Formula SAE Hype Video
I recently created a hype video for my FSAE team for our 30th year and wanted to share the process! In total, I probably put 30-40 hours into the video, a good chunk of that was scanning polaroids of old cars and digging through the old server for pictures.
This is the first video editing project I've ever done and I was pretty happy with the results. I used Openshot because it's free and easy to use. Overall, I liked it, but it lacks some more advanced features that would have made video editing a lot faster.Here is the video!
I originally thought of this concept on a run a few years ago and was very happy with how the video turned out. I had trouble finding pictures of some of the old cars, but for the most part there were at least a few pictures of every car that I could include.
For the earlier portions of the video which are primarily just pictures, I organized hundreds of pictures in Powerpoint to find some that made it look like one continuous car moving. This required a bit of image cropping and some cheating with putting cars out of chronological order to get a smooth sequence. Video editing got a lot faster and easier once I got to cars modern enough to have videos, and I didn't need to splice together pictures to make a sequence.
I used Matlab to generate the car numbers (F0 through F30) in the bottom right of the video. The images are all the same size but have a transparent background, this ensures the numbers are always in the same spot.
The script turned out to be really useful, because when it overwrites an image file the numbers automatically update in the video in Openshot. This is a case where automating saved a bit of time, and I also learned some basic image editing in Matlab. Code is here: https://pastebin.com/rHLiGfNs
A surprising issue I ran into is my bluetooth headphones have a lag, so I had to play the video on my laptop speakers as I was editing to get the pictures to sync up to the music. It also doesn't help that Openshot slowly desynchronizes from an audio file during its video preview.
I presented the video at Imagine RIT 2023.
