In and Out of Africa

This is a short film which I shot for Africa House Safaris just before Christmas 2009.

The brief was to produce a DVD showing the locations and activities that are available with an Africa House Safari holiday. The entire project took 3 weeks to film, we shot over 30 hours of footage and travelled over 1000 miles

All the footage was shot entirely with the Sony EX3 camera using several 16gb SDHC cards, at the end of each day the files were transferred to two 1.5TB hard drives (backup is an important step). We carried three BP-U60 batteries, although two batteries were sufficient for each days shooting. The camera gear was transported in a Kata 193 bag, which was perhaps too small for the EX3, but it was within the aircraft cabin hand luggage limit.

Other equipment included Mike Tapas Nikon - Sony converter and Steve Shovlars Adaptimax converter, a 70-300mm Nikkor lens which got me out of trouble for a few animal shots, but was basically a poor match for the EX3. A Manfrotto tripod was used with a 503 head - I will be investing in a Miller tripod for my next job.

As the final DVD production is for the US market, I shot the assignment using Full-HD 1920 x 1080p 30fps (29.97fps). The down conversion to SD was made via a Matrox RTX2 card and the resulting DV avi file was opened in Premiere for final output to DVD using Adobe Encore. I have spent many hours experimenting with settings for SD DVD and the best results were obtained via the Matrox card.

All footage was edited in Adobe Premiere CS4 & CS5, some of the long shots were stabilised using ProDAD Mercalli software. The final master DVD was produced with Encore CS5

Music was complied from Royalty Free CDs published by - Digital Juice, SmartSound and others.

Video quality on the sample clip has been reduced due to file size etc.

Vincent Oliver