Gaggle of Geese Remapped

During a recent shoot with a Canon 7D at Columbia Lake in Waterloo, Ontario, I chanced upon a small gaggle of geese preparing to take off. Although I was shooting in 1080p at 30 frames per second, I tracked their launch although I would rather have been shooting at the faster frame rate of 60 fps (albeit in the lower resolution of 720p).

Gaggle of Geese Remapped from David Rilstone on Vimeo.

This resulted in approx 10 useable seconds which I plan to incorporate later in a feature I'm creating about this park. A timely "tweet" by @AdobePremiere pointed me to a CS5 Help File at help.adobe.com on Timeline Remapping.

Here is described a very simple technique, which I've employed before for "Winter Sparrows", in which to create slow motion of the geese in flight by remapping the timeline. Slowing down to 25% (7.5 fps) of the original 30 fps framerate does create a slight jerkiness in the panning, but the wing motion actually remains quite smooth. Next time I WILL shoot at 720p/60 fps so that the resultant slo-mo frame rate of 15 fps (ie. 25%) will be smoother overall.

Thanks to @AdobePremiere (follow him on Twitter -- lots of useful tweets daily!)