Supercell and Tornado Timelapse

I finally got around to uploading all of the "Aurora" footage, I forgot how much we filmed before the actual tornado. We actually ran out of tape halfway through the Aurora tornado and you'll probably see where on there, but Darin was quick to the draw, so we only lost a few seconds. I really love our suction mount for our video camera that we purchased this year, it eliminates a lot of handheld shakiness and allows for some great time lapses. Next year, we plan on using this same camera and mount, and adding the amazing Sony FX1000 for better quality footage...having the old camera for wide angle structure time lapses and the FX1000 for the handheld zoomed stuff.

This supercell, before the infamous Aurora tornado, was oh-so-close to putting down a tornado in the city of Grand Island, which wouldn't have been good for their somewhat decent populated area, and fortunately didn't. We filmed an occluding meso that produced brief funnels beneath a wall cloud on the east side of Grand Island in the Wal-Mart parking lot, as it approached us about 1/2 - 1 mile to our west. We ran into Mike Hollingshead, saw Scott McPartland and Dave Lewison as well, who were also filming the show over Grand Island.

I would have had more time lapse footage, after the first scene you'll see, but for some reason that suction mount wasn't on tight, or the wind was moving my car and mount side to side, and it was rather annoying, so I left it out.

This took forever to render in Pinnacle, BTW. It only allows a 5x speed, so I had to chop each scene, then render it as the original .m2v file...which only wrote 1-3 frames per second...and each scene probably had 10,000 frames. So then I'd render it that way, then have to render it once again to get it to 10 x, before finally rendering the entire project. Fun stuff. The video isn't in it's native resolution mainly because Vimeo only allows me 500 mb, and the native resolution for this file was 700 mb. So I had to take it a notch down to 1200 x whatever instead of 1440 x 900 (1080i). And then vimeo resizes it to like 640 x 360. It still looks good, much better than any other format.

I'd embed the video on here, but they won't allow you to view it in HD other than their site, so here's the link to the video. I've also enabled it so that anyone can download the original source video on there, and the file is huge at 425 mb, but well worth it vs. the smaller version on vimeo.