Yesterday I decided to join the multimedia revolution and take all video clips rather than still images on my weekly outing. I started at Mission Peak because I know the hill by heart and hiking to the top in mid-August is definitely a worst-case scenario.
It’s easy to throw together a video montage — heck, it’s built into iPhoto — but assembling a not-sucky video of a few minutes length is deeply not-easy. Sorting through a hundred clips, throwing out the suckiest ones, paring down the dead areas in the better ones (I wouldn’t say I had any good ones), getting them all in order, adding titles, compressing, uploading and so forth is extremely time-consuming. I worked it out to an hour for each minute of finished video, and that’s after I spent four hours figuring out how Apple’s iMovie works.
Here’s the result, posted at YouTube.
After all this work you get to watch it with YouTube’s crappy-ass compression making it all pixilated … I’m going to see if Google video is any better.
For now I’m not adding a soundtrack … I don’t have any recording gear and I don’t like stealing other people’s work (tough I did have a killer track from X’s cover of Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Breathless” on an early version). I know everybody does it; well, let ’em. Copyright allows me to earn a living so I’m a little more picky about it. And adding sound is another gazillion hours of work … I see now why movies cost millions.
It looks like you had a blast! Reminds me I have to do Mission Peak this year. At any rate, it looked a lot easier than what you were doing a year ago yesterday!
A good source for legal free music is archive.org They have thousands of live concerts that you can down load and use for free. Either public domain or with the artists permission. All kind of audio and video. It is a great resource.
Great video Tom ~ love the editing and the bullet-point commentary. I admit that I’m not too sure how useful the directions are though .. they fly by a bit too quickly to get an impression of the route though they do add some context.
Video: try vimeo.com for awesomely sharp 720p quality video.
Music: for copyright-free works try ccmixter.org or googling ‘podsafe’ for music you can use.
Myself, I do a few video quickies with my compact camera and a soundtrack definitely helps, since most of the audio is just the wind howling past the mic. The quality of my hiking clips are a bit spotty, but they’re over here if you’re interested …
http://flickr.com/photos/yorkie/tags/trailspottingtv/
Thanks all for the music links.
Stuart: I agree on the directions… unless somebody downloads the vid into their smartphone it’s not very likely they’d use it on the trail.
I may try flickr for my uploads … the 90 second limit actually enforces some discipline and the video quality looks to be pretty good.
An hour for each minute of finished video? I wish I could be that time-efficient producing the WildeBeat. We work between 3 to 5 hours to produce each finished minute of our audio-only program.
Sir David Attenborough claimed that 1,000 minutes of film went into every finished on-screen minute in his documentary, The Life of Birds. In addition to shooting those 8,000 hours of film, they had to travel to and from locations world-wide, review, log, and transcribe the raw footage, write and rewrite a finished script, edit the raw photographic film clips, shoot additional studio segments, record voice-over narration, and so-on and so-on. It would not be far off to estimate that they worked 50 hours for every minute on the screen.
So my point is that you should consider your piece a success given the budget you had to work with.
I applaud your decision not to add a gratuitous music soundtrack. The aesthetic of whether or not a particular piece of music is appropriate or grating is so dependent on the cultural background of the listener. If you do add sound, I would recommend some non-spoken location background sounds, with post-produced voice-over narration instead of titles. You can learn a lot about recording good sounds outdoors from the Nature Sounds Society, as well as from the WildeBeat shows titled Listening to Parks and Bagging Wild Sounds.
“A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a sound is worth a thousand pictures.” –Nature sound recording expert Bernie Krause
“I prefer radio to television—the pictures are better.” –Alistair Cooke quoting one of his fans.
LOL…”A Two-Heel Drive Joint”. That’s awesome!
Steve: Thanks for the tips … editing digital video is way, way quicker than voice because you can crop a segment to a workable size almost as fast as you can crop a still image. With voice its harder to get to the points where you want to edit things, then you have to adjust your volume levels so they’re equalized, etc.
Adding voiceovers is the real challenge, because it’s so hard to relax and sound natural and polished. (And you really need actual recording gear.)
There’s one big problem with hiking videos .. they detract from the hiking experience. Exploration is a big part of hiking and if I’m heading out somewhere new I’ll read up on the area and maybe check out a few photos, but seeing a video would reduce my sense of exploration significantly.
On the other hand however, if it’s a place I’ll probably never get to explore, then I’m all over it. This video of Snoqualmie Mountain from Mark Griffith is a good example .. http://www.flickr.com/photos/niffgurd/2591029796. (btw, if you haven’t checked out Mark’s blog, then I highly recommend it .. http://www.niffgurd.com )
More direct link to Mark’s blog .. http://www.niffgurd.com/mark/blog
Stuart: that is a valid point.
Maybe I’ll add a “may contain spoilers” line to my next one.
Mission Peak is a hard route to do a video (or even a photojournal of)
There’s few points of interest on the trail, the trailside scenery doesn’t really change, and the view is mostly the same for the whole trail
I find audio the most time consuming part of all.
Easiest is to throw some soundtrack over the top of a blank video.
Cool start! I look forward to seeing what else you put together– this definitely showed what it’s like to be hiking or running this area.
You’re brave! Now that you’ve joined the multimedia revolution…you can never go back. Your readers will expect much more now 😉 Not that you ever dissapoint.
I’m liking the video hike summary. I think this will give us visual learners a kick in the rear out the front door. Thanks!
Nice vid, and blog for that matter. Vimeo is truly the best for vid hosting. No bandwidth regulations and you can upload 500megs a week. I’m not sure I can do that much hiking!
Horse Heaven is actually a fun trail (one of the few ones at MP), although I heard that it has been both Swecoed and trampled by the cattle. Too bad as it made for a heck of a downhill. 🙂