Night in Melbourne
This is what I’ve wanted to do for the last couple of years. What exactly? Shoot beautiful videos. I’ve more or less figured out how to take good photos already. Not that there’s nothing left for me to learn in photography, but video has become just as interesting to me — maybe even more so. That’s why I bought a new camera, an anamorphic lens, and, more recently, the professional version of DaVinci Resolve for video editing. It’s the same software they use in Hollywood. So yeah, I went out and shot a proper cinematic night-city video with an anamorphic lens last week.
As for the location itself, I caught the train to Richmond Station, walked through the park to Morell Bridge, then followed the north bank of the Yarra all the way to Princes Bridge and Flinders Street Station. Along the way I shot a bunch of short video clips, around 10–15 seconds each. Funny thing is, I edited them together in reverse chronological order — starting with Flinders Street Station at night and ending with Blue Hour shots from Morell Bridge.
Editing the video turned into a whole separate adventure. As I mentioned, I bought DaVinci Resolve Studio, and this was my first project using the professional version of the software. Before that I’d only used the free home version. The Studio version adds heaps of nice features, including AI-powered noise reduction and sharpening.
Putting the video together itself wasn’t too difficult. I used music from the brilliant Swedish band Les Big Byrd, whom I met at a recent concert. I wrote about them here:
I probably got a bit carried away with all the new DaVinci Studio features, and the project ended up pretty “heavy” in terms of effects and rendering load. So heavy, in fact, that my own computer completely choked on it. I ended up using my son’s MacBook instead. Even the Mac took an hour and a half to render the final 8-minute video.
Was it worth all the effort? For me, absolutely — I enjoyed the process, and that’s the main thing. And the video turned out pretty well too. I made it in HDR HLG format, and it looks incredible on an OLED TV. Unfortunately, YouTube still hasn’t processed the HDR version, and in standard dynamic range it ends up looking too dark. Still, it’s definitely watchable — especially with that fantastic Swedish soundtrack.
And here are some photos I snapped in between filming the video clips:
And here is the Flickr album with the high-resolution photos:
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