Hot Air Ballooning Near Lake Bled.

[MarkBarbieri]

This is a video we made on a hot air balloon ride near Lake Bled a few days ago. Watch it and try to figure out how it was filmed. I'll come back and explain later.

The flight was a lot of fun. That part of Slovenia is incredibly beautiful. The lake is overlooked by a castle on a cliff. It also features a church on an island in the lake. It's like a real-life fantasy setting. I went paragliding over the lake earlier in the week and that was also spectacular. It was our first time in Slovenia, but we loved it and will probably come back.

A few notes for anyone that hasn't gone up in a hot air balloon:

1) They are really quiet except when they aren't. When the burner is on, they are very loud. My estimate was that the burner ran for about 20-30% of the time.

2) It is not windy. Generally, balloons only fly when the wind is fairly low. And the balloon moves with the wind, so you hardly feel any wind at all.

3) While I'm not afraid of heights, I typically feel a little nervous standing at the edge of a canyon or tall building. Oddly, I don't get that sensation in a balloon. I'm not sure why.

4) Balloon landings can be very rough. Usually, the wind is low and the landings are gentle. But sometimes it is windy near the ground and you bounce and crash across the ground for a while before coming to a stop. Even though it was calm for our flight, our pilot had us crouch and hold on in a crash position just in case. We once landed in high winds in Colorado and it was rough.

5) The balloon ride was more than twice as expensive as the paragliding flight. That's because the ratio of ground crew to passengers is higher, because the equipment costs are higher, and because they can usually only do one balloon ride per morning. It was about $250/person for our flight.

6) From what I've seen, most balloons are set up to carry 6 or 12 people. On this flight, we were in a 6 person balloon. With a 12 person balloon, the basket is split into two sections, so you can't necessarily change sides to get a different view.

7) The pilot of a balloon has limited control. They can go up or down looking for wind moving in the direction they want. Sometimes that works and they can go where they want to go. Sometimes it doesn't and you either don't move much across the ground or you don't move in the direction you want. It's hard to predict, so any balloon ride is a bit of a gamble.

 

[MarkBarbieri]

OK, here's how I shot the video. If it wasn't already obvious, it will be if you re-watch it after the explanation.

I mounted a camera on the end of a selfie-stick. Not just any camera, though. I used a 360 camera. In my case, it was an Insta360 X3. And not just any selfie-stick. I used an Insta360 Extended Edition selfie-stick that is 3m or almost 10 feet long when fully extended.

The camera has a neat trick where the selfie-stick mounts exactly inline with the stitch line between the two lenses. Then it masks out the stick when it blends the images together. With the super long selfie stick, it doesn't work perfectly because there is a lot of flex in the stick, but it works fairly well. The result is that you've got a camera positioned in space up to about 9 feet from you and you can adjust the camera angle (and the zoom slightly) in post production. You can have it look back at you, away in the opposite direction, up, down, or anywhere else you want. You can even do dynamic "pans" in post production starting in one direction and then moving to another.

It's cool, but it's kind of like using a trick lens or filter. It's fun when you use it for what it is designed for, but it's not very practical most of the time. Because the camera has to capture everything, it doesn't have much resolution when you crop down to a usable field of view. So I love it for stuff like this, but I find myself using my phone more often and also using a DJI Pocket (a tiny camera on a tiny gimbal) more often. Also, the flexibility that the X3 provides you in post comes at the cost of requiring much, much more time in post production.

 

[MarkBarbieri]

For fun, we also made a faked drone flight video at Castello Miramare in Trieste, Italy. You can see it below. We started the shot with a cellphone video of my wife holding a microdrone (that had no camera and we didn't even have the controller with us because it is illegal to fly them there). Then cut to a shot of the "drone" (really the 360 camera) launching from her hand and flying around. Kind of childish, but I found making it amusing.

 

[bob100]

cool

 

[TravelBlobb]

For fun, we also made a faked drone flight video at Castello Miramare in Trieste, Italy. You can see it below. We started the shot with a cellphone video of my wife holding a microdrone (that had no camera and we didn't even have the controller with us because it is illegal to fly them there). Then cut to a shot of the "drone" (really the 360 camera) launching from her hand and flying around. Kind of childish, but I found making it amusing.

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