"THE CHICAGO BEAN" (aka "Cloud Gate", by sculptor Anish Kapoor and located in Chicago's Millennium Park) is a most remarkable smoothly-mirrored giant bean-shaped object which sits on a large stone plane. It reflects the Michigan Avenue buildings, the sky, and the people around and under it (where the reflected images are wildly distorted). It is an amazing sight!

While editing this video, I found the ProDAD Mercalli image stabilizing software plugin for the Sony Vegas Pro 8 editing software a great help for smoothing the video footage taken with the very small Canon HV20 camcorder (which I handheld without my usual camera brace). I did find it useful to add a bit of sharpening to the string of filters used on the footage (with Mercalli last) to offset its normal image softening.

Since I had used a mono short shotgun microphone on the HV20 for this video (it is the least wind sensitive of all my mics, especially with its added "fuzzy"), I tried various ways while editing to produce simulated stereo sound. I was not happy with the results from methods I had read about, but I found that by reducing the audio level by about 3db in a sound editor (I like the simple and easy to use Cool Edit 2000) and introducing 3-4 4db peaks and dips through the midrange of each channel with the peaks and dips of one channel corresponding with the dips and peaks of the other, that I had an acceptable "stereo" video track.

(Note: The video compression necessary to make internet streaming practical may cause the image to appear to move with some "jogging" during pans that is not in the original - and for the smoothest playback in HD, it may be necessary to play the video twice.)

Lowsize: 16.50MBwxh: 336x189 Mdsize: 30.24MBwxh: 640x360 HDsize: 53.04MBwxh: 1280x720

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