What a pain adding video is

I promise to get to the garden part soon enough. First I must get some things off my aging chest. When I first envisioned doing a gardening blog with accompanying videos, I thought it would be fun and action packed. My purpose was to create something enjoyable. It’s nice to know that I can still live in a fantasy world at seventy six! What I found was the whole thing became a slow motion Charlie Foxtrot. Here’s one of the better ones.

Disclaimer #1: I never made videos before. It shows. The closest I came was an occasional vid sitting in front of my computer screen. Trust me, that doesn’t qualify, not by half. This effort has been a complete one man band. I got to be the star. Also, I got to be the director, the cameraman (or is that cameraperson??), the sound guy, and probably the grip if I only knew what that was. I see it all the time on movie credits, so it must be important. I’m probably one of those as well.

A Poor Craftsman Blames His Tools

Being mindful of the craftsman adage that a poor craftsman blames his tools, I purchased a few decent tools for the video trade. I have two tripods, three cameras, a Lavaliere microphone, and extra batteries. I left little to chance. Now I only had myself to blame for the quality or lack thereof. Believing that I can become at least marginally competent at the things I try with practice, practice, practice, I started.

First, you must learn to use your equipment. There is a curve! I’ll get better, but . . . Gardening is a timely thing and time’s a wasting. My early videos will be very authentic! That’s the kindest way to put it. I wish my only problems just created silly outtakes. Alas, it’s not to be so. The problems were stupid!

Sound Quality Issues

My first problem was sound quality. Those two words do not go together with my videos. One common problem that I have yet to overcome is external ambient noises bleeding into my audio. I never realized how noisy my neighborhood is. My yard is about half a mile from the airport flight path. I never knew how bad that noise level was until I started playing back the videos. I have a 6 lane road about 800+ feet away in the back. My audios make it sound like I’m filming on the curb. My neighbors to the east added their chatting to my recordings. Even the blue jays intruded! I have no clean audio. In this one, my air conditioner annoys the background.

More On Sound Quality

Sound quality part two . . . One camera has a jack for my external mic. It made no difference. I could get farther from the camera, but could not increase the sound volume level, and it was subpar. I even tried to jack the microphone into my phone. It worked better without it. In fact, the very best audio was not found on my new equipment. It was strictly from my phone with the regular speaker. No kidding. Both camera’s built in audio would not hold up more than six feet away. All you would show at six feet was my old face. Who needs that? Another thing I found out about using my phone’s audio is that I could hear myself huffing and puffing if I held it anywhere near my mouth. I’m talking about anything closer than full arm’s length. You’ll get to hear some of that too.

Now Video Quality Issues

The final problem; is the video, well, not really. All the video quality was great. Sadly to me, after spending money on a sack full of video equipment, my phone worked every bit as well as any of them. It provided the best (if you can call it ‘best’) audio. I did find the tripods to be quite useful though. Two final weird things about the camera video, first, in order to see what was in the frame, I had to put the phone on the tripod with the screen facing what I was shooting. The trouble is that orientation gives you a mirror image. If I’m wearing a hat or shirt with writing it, it’s backward.

There’s Always Tradeoffs

There was a tradeoff between getting the phone far enough away to show everything in the frame and getting good sound quality. In some videos, my head is cut off. It was the only way I could show what I was doing in the garden. There are some who think that was no great sacrifice.

I liked shooting videos while walking around holding the camera or phone as long as I didn’t stumble over things. There, the audio worked better with the cameras. I found using the cameras that there was little to no heavy breathing like I was suffering from asthma or shortness of breath.

And Then There’s Editing

All this was the easy part, next came editing the scenes and combining them into a finished video. I could write a whole blog about that. If I could figure out a way to do that without making it as boring as the editing was, I would. I had to find editing apps that a greenie could learn. That was time consuming. I had to find a way to catalog my videos so I could keep up with where they were on the C drive and what they contained. That became a fairly big spreadsheet. You’ll see a short clip of it in a future vlog. Only then could I start slicing and dicing the clips. I knew I wanted to keep them short, between one and three minutes, tops. Many of them were long enough, but they were not stand alone. They did not tell a story. This is a work in progress. So far I have completed one.