Lighting Rod Update?

14 day roller coaster tour will be including 2 days at Dollywood on July 7th and 8th. Of all the new coasters I will be getting to ride, I am looking forward to Lightning Rod the most. Can't wait!

A new mounted POV was posted on YouTube today:

WTF is "cine" POV supposed to mean? I hate that regular people can afford nice equipment, and not know how to use it or what the terminology means.

4K Cinematic 24P video - Have you never shortened a word in your line of work?

This isn't some some Robb Alvey BS video. Scott actually knows what he's doing, and gets compensated fairly well for it.

"Cine" doesn't mean anything to anyone but people who market cameras. It's like if I put in the title bar of this site, "Server with ASP.NET MVC and SQL Server from the cloud!" Nobody cares. What makes it "cinematic?" That it's shot at 24 fps? What I see is unnatural rolling shutter (the "jello effect"), probably caused by high shutter speed (judging by how little motion blur there is), which was likely to compensate for not using some kind of ND filter or a wide-open aperture. White balance is poor, much of it is over-exposed.

I just can't stand buzzwords.

Personally, I'm more apt to seek out a "cine" video because I think 60P provides way too much "hyper-realism" Sure, it's a bit smoother looking, but at what cost?

The buzz words on the video aren't there to appease anyone. They're there to let people know what kind of video they're about to watch. I'd rather see that before selecting a video than having to read the description. Kind of like when I see 3 big letters or words in red/blue/green plastered on the opening screen, I know not to waste my time.

The "jello effect" comes from the vibration of the train due to the "hot rod" front end. When I filmed this, I didn't intend to film a POV as I was at the park working on a technical video project for RMC and this video was originally intended to be a reference point for their engineers. Aside from reasons Josh mentioned, I use "Cine" POV to differentiate myself from other POV videos out there. If you see "Cine POV" you know it's Upstop Media. I'll be the first to admit, this isn't my best work, but a quality mounted POV of Lightning Rod is helping generate a buzz for this ride. Call me a "regular" person all you want, but keep in mind more and more parks are utilizing my footage for commercial advertising. I've also produced numerous promotional videos for ride manufacturers. Now tell us what you really think. http://gph.is/1UhonpP

Vibration aggravates the effect, but it's rolling shutter. It's been an issue for as long as (relatively) inexpensive CMOS sensors started being used to shoot video. It can be minimized to a degree by using a slower shutter (or larger shutter angle, if you want to be "cine"), but you'll have to stop down the lens or put some ND filters in to compensate for all of the additional light. That will also cause more motion blur, which while subjective, makes rides look "faster" and less like a sports highlight reel.

I don't know anything about you or even know what "regular" means, and I don't doubt that you've been hired to do work. That's super, and I wish you the best of luck. But getting some bullet points on your resume doesn't mean you've mastered the craft, and you should take every opportunity to learn what you can and look objectively at your work to understand how to make it better. Above all, you should abstract away any kind of buzzwords that the end consumers don't care about. Philip Bloom (who you should absolutely follow, as he can make a movie with a goddamn Barbie doll) doesn't have The Wonder List titles starting in "presented in cine 4k." Be professional, not buzzwordy.

In the end does it really matter how he words it if it's doing the job he's paid to do? The parks and RMC seem delighted thusfar.

When can we see some professionally produced coasterBUZZ HD pov?

When it pays better than my day job.

I was going to stay out of this debate, but when I watched the video again I got a YouTube teaser for another of his videos that said "enjoy cinema quality POVs." I really appreciate people who go out and get good POVs with park permission, but let's call then what they are... YouTube videos shot by cameras latched onto coaster cars. This isn't movie theater material here.

No one is claiming to be making the next Star Wars or anything. This is exactly the scenario that action cameras were made for.

Who wants to mount a huge rig on a coaster car when you can mount a 1080P or 4K camera easily and securely in less time, with less effort and costing less money?

Jeff said:
When it pays better than my day job.

So I guess that's good for the regular folks that would otherwise be put out of business.

My 4 year old, $350 laptop probably doesn't know the difference. Maybe I'll pull it up on the 60 inch TV... hmmm....

Jeff said:
It sure has a lot of gas leftover at the end.

These coasters seem to be more about being big and fast instead of long. Most of the renovated coasters lost length, especially Colossus (which they "made up" for by cycling on both tracks).

Topper Track and I-Box are expensive. Longer coaster = more track. More track = more dollars.

I wasn't commenting about the economics. They have no bearing on my observation.

And I wasn't replying to your post. Clearly, I was responding to Super7*'s observation. I didn't want to quote him since he's directly above me.

According to Dollywood's website, Lightning Rod is officially "now open." Here's some off-ride footage from this weekend. Man, is that thing flying at the end.

I hear that's because making it longer would have been more expensive.