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see also: ZS15 footage of Vegas Wynn waterfall:
see also: ZS15 footage of Caesars Palace:
The waterfall fountain at the Mirage Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, shot with a Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS15 compact superzoom pocket camera and edited in Sony Vegas. I adjusted the brightness and contrast in a few of the shots, and increased the color saturation in 1 shot, otherwise the images are exactly as they came from the camera. I rendered the upload at 1920×1080, 30fps progressive, at 16Mbps. The quality seems to have held up fairly well. The music is “Backlight Intrigue-Variation A,” included royalty-free with Sony Vegas. The camera is sold as the DMC-TZ25 in Europe.
In my first test (at the Wynn) I used an original Gorilla Pod to hold the camera. At the Mirage I found that the railing vibrated almost constantly, putting jitter into all the video. This is the biggest problem with the Gorilla Pod for video. So I used a Ravelli 49″ APLT2 tripod, which weighs only 1.15 pounds and costs about 13 dollars, to hold the camera.
Camera:
Tripod:
All in all, the DMC-ZS15 (4.1 x 1.3 x 2.3 inches; 6.6 ounces) and Ravelli tripod (~ 1.15lbs ) can make a very nice and useful combination. However, this tripod is useless for pan and tilt motions, due to the totally non-fluid head. Unfortunately I have yet to locate a tripod anywhere near so light with a good fluid head at any price.
I did find that despite its drawbacks, the Ravelli can make a good steadicam stabilizer for a pocket camera. Simply extend the legs and center post fully, and hold the tripod with 2 fingers at the point where the legs meet the center post. The camera and tripod together weigh about 1.5 pounds (there is no steadicam type footage in this video, however).
This is my second test of this camera. It has a very nice image sensor (12.1 megapixels) for its size (standard point and shoot 1/2.3″ size sensor, about 0.30 inches diagonally). This is reportedly the same image sensor used in the acclaimed DMC-FZ150. Both video and still photos look excellent. The auto exposure and auto focus both work very well, and the Leica 16x zoom lens is very sharp.
In this video I also utilized the “iZoom” feature, which extends the zoom range to 32x without loss of quality by using a smaller section of the 12.1 MP sensor. I found that the 32x images look very nice indeed.
All of the shots were taken in 1920×1080 30fps progressive MP4 mode (20Mbps) with the “Expressive” color mode selected, resulting in generally pleasing higher saturation.
Unfortunately, although manual exposure control is available for still photos, it is disabled for all video recording. You can have some partial control over exposure by choosing between three meter settings, Averaging, Center Weighted, and Spot Metering. Four custom settings can be stored, so I set three of them for the three types of metering.
The Mirage is a 3,044 room hotel and casino resort located on the Las Vegas Strip in Las Vegas, Nevada, United States.
The Mirage is connected by a free tram to Treasure Island. The marquee in front of the Mirage is the largest free standing marquee in the world….
History
The Mirage was built by developer Steve Wynn and designed by Joel Bergman. It opened in November 1989 and was the first resort that was built with the money of Wall Street through the use of junk bonds. It was built on the site, formerly occupied by the Castaways and previous to that, the Red Rooster Nite Club.
The Mirage was the most expensive hotel-casino in history, with a construction cost of US $630 million. The hotel’s distinctive gold windows get their color from actual gold dust used in the tinting process.
Its construction is also considered noteworthy in that Wynn had set a new standard for Vegas resorts, and is widely considered to be the father of today’s Las Vegas. Prior to The Mirage’s opening, the city was experiencing a decline in tourism that began in the 1970s, especially around the time that the state of New Jersey legalized gambling and tourists (in particular those on the East Coast) began to frequent the casinos of Atlantic City. Also, this was a time when Las Vegas was no longer considered a fashionable destination, so a new, high-profile, project was necessary to jump-start the ailing industry…
