Starting videoblogging

Hello! I meant to start my video blogging earlier but it has turned out to be a much more challenging errand than I anticipated. For that reason it's been two weeks since the last blog post. You can watch my first video below:

The results are not great and I would have a little stronger throughput from myself. I did not give up though, so I learned a lot along the way.

I am not going to give up on written form so you are still going to see ordinary blog entries from me. Yet I am definitely going to exercise performances in front of the video camera a bit more.

Ahead-up planning

Before you even start filming stuff up you should have it clean how you're going to represent the subject and what you're going to tell and in which order.

I am a slow speaker. For me it is not natural to speak even full sentences in front of the video camera at the pace you usually hear out in youtube. To do it I have to plan ahead what I am going to say and how.

In the video I have a lot of cutting because of not planning ahead on properly on what I am going to say.

The another problem you may meet is that the things on the camera do not appear in the same clarity as they appear to you who is performing. To get it right you're going to need auxiliary material along your performance, that you add into the video during the clipping and processing.

Don't worry too much about how you look like

When you have finally taken the first footage about yourself, you may find out that you appear fatter and dumber than you think you do. In front of the camera you cannot conceal who you are or how you appear...

...but should you conceal yourself? Do you want that? If you think about it most of the charisma is in how you behave, not in how you look like. Give yourself a chance to appear and you won't look so bad anymore.

The bare fact that you dare to appear in front of the camera already makes you look better than you are. To others, not to you though.

High quality video production is difficult

If you are lazy, you could just film out your footage then dump it into Youtube and be done with it. But more you do so better chance there is that the content you uploaded won't progress at the rate to be interesting enough to watch.

Doing this is hard though. You have to film enough material, label it, cut it, decide up the special effects and finally whether to keep or cut something out.

The footage's format is important

While I was working through the video material I found out that the audio and video was constantly out of sync. It didn't matter which software I was using, although everything seems fine in an ordinary video player.

The problem appears to be that the recording software expects you to be an idiot and upload your footage directly into the web. For this reason the video encoder is using separate, varying framerate at the video and the audio to pack it up.

It is difficult for the video editing application to keep up with varying framerates so the video content you get is out of sync and it begins to appear as you clip and glue things together in the editor.

Avoid having a super-bad time and pick a video format supported by the editors before you shoot.

FAT32 & USB memory sticks suck

When I finally finished shooting video, I had 9GB of footage I had to get to my computer. I decided to get an USB stick to do that.

Unfortunately if your USB stick is formatted to FAT32, it will only accept files that are somewhere around 500MB - 2GB large. It simply refused to copy my large footage file into the USB stick.

Video editing software sucks

I tried the following software for cutting my video in together:

Both the OpenShot and Shotcut have problems with handling large files and speeding up&slowing them down.

The OpenShot looks better than Shotcut at the first time due to it's tutorial. The Shotcut ends up working more reliably though.

Lightworks gives you a great looking interface, but if you picked your video format wrong it will be hell to resolve that in Lightworks. The interface is complex and looks like it attempts to satisfy some workflow although that workflow is redundant for the beginner.

Despite that I finally ended up using Shotcut I think you're screwed if you plan to go without a budget into the video production. If your 1080p video is longer than 10 minutes, the open source software listed here ends up being sluggish at the job. OpenShot simply crashed at my video that was a hour long.

All of these programs struggle at doing the simple thing of taking the footage you have and letting you to clip it into pieces, adjust those pieces, removing and inserting stuff in between. There is literally one task all of these applications fail to satisfy somehow.

On the brink

I was on the brink of whether to publish my video or not. On the one hand I feel like it's not good enough. On the other hand I want to publish it. So here it is, enjoy if you can!

I have my worries that I will be getting ridicule and harrasment because of this video. But I feel like something inside me is broken. If it stings, I let it sting! I refuse to care.

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