Monday, October 7, 2024
8:17 a.m. Table 18, Paklang Kopitiam
Port Dickson, Malaysia
(1,184 words)
This is the second morning of my restart of my journal habit. There are a couple of unusual things about this morning. One is that I was extremely tired and unfocused when I woke up. And that led to me forgetting to bring my reading glasses. Luckily, I keep a second set of glasses in my knapsack. However, this second set is stronger. I carry them around for when I need to look more closely at smaller things. I put on these glasses, and they help, but the laptop screen is still quite fuzzy because it is too far away for these glasses. This is making writing difficult.
I fell into the habit of coming to this kopitiam for breakfast because I needed to upload videos to YouTube, and my current room in Port Dickson has no access to WiFi. I discovered that there were a couple of places around Port Dickson that had relatively fast upload speeds on mobile Internet, and one of those places was the street right outside this kopitiam. And after my first visit, I discovered that there was one table at this kopitiam that had a good connection. This table sits right at the front next to the open door and two windows. That means the mobile connection from the nearby towers is quite strong here. Plus, there is an electrical outlet beside this table. It is also a popular table, so I learned that if I want to sit here, I have to come early. I developed the habit of getting here before the place even fully opens. At five minutes to eight, I poke my head inside and smile at the staff and indicate that I wouldn’t mind snagging that table right away. I don’t need them to serve me yet, because I know they aren’t open. But I really want to sit at that table. And they have gotten used to me doing that.
I got lucky in this habit because my mobile telecom company just happened to be offering a special where you get 100 GB of high speed data for 3 ringgit, which is about seventy cents US. I took advantage of that deal and I came to this kopitiam as many mornings in a row as I could, and I kept buying more data as it ran out. I needed that much data because my YouTube video files are huge. The full videos clock in at from 60 to 80 gigabytes each. I eventually met the owner of the Paklang Kopitiam, and he was kind enough to give me the password to their Wi-Fi. This Wi-Fi network isn’t normally available to customers. Having access to Wi-Fi was useful, but I still uploaded through a mobile connection if I could because it was twice as fast.
I still ran into trouble, however, because the video files were too big. It often happened that I would upload 40 to 50 gigabytes of a video, and then, for no reason that I can track down, the upload would reset to zero and start all over. So I would sit here for a couple of hours while the video uploaded, and then it would just cancel and start over from zero. And all of that time and all of that uploading was lost. And I lived in constant stress and fear as I was doing the uploading because even if the upload would reach 79 gigabytes and there was just one more gigabyte to upload, it could cancel and start over. I was going out of my mind.
The stress of this uploading got so bad and was taking so much time that I decided to try to re-export the videos and make them smaller. This was a bit ridiculous because all the source video clips were already gone. I couldn’t re-export from the original videos. All I could do was take the 80-gigabyte export, and import it BACK into DaVinci Resolve and then edit and export it again but at 1080p instead of 4K. That would reduce the file size by 75%. And I would also export the video using H.265 instead H.264. And that would reduce the size by another 50%. I did this for all the videos that I had completed, and then I went back to the kopitiam and re-attempted the uploading. And then it went fine, and I was finally able to upload the video files. It’s crazy how difficult the technical side of having a YouTube channel has been for me. My learning curve is not so much a curve as an endless circle. Progress never seems to be made as I go round and round.
That being said, I do seem to have come up with a few fixes. One big problem I had in Vietnam was that my new GoPro Hero 12 was overheating a lot. Through much trial and error and gnashing of teeth, I finally discovered (here in Port Dickson) that shooting video at a high frame rate contributes to overheating. I routinely shot my videos at 50 or 60 FPS. I thought the video looked smoother and the colors looked better when I did so. This was particularly true with my GoPro Hero 9. What I didn’t know was that if you shoot at 50 or 60 FPS, it produces FAR more heat. AND it doubles the size of the video files. I didn’t realize there was such a heavy penalty. I did my own testing in my room here, and after I reduced the frame rate to 25 or 30 the GoPro never overheated. In fact, the battery in the GoPro died before the camera overheated. It essentially never overheated, even when I was shooting in 4K.
And I also learned that reducing the frame rate not only solves the overheating problem AND makes the file sizes half as large, it also cuts the exporting time in half. And since the exporting time was now shorter, I was able to use H.265. Using H.265 makes the exporting time much longer, BUT it again makes the final video size much smaller. So it all balances out. Shooting in 25 FPS reduces the export time and H.265 increases it, but those cancel each other out. And I end up with the benefit of a much smaller video size, which makes uploading possible.
A funny thing is that when I made all these discoveries and told people about them, everyone around me said they already knew this. It seems that everyone else already knew that higher frame rates doubled the file size and caused cameras to overheat. But if everyone knew this, why didn’t anyone ever tell me? All I do is talk about how my GoPro overheats and how my video files were too large. And everyone knew the solution, but no one ever bothered to tell me. It seems that the entire world knows all these things. People consider all this technical information to be common knowledge. But it’s not common to me.