Running with the sardines off South Africa
Every winter off the KwaZulu-Natal coast of South Africa, millions of sardines and red eye herring move northwards assisted by cold water currents in a migration that has become known as the 'Sardine Run'. The mass of fish becomes a source of protein for numerous predators that arrive to take advantage of the event.
This ten minute video short is a Quicktime .MOV file encoded to 640x360 at 800bps in Apple’s Compressor from the original HDV material. The topside video was shot with a Sony HVR-A1U and the underwater material was shot with a Sony HDR-FX1 housed in an LMI BlueFin housing.
Capturing quality video was tough. Conditions were challenging with low visibility, low light and on occasion very high seas. However, enough sharks, dolphins and whales presented themselves to us, and enough tapes were burned for this memorable trip to be well recorded.
Our base in KwaZulu-Natal was Port St. Johns, at the mouth of the Mzimvubu River, four hours drive south of Durban.
This .MOV file plays best with the latest QuickTime plug-in, and should start streaming after a few minutes depending on your connection speed. The file is very large (60 meg) so be patient while it loads (any smaller and the quality would be really terrible - you may want to load in the background and view once the whole file has been downloaded)
