Videography

For my own records, keeping track of where I come from, because I learnt writing the "Why" page: I forget.

2020aug08sat Published

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2020aug02sun Blog Draft

2020jun23tue Original on "Why" page

The initial Harkerville video (2018dec07-09) was shot on an ASUS Fonepad 7 (7-inch phablet). The phablet recorded very unstable, 16:9, 720p, variable-fps, mp4 footage with relatively good sound. I borrowed J-M's Dixon action camera, and it recorded relatively unstable, but wide-angle, 16:9, 1080p, 30fps, mov footage with slightly lower sound-volume.

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I consider the Dixon's wide-angle fish-eye effect to be unnatural for my purposes, and the greater resolution, although producing a clearer, crisper image perhaps, did not seem to contribute anything else significantly positive to the video. Actually, for the higher resolution, you have to approach so much closer to the subject (e.g. a sign post) in order to capture sufficient detail for display on smaller (phone) screens. Also, considering the Dixon's lower sound-volume, the choice of the phablet over the Dixon, for my purposes, was rather easy in the end.

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The weekend after the Harkerville (2018dec16sun), I recorded the Tierkloof waterfall hike, and the weekend after that (2018dec22sat), the Glentana hike.

Then I edited and rendered them all using OpenShot, and uploaded them to YouTube, adding automatic face-blur to all three, as well as expanded, explanatory closed captions/subtitles to Harkerville and Tierkloof.

At that stage, my YouTube account didn't facilitate very long videos. So, I had to upload the hikes as separate, split videos, and combine them in playlists. I was also just beginning to learn how it all worked, and only afterwards figured out how to render in High Definition for better quality. That's why there are two sets of videos of the same Harkerville hike.

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I also had not yet realised the infeasibility of becoming a registered hiking-guide, and branding was still very much on the table. However, "Natural Rhythm" seems to be such a ubiquitously-popular concept, it is almost generic. After considering and trying many different concepts, I finally just gave up, and settled on "Q. Hikes" as my YouTube channel-name. "Q. Hikes" < "QDOT Hikes" < "Quick and Dirty One-Take Hikes", referring to my attempts at keeping things as simple as possible. However, as far as a brand name goes, it is also not great, because it isn't intuitive, and requires explanation. The email address couldn't be "q.hikes", but had to be "qdothikes", requiring forever spelling it out for people so that they don't get confused. So, contradictorily, it's actually not very simple in the end at all.

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However, it became clear that the phablet is actually entirely inadequate for the task. Including its external cover and USB keyboard, it is very big and bulky and clumsy and cumbersome and awkward. I had to get something better, more compact, more stable, with a wider angle, but no fish-eye effect. Enter the GoPro Hero7 Black.

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Initially, I didn't want to fork out a lot of money. However, any other brand just had too many unanswerable questions. The closest competition I could find, was the Garmin Virb, and the Virb's software interface seems to be significantly more user-friendly and useful than the Hero7's, but nobody in George stocked them. So, after-sale support and service would be less than optimal.

Also, the Hero7 White and Silver do not have removable batteries. At the very least, I want to be able to swap-in a fully-charged backup battery when the original runs out of juice after an hour's worth of recording. Also, if the battery should pack up completely, I want to be able simply to replace it without having to send my camera away to who knows where for who knows how long, in the end having to pay who knows how much more for courier fees and handling fees and labour and who knows what else. A more expensive camera, but with a battery which I can replace at home or in the bush by myself, is a much better investment in my books.

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At the beginning of 2019, I found excellent, friendly, knowledgeable GoPro service and support from Christo at the Photography and Optics Department at Kloppers, and a fair deal as well. However, the total price of the camera and the accessories still had me in the red for most of the rest of the year. If I knew then what I know now, I would not have bought the external RODE lapel mic and mic adapter (not even RODE can really improve on the Hero7's built-in sound quality to any significant extent). However, Kloppers did not have a lapel mic, and the usic store did not have the adapter, so I could not really test in-store if there would be any significant improvement, or not. I would also not have bought the head-mount (my head pans around too quickly). I would rather have bought a flexi-grip ball-joint tripod for handheld and belt-mount footage, and a second battery straight away. Don't make the same mistakes I made.

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Now I generally shoot 4:3, 1440p, linear (vs. wide-angle), 25fps, mp4 footage which is much more stable, and does not have any fish-eye effect. Yes, greater resolution requires getting closer to the subject, and increases file-size, but it also allows a wider image in all dimensions. ...And the GoPro's tri-directional sound is just so much better than the phablet's single mic - not to mention the greatly-improved convenience of a more-compact and versatile design.

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The Gopro Quik software interface is horribly unintuitive, though. It isn't optimised for my Android phablet, and, since Eskom broke the Windows 10 Pro on my laptop, during an update, with one of their loadsheds, and since Microsoft doesn't even acknowledge my existence, and since Quik doesn't run on Linux, I now have no directly-accessible means anymore of updating the GoPro's firmware. Thankfully, everything on the camera still seems to be running fine.

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The videos following, up to and including 2019nov02, were shot with a head-mounted camera, hence the continual fast panning back and forth. 2020jan10 involved comparative experiments with a chest mount, which didn't pan enough. On 2020feb08, the FGBJT (flexi-grip ball-joint tripod) belt-mount technique was discovered on the Vensterberg hike! Since then, combinations of mostly handheld and some belt-mounted footage have been preferred.

It takes about a long work-day to edit an average hiking video of about an hour's worth of footage, and then about another hour to render the project file to a single mp4 file. Then it takes more than 24h to upload an average 20GB, 1h mp4 at an approximate rate of 0.8GB/h. Sometimes, further communication is also required with hiking-group members regarding sorting and including their photos and videos, which WhatsApp apparently downloads in a less-than-optimal, random order. Then it takes about twice as long as what the video itself is to add YouTube chapters in as well.

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Also, YouTube's voice-recognised, automatic closed-captions/subtitles are only so accurate, and not particularly so, at that. It would take about another day to fix the closed captions/subtitles the way I needed them. There is at least one hiking friend for whom I would've liked to maintain the closed captions/subtitles, but it was just too unjustifiably time-consuming in the end.

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Since no-one has actually ever required their faces to be blurred out, and since YouTube's automatic face-blur is not always entirely accurate anyway, it too has been abandoned in later videos.

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Working mostly on sundays, often recording a hike in the afternoon as well, besides the usual saturday hike, often uploading one video while editing another at the same time, still means that it usually takes about two to three weeks to get a hiking video on YouTube. There is usually a significant backlog of editable footage. At least, the C19 lock-down has helped in starting to catch up. Today, 2020augIt's been about 141 days since I've last been on any kind of hike anywhere.

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Then OpenShot lost audio synchronisation, and could apparently not be fixed. It took more than a year to find another suitable open-source freeware alternative.

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After the George Peak hike with Carl, the hunt for a replacement video-editor program began in earnest, because now I had to get that video out so that the world could meet the blind man who summitted George Peak. That was when I discovered Shotcut. It is perhaps not as user-friendly as OpenShot, but it is much more useful and robust for my purposes, and there are plenty of tutorials available on YouTube.

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The main filters that are most often used, are fading audio and video in and out at the start and end of a clip, smooth zoom in and out, or zoom and hold, cross-fade transitioning between cut scenes within a clip, descriptive or explanatory text, 60% - 75% blur, and audio muting, as well as exporting a frame and importing it back in as a still shot.

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On some of the earlier videos, the camera battery was depleted before completing the hike. A second, back-up battery was obtained to ensure sufficient battery life, which should now be in the range of two hours, if not more.

Eventually, it was also discovered that the footage from Carl's second camera, as well as some stationary footage, can often present alternative, more interesting and/or better angles.