MTTS Milestones
On the Road with MINI Takes the States 2014 - Part 1
This is the first half of a documentary that seeks to communicate the experience of MTTS 2014 by presenting literally every moment of time on the road across the two week event, along with enough images and video from each gathering to convey the flavor of what it was like to participate from San Francisco to Boston. Either time-lapse photography (one image each 2 seconds) or highly accelerated video is used for most of the rally experiences on the road, but for the most scenic and unforgettable segments, normal video accelerated to 250% of normal speed was chosen (your 30 mph pace appears to be 75 mph) to preserve the scenery and motoring feel of those segments.
This first part covers the first week of the event, from San Francisco, CA to Memphis, TN and closes with the evening event on Beale Street. There is a substantial amount of the slower “scenic video” in this part, particularly on the back roads of Napa Valley and Tahoe, as well as across the Million Dollar Highway in Colorado. Please feel free to browse forward in these scenery passages if they start to lose your interest. I kept their full length because of the extraordinary motoring we enjoyed on these roads, knowing it’s better to have the option to fast forward than to not have the content at all. The “scenic video” passages retain the live audio of those driven segments (wind noise as well as exhaust music) while the time-lapse segments have all been fitted with musical accompaniment suitable to that leg’s characteristics.
The photography herein was accomplished with two GoPro cameras (a GoPro Hero 3+ Black and a GoPro Hero 2) mounted on at least four different points on my MINI, facing both forward and back. My Nikon D800 DSLR (Nikon 28-300 f/3.5-5.6 VR FX lens) with a Rode Stereo VideoMic Pro was used both for images as well as handheld video capture. A few images can be sourced to an iPhone 5. Every image went through post-production in Photoshop CS6. Approximately 190,000 individual GoPro images were employed to create the time-lapse video segments. Time-lapse post-processing was performed on a batch basis in Lightroom 5.4 and time-lapses were smoothed, exposure-balanced, motion-controlled and rendered in LRTimelapse 3.0 Professional. Final video editing was performed in Sony Vegas Pro 13.0. BluRay disk design and production was completed with Sony DVD Architect 6.0.
This RU-vid presentation was rendered in 1080p HD but due to variations in people’s connections, that definition may be eroded in transmission. I am preparing a number of BluRay DVD 2-disk sets of this production which may potentially be available. My experience so far is that this is best viewed on a BluRay DVD player and large screen television to bring out the clarity and complexity that I tried to engineer into the video.
I spent over 10 months to bring this together as my gift to the MINI Community, feeling that if MINI USA can invest so many, many months in preparing MTTS for us all, I could at least spend a little time to try to record it all and tell the story afterwards.
Whether you are a veteran of MTTS or have never driven a leg, please enjoy this with my best wishes -
Motor On my friends !
27 авг 2024
