has a mode for fast frame rates that could handle the slo-mo presentation quite readily and this lightning show would be amazing with the higher frame rate.

Thanks Alan.

I wasn't using the iPhone for video yet when I did this. This was one of the times I used the GoPro, especially the last part where it was getting darker, when I said I needed a better alternative.

As for the faster frame rates, I am not using that now I don't believe. I think I turned it down to 30fps on my iPhone. In most cases I don't need anything faster, and the higher FPS movies seem to bog down the computer longer when editing. But I might need to rethink that.

 

[AlanLichty]

Thanks Alan.

I wasn't using the iPhone for video yet when I did this. This was one of the times I used the GoPro, especially the last part where it was getting darker, when I said I needed a better alternative.

As for the faster frame rates, I am not using that now I don't believe. I think I turned it down to 30fps on my iPhone. In most cases I don't need anything faster, and the higher FPS movies seem to bog down the computer longer when editing. But I might need to rethink that.

For the record I haven't tried any of the new faster frame rates yet either and need a little more compute horsepower and RAM as well before I can try. I didn't build my current computing environment for video and especially higher resolution video.

 

[JimFox]

For the record I haven't tried any of the new faster frame rates yet either and need a little more compute horsepower and RAM as well before I can try. I didn't build my current computing environment for video and especially higher resolution video.

I think it's more the apps then the computer even. Adobe Premier Elements is pretty fast, but I hate the workflow for assembling videos, I just use it for simple edits (color, contrast, highlight, shadow). Movavi is the best for assembling, but it chokes on 4k video, and it's edits remind you of editing 8 bit graphics from 30 years ago. Photoshop CS is the most powerful, but it can take hours and hours, to Render a video. So speed to me seems to be more of a product of bad programming, or purposeful programming if Adobe really wants people to use Premiere, so they handicapped Photoshop on purpose to make it Render slow?

 

[BlackRockArt]

When I put together my other video, my little short story of that evening with all of the lightning. I thought, maybe it would be cool to see some of the lightning in Slow Motion! The Night of a Thousand Lightning Strikes | Focal World

So I just pulled a few clips, and slowed them down. Now I do apologize as the quality will be poor at best.... but hopefully I can get a few points for effort.

I have never tried this before. First off the GoPro is horrible in low light, so next time I won't use it. And Second, I would try to switch to a higher frame rate, so it has more frames to use to slow down. I think this one was at 30fps, and most video that's used for slow motion is at 120 or 240fps.

Hopefully you can enjoy it despite it's flaws.

The FocalWorld YouTube Channel is up to 190 Subcribers!!! Please help it get to 1000 by subscribing and sharing!

Thanks so much,

Jim

Jim， this is a really cool video. I find myself spending more time getting the right soundtrack to match the tempo of visuals; it's more work.

Oliver

 

[JimFox]

Jim， this is a really cool video. I find myself spending more time getting the right soundtrack to match the tempo of visuals; it's more work.

Oliver

Thank you Oliver. I agree the sound track is key to a good video. I have been using a lot of classic sounding music recently, but for this video since it's in slow motion, I didn't want to put the viewer to sleep with equally slow classic music, so I went with some inspiring type music that is a bit fast and has a steady beat. It's not perfect, but quite a few of the strong beats in it lined up with the lightning strikes, so I thought that was cool.

 

[Alisa]

This is cool Jim! I would love to go to UT during monsoon season!