Videos shot from famous St. Martin beach gets you right in the middle of the action

What to do on vacation in Sint Maarten (St. Martin) when you've had enough sun? If you brought along your Canon HV30, then there are plenty of options.

One day I went over to Maho Beach and shot some footage of comings and goings at Sint Maarten's Princess Juliana Airport (SXM).

From the beach the planes fly directly over your head and man they come in close!

The two videos I produced where shot entirely handheld without a tripod (who wants to haul a tripod on vacation anyway) using my Canon Vixia HV30.

The first video features planes and the second video features jets.

I decided to post the videos on both Vimeo and YouTube. Vimeo seems to allow higher playback quality, but I am still trying to figure out exactly what the best rendering settings are for posting videos to either site.

Be sure to click the full screen control to enlarge the video if you like.

If you like the music included with the videos, I have included a song download link next to the video.

Princess Juliana Airport (SXM) Saint Martin Part 1 - Planes from Holly View Video on Vimeo.
Princess Juliana Airport (SXM) Saint Martin Part 2 - Jets from Holly View Video on Vimeo.

These were shot in High Definition with stock lenses, no filters, at 1080 60i, and then captured via firewire in Sony Vegas 8 on my laptop.

The video was then rendered in Sony Vegas 8 with some efforts on color correction using built-in filters.

I attempted some surround panning using the noise of the planes and attempted to mix sound levels of noise along with background music.

In case anyone is interested in the specs on the video rendering they are Video: 23.976 fps, 1280x720, WMV V9 CBR Compression, Smoothness 90. Audio: 384 Kbps, 48,000 Hz, 16 Bit, 5.1 Surround, WMA9 Pro.

Sony's description states: "Use this setting for high-quality HD video playback from a local hard drive."Video shot in August 2008.