Weather balloon flight

How did I create this video?

This video was created as a hobby project. My school had a "Projektwoche" (project week) where a project was to launch a weather balloon. I was interested in making a video about the results of the project. We used several cameras to capture the launch. There were two action cameras, a drone, a Sony Alpha 68 (operated by me), and some smartphones. The handheld cameras were used to capture the setup, launch and rescue mission. Unfortunately, the Sony Alpha 68 was not used with a gimbal, which is why some footage is a bit shaky. One of the action cameras shut down during the flight, either because of low temperature or low battery.

How was the video edited?

To edit the video, I used Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects for animations. There were several steps to editing the video. At first, I had to sync up all the videos, which was surprisingly difficult because of some frame rate differences. When this step was done, I thought about the general structure of the video, which consists of the intro, the setup, the launch, the rising of the balloon, the pop of the balloon, the fall and finally the rescue mission. I then cut out video material that was boring and tried to cut the video to the beat of the music. In this process, I gathered some feedback from friends and family. Once I was happy with the basic video, I added some animations that I thought were fitting with Adobe After Effects.

Additional Info

The action camera that points down was not setup correctly, so it had an outdated timestamp in the bottom left corner that was supposed to be disabled. To cover it up, I added an (admittedly unpleasant) black rectangle that covers the timestamp. I added data from the data logger to make it look like it wasn't a cover-up for a mistake. To display the data, I used Processing to generate frames with the data and then used FFmpeg to combine the frames with the video.