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May 2017

Viewing posts from May , 2017

Travel Time: Niseko March 2017

 

 

Amongst the sea of cooking posts, comes a single travel/videography post. 😀

This was our 3rd time in Annupuri, Niseko. The first two times, weather wasn’t great, despite being closer to the peak periods. This time, I’d say the weather was perfect. 🙂 We hit our usual makan spots, and tried some new ones. Went all the way to Hirafu to try out Bang Bang, one of the best izakayas around. Hideo-san helped us make a reservation for dinner at Sobadokoro Rakuichi, but the boss lady lost our reservation so we got turned away. Needless to say, Hideo-san was pissed, and our eagerness to try the place has dropped quite a bit, so we might not bother trying to dine there ever again (in Hideo-san’s words, “never again”). On the flipside, we got to try Taj Mahal, which is an Indian restaurant close by. It can actually give our local Indian restaurants here a run for their money. We also managed a trip to Milk Kobo, which is a milk farm serving fresh milk products! Soft serve cone on a hot sunny winter day is the best!

As always, dining with Hideo-san at the villa causes us to meletop every- single- time. Please do not ask how many KGs we gained. 😛 In addition to the shabu-shabu or sukiyaki, he’d ply us with clams, scallops, kinki fish, yanagi no mai or yellow rockfish, sashimi, hairy crabs, rice. We always feel bad not being able to finish the food, but seriously-lah, Hideo-san! You know from our last visit we can’t each much. =.= Anyway, he pleasantly surprised us with a nice balcony BBQ for lunch on our last day, which was cold but awesome!

The video above is my first foray into video capture and editing with my new drone and action cam, so please forgive the rough edges. I’m quite proud of it though, and glad that I finally got around to doing it after so many months. I think I rely too much on the FDR-X3000’s optical stabilization though, as can be seen from the not so steady footage. Proper frame rate selection needs to improve too, as mixing 24fps and 60fps videos prolly isn’t a good idea. Post-processing was done with Davinci Resolve Lite, and in lazy mode: trim according to music and auto color the flat drone footage. Might try straight up 4K next time; thought the 60Mbps limit on the Mavic wouldn’t look nice, but Youtube seems to compress videos up to that level anyways.

Also, I crashed my drone on the 5th day. Yep, totally pilot error. Was trying out the POI function to do an orbit around the villa, but I didn’t check for clearance so it crashed into a low tree. Fortunately, it fell into soft ungroomed snow, so besides losing two propellers and introducing some looseness in the gimbal mount, it came back relatively unscathed.

Anyway, looking forward to our next trip back to this place. Love it!