More fun with Speed Drawings

Nature's Gifts
9x12 inches
Coloured pencils, Pitt pens and a touch of white ink on
Canson Pastel Grey Mat Board

What a heavenly feeling to back doing art again and isn't it wonderful to have a job where you are dying to get back into it. This is my latest piece and after lots of fun and games, I finally managed to get a speed drawing video rendered and you can view it on YouTube at http://youtu.be/SokrF9IQAFk. 

In previous posts, I talked about my set up for creating the speed drawing and mentioned that I had purchased the iphone app LapseIt. This little app enables you to take time lapse photography and then to render all the individual frames into a video. This worked reasonably well for my first speed drawing of the eye, although I did notice there was a little jumping around in the rendered video compared to the individual frames. This time, I had over 10,000 frames. In each of these individual frames, you can see the entire area I am working on, but for some reason, every time I tried to render the video, the app was cropping down certain frames so that my hand and what I was actually drawing was out of the field of vision. I tried rendering numerous times, using several different formats and each time the same problem. After an exasperating weekend, of trying all sorts of solutions including trying to use Windows Movie Maker, unsuccessfully, to render the video, I eventually bought another little app called OSnap. I then had to save all 10,000 frames to my Camera Roll and then import them to this app and finally was able to render a video, that might not be of the highest quality, but is still watchable, and at least you can see my hand and what the pencil is doing at all times. I would highly recommend the OSnap over the LapseIt, although it also has some limitations itself in that it saves the video in .mov format, where most applications prefer MP4. I also had problems sharing my video to YouTube from within the app, but tried instead saving the video to my camera roll and sharing it to YouTube from there. That only took 5 minutes. All this sounds really complicated and difficult, but I guess you can't expect too much from a $3 app. I have now deleted LapseIt, because I simply can't afford to run into these issues again and will use OSnap for the next speed drawing to see how it goes from start to finish.