Looks good. Kept the cars in frame and not a lot of shaking and you zoomed up enough to get a nice fat image of the cars. Looks like it was a tough day as far as lighting was concerned.
Most editors have a color correction filter or editor in them. I use Liquid and with that you can set a frame as a reference. Say one of the frames in yours that isn't dark. Then you can use a 1 or 3 point match to correct the dark frame. Since they are both shots of the same dirt it usually comes out perfect without having to manually adjust anything. Color correction is something that a lot of people leave out. And the pro's spend a lot of time on. I guess because its not real easy to do. I've been messing with it for a few months now and it can be very frustrating. But like most things with this hobby it always gets easier the more you do it.
You nailed another thing that messes up a lot of video on the net. As far as I can tell its progressive or deinterlaced. It amazes me how many pro's that make beautiful DVDs don't deinterlace their trailers before they put them on the net. All computer monitors nowadays are progressive. A car will move far enough in 1/60 of a second to get a ghost image on any interlaced frames viewed on a computer. The most visable thing it does is leave zagged edges on stuff that is a straight line. Especially if its pointing to the sky ie poles the end of a wing or the pipe. Peeps always deinterlace your video before putting it on the net. The faster the cars you are filming the more you need to deinterlace.
If you are going to get into this stuff deeply one piece of software you really need is a good compressor. Procoder or Sorensen squeeze are the best ones. I use Procoder because it has an awesome adaptive deinterlace filter gamma correction and a bunch of others. If you editor has a gamma correction filter you can use that to brighten up dark footage as well and usually its easier than using the color corrector.
If you are using the Adobe stuff get a copy of fieldskit. Its less than 100 bucks and is the best deinterlacer by far. Looks forward and backwards in the video to make the best possible frame when it deinterlaces them.
For slow motion you want to use the timewarp filter. It comes in Adobe After Effects and also Liquid 7 probably others as well. The full software from Algolith is very expensive but the cut down filter included with the editors has everything you need for this type of work. Again this thing can be a bear to learn especially the dynamic slo mo. The static stuff is easy just a couple of checkboxes and buttons to click and its done. But if you want to vary the amount of slow motion in the clip you need the dynamic version.
I tried Adobe and Liquid and ended up sticking with Liquid 7. It renders in the background while you are doing other stuff so there isn't that long render afterwards. The timewarp filter is a better implementation IMO than the Adobe one and easier to use. Not only the filter but the way the timeline works as well. In Liquid you do the timewarp on a clip while putting the vid together. In Adobe you have to export out of premier then bring it into after effects so the video is already complete. When you slow motion a clip it needs to get longer and that is a pain to do in Adobe. In Liquid you just grab the end and take it to the length you want and since you are still in the edit mode you just add more clips after so it isn't a problem.
If you are a student of any kind with a valid ID you can get Liquid and the other high end editors dirt cheap. For instance Liquid costs 500 bucks. But as a student you can get it for 148.00. Do a search on educational discount software and you'll find lots of places to buy that way. Procoder is also 500 bucks but goes down to 200 or so with the discount. So for less than the cost of the editor alone you have everything you need to put out flawless video.
Those of you out there considering getting into this DON'T buy a camera that doesn't have firewire. USB just won't cut it. You will loose frames. Analog capture through a video card isn't going to get you near the quality that you will get with firewire and capturing directly to a file. And you can control the camera through firewire as well as get the data so the interface is much nicer.
To get really sharp close ups you need some kind of camera support if you don't have a shoulder held camera. No matter how steady your hands are you won't be able to hold one still enough at high zoom levels. You don't want to use any kind of electronic stabilization when you are shooting moving objects. Reason is it gets confused when you pan slowly and sometimes when you pan fast. Optical stabilization works a little better but if you don't want trails and other artifacts you need to keep this stuff turned off. Also if you can manual focus your camera. When a car comes into view the camera will try and focus on that. Then when it goes out of the frame the camera will refocus usually on the ground. This refocusing shows up as blurring in your final vid.
I like to use fully manual settings but using 3 cameras its not always possible. If clouds are moving around and causing different light levels I'll use a sports preset on the camera for exposure and manual focus. You'll get a little blurring when it changes exposure but usually you can edit around that. The focus induced blurring is almost impossible to edit out.
I'm putting together a video tutorial and forum thread on a site close to my home here in Tx. Its going to be a place for people with any level of experience to learn new stuff or contribute to the knowledge base so others can learn this stuff without too much pain
I'll post up the url when I have it working. Its almost there now but we still have to work out a few issues with how to put up short clips in the tutorial. I want to stream them off my site instead of using youtube where the video gets converted to flash. You won't see some of the stuff I want to show people if you use flash.
Anyways sorry for the long post but I'm really into this stuff. Keep it up it takes lots of practice. I think I'm up to 130 or so vids now. They started getting pretty good about the 80 mark.
Griz