High above the River Conwy stands one of the greatest medieval fortresses ever built.
In this cinematic drone and ground documentary, we explore the history of Conwy Castle — the mighty fortress built by King Edward I following his conquest of Wales in 1283.
From its towering walls and eight great towers to the story of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, the last native Prince of Wales, Conwy Castle remains one of the finest surviving examples of medieval military architecture anywhere in Europe.
This film explores:
Edward I’s “Iron Ring” of castles
The lost abbey of Aberconwy
James of Saint George and the castle’s construction
Medieval siege history
The English Civil War and the slighting of the castle
Victorian engineering beside the medieval walls
Stunning aerial and cinematic ground footage of Conwy today
The video also includes historically inspired reconstructions and artistic interpretations based on surviving evidence and historical research.
Best watched on a 4K television . If you enjoyed the watch then please give it a like and leave a comment.
This is a really great piece of work, @D0c.Col - clearly a labour of love to bring together the aerial, ground and AI stuff all expertly spliced together.
Thanks very much @gasbag43 Andrew. Yes, I do love the research and editing, not so keen on the 10hr final render time though!
I edit in Davinci Resolve on a ASUS Vivobook 12th Gen CPU laptop with a NVIDIA RTX, and use all the bells and whistles too! Upshot of that is long render times and laggy editing so I use proxies and a 720p timeline until I’m ready to do the final render at 4k. The latter is often done after checking 2, or 3, 720p draft renders to make sure there are no errors in the final one. These only take a few minutes and still look okay on YouTube, but we are snobs when it comes to resolution, are we not?
I know what you mean about chasing the highest quality output - I do very little video work, but for my stills stuff, it has to be right on the money before I’ll post it on my website.
Thanks for the info re your software setup. I’ve just gone the whole hog and gone with a Gemini AI Pro subscription while i dip a toe in the water with image creation and editing, but will be moving onto generating videos from stills.
I know i need to beef up my limited video editing skills as Im off to Ireland’s Copper Coast in a few weeks time and it would be rude not to shoot some cliff-related video while I’m there.
What i did use when i first got a drone was edit in iMovie and dependent on what i can eke out of Gemini, i may well go back to it before experimenting with other video tools (but i do hear good things about Davinci, so will check that out)
You can get a free version of DaVinci Resolve, but it is RAM and processor-hungry, so beware. I have the Studio paid version that utilizes my NVIDIA RTX GPU, so it’s a bit quicker… but not a lot.
P.S. I’m as patient as the next man, but let it render through the night!
