Monday, April 25, 2022
5:46 a.m. Room 1102, Phannu House
Mae Sot, Thailand
I did go to the Sunday Morning market yesterday, and it turned into quite an enjoyable trip. I was tired when I set off, and I wasn’t sure that my heart would be in it. And even as I was walking to the market, I wasn’t feeling great. Instead of walking straight there, I turned down a sidestreet to Wat Chumpol Khiri. I walked around the temple and then I tried to follow the canals to my old neighborhood as much as possible. I had the GoPro Hero 9 in my hand. It was connected to the Rode Wireless Go. And I had the Hero 7 mounted on a chest harness, which was concealed underneath my shirt. I wore my blue shirt this time. I’ve kind of stopped wearing the blue shirt because it has become very thin. But I wanted to have a different color on my body other than red.
That walk to the market wasn’t terribly exciting, but I had a few tiny adventures along the way. And even when I got to the market, I still wasn’t quite awake. However, I persevered, and I entered the market with my Hero 7 running. I didn’t have a set plan in my mind, but at the last second, I decided to record mainly with the Hero 7. I didn’t want to walk through the market with the Hero 9 in my hand while pointing it at people. I let the Hero 7 record the scenery and record audio with its built-in mics. From time to time, I would speak, and I would let the Hero 7 record my voice as well. When I saw something interesting or decided to buy a snack for my 5-Snack Challenge, then I turned on the Hero 9 and took specific video of that moment and of myself talking about the snack after I bought it. Then I stopped recording with the Hero 9 and let the Hero 7 take over.
In the editing afterward, I noticed that because the Hero 7 was recording nearly the entire time, I captured many sequences in which I was holding or adjusting the Hero 9 in my hands. I also captured the moments in which I turned the Hero 9 on and off to start and stop recording. I don’t know if I will keep the video like this, but in my first edit, I left a lot of those moments in. They serve as an ongoing behind-the-scenes sequence mixed in with the actual events that I recorded deliberately.
The snacks that I purchased were probably not that exciting. For the most part, they weren’t exotic or designed to elicit any kind of passion from viewers of the video. There was a lot of finger-food, like little snacks similar to cookies or brownies or muffins. The one snack that struck me as different was a bag of very wet sticky rice. The bag served as a bowl to contain the liquid that sloshed around with the rice. There didn’t appear to be anything else in the bag but rice. However, the flavor was unusual and strong. I wasn’t able to identify the ingredients, but the rice tasted sour and bitter. The best description I could come up with was that it tasted like it was made with a type of bitter or unripe fruit. In fact, I don’t think I even came up with the word bitter when I was making the video. But that is the best word to describe it.
I didn’t eat the snacks as I bought them. Instead, I stuffed them inside my knapsack, and when I had assembled five of them (six with a bonus snack), I went to a small cafe and ordered a bowl of rice porridge. That order allowed me to take a seat in the cafe. And then I spread the snacks out in front of me on the table and tasted them all in the order that I had purchased them.
I didn’t realize this until I returned to Phannu House and began editing the video, but at some point, the Rode Wireless Go disconnected from the Hero 9. Because of that, the Hero 9 recorded audio using only its built-in microphones. I was lucky, to be honest, to get even that audio. Normally, when the Rode doesn’t work, the Hero 9 doesn’t record any audio at all. The unreliability of the Hero 9 is starting to become a big problem. At one point during the sequence at the table in the diner, I had to replace the battery in the Hero 9. And when I started the camera up again, I tested the microphone as I always do. And I think I had to reset the camera seven times in order to get the microphone to connect. I keep looking for a pattern in the reset process, but I haven’t found one. I have no idea if turning the GoPro off and back on is the key to getting the microphone to work. Or maybe it’s a combination of unplugging the Rode and then plugging it back in while turning the Rode off and back on. Or maybe I have to do both or all of them. I just keep doing all of these things at random until suddenly the GoPro is recording audio from the Rode. I have a feeling that turning the GoPro off and back on while the Rode remains on and plugged in is the technique that works best. But it doesn’t always work.
I enjoy shooting this type of casual video using just the two GoPros. But with this microphone problem, I might be forced to use the G85 instead once more. I could have the G85 recording with the Rode, which works 100% of the time. And then I could have the Hero 9 mounted on the chest harness and recording audio with its built-in mics. That would be the best combination for the best possible audio and video quality. The tradeoff is that the G85 is so much bigger, heavier and complicated. Plus, it would be more obtrusive and noticeable to other people. But that could be a non-issue. My instinct is to believe and feel that the GoPro is less obtrusive. But is it really? I’m a six-foot white dude wandering through a local market in a small town in Thailand with one camera in my hand and another on my chest. It’s not like I’m invisible and going unnoticed. People see the cameras. They see me. They know what I’m doing. So, does the size of the camera I’m using really matter? It probably doesn’t. The difference is probably just in my head.
The editing of this market video is taking longer than I’d hoped. My plan was to record the video on Sunday morning and post the video Sunday evening. But I made very little progress in the editing process. The big problem was the audio. I realized how bad the audio from the Hero 9 was. But I had the Hero 7 running at roughly the same time. And I started extracting the audio from the Hero 7 and playing it over the video from the Hero 9. But there are no special tools in Kinemaster to make the syncing of audio and video easy. In fact, Kinemaster makes it even more difficult because the audio waveform is not accurate. It does not match the actual audio. It might as well not even be there. The only way to line up the video and audio even remotely is to do it by listening to it. I have to go through a process of making major adjustments to get it lined up roughly. Then I have to zoom into the timeline and make tiny adjustments while playing the video over and over until I finally get it right. Syncing just one clip this way can take from ten minutes to twenty minutes. It’s painstakingly slow. I’ll continue the process this morning and finish the video today I hope.
I didn’t do much else yesterday that I can remember. There was a brief flurry of activity as I cleaned the bathroom. And there was some excitement as I played around with a GoPro battery that had swollen badly. The battery is practically brand new, but it is useless, because it is so swollen that it can’t fit inside the GoPro anymore. I was just curious if I could cut away the rubber coating that surrounded the battery. And as I was doing that with a pair of scissors, I cut through the plastic liner on the inside, and a cloud of dusty gas burst out of the battery, like a small explosion. Like a dummy, I kept digging away at the battery with the scissors, and that produced another small explosion with arcing electrical sparks. At that point, I decided it was best to leave the battery alone. I didn’t dare throw it in regular garbage at this point. I thought there was a chance it could heat up and burst into flames. So I have it sitting in the middle of the floor on hard tile just in case.
I did some more reading about Patreon. It’s becoming more and more clear that, like everything technical in the modern world, reading can only get you so far. In fact, reading may not be the best way to learn anymore. It’s probably better to just open a Patreon account and learn by doing. However, I continue to have ideas about perks that I can offer patrons. I’ve noticed that I have an urge to communicate small details of my life with people. Yesterday, for example, when I noticed that the Rode Wireless Go hadn’t connected with my Hero 9 and I had lost all the audio, I instantly sent a message to a friend about that. I wanted to communicate and share that story. And if I’m going to spend all that time writing these update messages to just one person, why not switch the audience for those updates? Instead of using that urge to write one message to one specific person, I could make these updates a perk, just like how these journal entries could be a perk. It often occurs to me that other people don’t do this. I don’t get a message from other YouTubers I know every time they have a technical glitch or buy a new microphone or have some other random event take place in their life. But I feel this need to reach out and tell my life story in journal entries like this and in tiny messages throughout the day. I just want to communicate my thoughts. And it’s probably annoying to friends of mine that I do this. They don’t need to know every detail of my day. But if I have this urge, why not make it a part of a Patreon tier?
I also read about the Patreon Discord Server. I could barely make sense out of what I was reading. Discord sounded interesting, but I think the only way to truly understand it is to sign up for Patreon and try it out and see how it works.
Food was a big part of yesterday, that is for sure. I had all the snacks and the bowl of rice porridge at the market. And when I got back to Phannu House, I kept eating the snacks. I thought the snacks would last for several days, but I ate nearly all of them with coffee when I got back. And then I had Pork Adobo at Salvador Mary Jane. And in the evening, I had the rest of the snacks plus Corn Flakes and milk. It feels like I ate a lot of food. But today is another fasting day. I’ll probably coast for quite a while on all the food I ate yesterday.
And that’s all I’ll write about for now. I want to reply to some comments on YouTube, and then I have to get to work editing videos.