Monday, November 4, 2024
5:50 a.m. Room 19, Hotel Malahayati
Tanjung Balai, Sumatra, Indonesia
(3,324 words)
It’s been a few days since I’ve written anything down. I’ve just been too busy with video. Last time, I was writing about my attempts to upload videos with my smartphone hidden in various places around the hotel courtyard. I had to do that because the Wi-Fi won’t reach my room. Unfortunately, that didn’t work. And it may not have been the fault of the Wi-Fi. I don’t think it was the fault of my smartphone either. The problem seems to lie in the connection between the mobile YouTube Studio App and YouTube central. The problem is that when the Internet connection is lost between the two (even for a millisecond), all the data that was uploaded is also lost. Therefore, I’d have my phone hidden out in the courtyard for hours, and I’ll have uploaded about 17 gigabytes of data. And then, out of nowhere, the upload will be cancelled and it will reset to 0 and start all over again. This happens constantly, and I eventually concluded that it’s just not worth the effort. So I decided to try uploading from my laptop. The issue with using the laptop is that I can’t exactly hide it in the courtyard or on my bicycle. I can only use it inside my room, and the Wi-Fi connection is so weak that uploading is glacially slow. However, the advantage is that when you use the full browser-based version of YouTube Studio, the uploading of a video can be paused and restarted mid-upload. Therefore, I can start the upload from my laptop and then just leave my laptop running forever. The Wi-Fi connection will be lost constantly. I can even put the laptop to sleep overnight. And it doesn’t affect the upload. However much data that is uploaded will not be lost. It is retained by the YouTube system as a partial upload, and when you reconnect to the WiFi and the Internet, the upload will just continue from where it left off, and nothing is lost. Therefore, it may take a very long time, but the stress level and frustration goes way down. And eventually the job gets done. This is also a possibility because I’m using this 2017 Asus VivoBook now. It isn’t exactly a high-powered beast, and the LCD screen isn’t even close to as good as the one on my MacBook. However, one of its many advantages over the MacBook is that it doesn’t overheat. In fact, it never gets hot anywhere. The Mac would get blisteringly hot. And the LCD screen on the Mac would burn out and become unreadable over time if you just let it sit and upload. This would happen even with the screen turned off. But leaving this Asus on for 24 or 36 or 48 hours straight doesn’t seem to affect it in any way. It never gets hot and the LCD screen never suffers. It offers a completely different user-experience. Anyway, the long and short of the story is that I have been able to upload videos.
And I took advantage of this new system to upload a lot of videos. Of course, there is confusion here and I’m not quite sure what I’m doing. I’m still living as if I have an active Patreon, and I’m trying to figure out exactly how to start using it. For example, I have to distinguish in my mind between videos that I would upload to Planet Doug and those that I would reserve for Patreon. When I was in Port Dickson, I shot a lot of videos about testing camera-mounting systems on my bicycle. In my mind, those are behind-the-scenes videos, and I decided to reserve them for Patreon. In a way, keeping those for Patreon helps me out because I feel like I don’t have to worry about them as much. They are clearly bonus content, so I can do whatever I want with them. I don’t have to include titles and end credits and music and graphics and information. I don’t have to worry about them being too long and too boring. I can just shoot whatever interests me and whatever strikes my fancy. So far, I have a bunch of that type of video:
Patreon Videos:
1. Crazy House Reframed Video Walkthrough
2. Crazy House 360 Video
3. The Story of My Bicycle – Final
4. Testing Camera Mount Using the Full Broomstick Mounted on the Frame
5. Testing Camera Mount Using Short Broomstick Mounted on the Handlebars
6. Testing Various Camera Mounts for the 360 Camera
7. Trying to Get My Kickstand Repaired
8. Relive 3D MAP from Ep.3 Ferry to Tanjung Balai
9. The Blue Dot for Ep.3 Ferry to Tanjung Balai
10. Photo Montage from Ep.3 Ferry to Tanjung Balai
11. Extended Cut of Ep.3 Ferry to Tanjung Balai
All of those videos have been completed and are uploaded to YouTube, but they are currently set to Private with the intention of ultimately making them available to Patreon members in some fashion. I still don’t know how Patreon works, but I assume I will be able to link to them. And I also have 18 long stories already posted to Patreon as journal entries. One thing I learned about Patreon is that it is a good idea to already have some content there for the official “launch”. Then when people go there for the first time, they actually see what it is all about. They can see what they will have access to when they join my Patreon. That’s better than just opening a Patreon and THEN starting to post content. If you do it that way, the Patreon is empty at the launch. That would be like opening a store with empty shelves while offering the promise of putting items on the shelves eventually. That makes little sense.
The last four videos in that Patreon list are the interesting ones. I originally edited the video about taking the ferry to Tanjung Balai as a normal Planet Doug video. And that full video is the Extended Cut. When I set off that morning, my idea was to NOT shoot a long video. I wanted to shoot a short and happy and energetic and fun video. I wasn’t going to document every single thing along the way as I normally do. And I thought I was somewhat successful in doing that. However, by the time I finished putting that video together and then adding the bonus clips at the end (Relive, Photo Montage, The Blue Dot), the video was over two hours long. And that was the result of me actually trying to make a short video.
So I started all over, and I tried to make the main video as short as possible without going crazy. It ended up being 49 minutes long. That’s short for me, but it is still twice as long as a typical video from any other YouTuber. The only way I could make the video 20 minutes long (like a normal Itchy Boots video) would be to delete entire sections. Noraly rarely shows any of the logistics of her trips, such as loading up the motorcycle and unloading it, checking in for flights, or checking in to her hotels. That’s one reason her videos can be short. For me to make my video that short, I’d have to remove all those sections AND remove lots of content from the actual travel parts. Basically, I’d have to stop talking. I would have to occasionally say “Whoo hoo” or “Look how beautiful” or “I’m loving this” and that’s all.
And then I removed all the bonus content and made separate videos out of them. So I made a separate video for Relive and one for The Blue Dot and one for the Photo Montage. The plan right now is to post the 49-minute video to Planet Doug and keep all of the others for the Denizens of Planet Doug on Patreon, including the Extended Cut. I don’t know if this is a good idea or not. Doing it this way required a lot of time, of course. It required more time than I would take normally, because I changed my mind and did everything twice. And that’s one of the reasons why I am still here in Tanjung Balai and not currently cycling around Sumatra. I’ve already almost given up on this first month in terms of my cycling project.
As far as regular Planet Doug content is concerned, I have three videos complete and uploaded:
1. Buying the Ferry Ticket
2. Demonstrating My Bicycle/Camera Gear
3. Taking the Ferry to Sumatra
And I did shoot video of my third day here in Tanjung Balai. On that day, I went out on my bicycle to buy a SIM card and buy a kettle. I just started editing that video last night. Unfortunately, it struck me how relatively boring that video is. One of my ideas for coming to Sumatra with my bicycle was to try to shoot more dramatic and entertaining and shorter videos. It’s clear that my normal daily video journal approach doesn’t work. However, the second I left from my house in Port Dickson on my bicycle, I just naturally fell into my old habits of shooting daily life. I guess that is what interests me. I appreciate, for example, what Noraly did with her first Itchy Boots video from Turkey. As always, the video pretty much opens with her motorcycle fully packed and she hits the road. And she concentrates on shooting video when she gets into the beautiful mountainous scenery. And, of course, she deliberately chose to ride on that road because it is scenic. And she flew the drone when she got to the most dramatic part. That produced some nice drone footage of the road going through the forested hills and of some beautiful herons on a big lake. And she used her normal over-the-top music. To keep it short, the video ended when she arrived at her destination. And the video ended up being 18 minutes long. I appreciate all that, but at the same time, I find it uninteresting because of the lack of personal content, commentary, and practical information.
Even so, I was quite depressed with myself this morning when I started editing the video I shot in Tanjung Balai. I began the day by shooting a 20-minute video clip only about my hotel room and how I had to fix everything and how I had to rearrange the furniture to make it livable. The entire video on Itchy Boots was 18 minutes long. I took 20 minutes just to analyze the low budget life in this low budget hotel room. Of course, it helps to have Noraly’s budget. She did end this video in Turkey with some shots of her hotel room, and it was fabulous with lots of luxury and a beautiful balcony overlooking fantastic scenery. The place even came with 16 cats. She wouldn’t have to spend an entire morning taping up the screens to keep out the mosquitos, moving the bed in order to have a place to sit (and get away from the overwhelming traffic noise), and cleaning everything. And, of course, she didn’t bother to record any of her work to get a SIM card or anything like that.
The problem is that I’m interested in stuff like that. I don’t care about the big, dramatic things and the gorgeous scenery. My interest is in the small things of life. My interest is in the actual effort it takes to travel in a place like Sumatra. My interest is in the daily life of normal people around me and life on the streets. I like the story of being a fish out of water. But, for YouTube, I guess I should buy a drone and head straight to Lake Toba to get drone footage of the sunrise there. Or something like that. That’s what people on YouTube want to see.
Anyway, now that I have this 20-minute video about fixing up my low budget hotel room, the question becomes what to do with it. My plan was to NOT shoot video like this. Yet, I did. So, should I keep it for Planet Doug or should I just post it to Patreon as BTS content? I don’t know. I’ll see how it goes.
I’ve had some other interesting video adventures. One of them was inspired by the UK vlogger We Hate the Cold and by the TV series The Grand Tour. I’ve been watching the videos from WHTC, and I noticed that he uses a lot of voiceover narration. In fact, his latest videos have been perhaps 90% voiceover. Personally, I think that is too much. But I can see why he would do that. It makes editing and telling a story a lot easier and more economical. You don’t have to worry about shooting video and telling the story as it is happening. And when you take that approach, you don’t have to worry about audio and microphones. You are going to add the audio later on. Plus, I think it allows you to shoot video more randomly and sporadically. It doesn’t occupy your mind as much. You can just live your life naturally over several days and then tell the story afterwards by speaking into a microphone plugged into your computer. And then you take some of the video you shot and stick it in to illustrate what you were talking about. It also allows you to shape the narrative however you want.
I don’t actually like what he did with his narration. It seemed overdone. There’s too much narration, for one thing, and his storytelling is so dramatic and so exciting that it doesn’t seem to match the reality of the video. For example, at one point, he was taking his scooter down a rough, rocky road, and he fell over. In the video, it looks like he was going very slowly, and then his front wheel hit some larger rocks, and his motorcycle came to a halt and he lost his balance and fell over. He essentially lost his forward momentum and then tipped over. But in this narration, he described it in breathless terms as a major crash on a dangerous mountain road with steep cliffs on all sides. You’d think he was in the Himalayas at 20,000 feet. The reality as seen on the video doesn’t match his description in the voiceover. However, I do see the advantages in doing a voiceover.
And The Grand Tour is filmed as a major travel video. Therefore, they use all the fancy editing techniques, including some voiceovers. They do it very well, however. They use it sparingly but effectively. The voiceover provides the skeleton or frame on which they hang the entire story. They’ll include just one or two lines of voiceover whenever they need a transition to the next scene. And it is a very effective technique. It allows them to jump far ahead in time and activity without needing to show everything that happened. And it keeps the story moving along at a rapid pace.
Inspired by their examples, and wanting to make my most recent video shorter and more fun, I decided to see if I could copy them, particularly the Grand Tour approach. I was NOT successful, I must say. My grandiose idea for how I could re-edit the ferry video using voiceover was unrealistic. For one thing, I realized that in order to use that technique, you need B-roll in which you are not speaking. For example, if I want to insert a line of descriptive voiceover as I arrive at the port in Port Dickson, I need video of me arriving at the port. If I want to use voiceover to transition to cycling away from the port in Tanjung Balai, I need video of me cycling away from the port. And I didn’t have any of that video. All of my video was shot in the first person from my point of view in real time. And the only time I have video of myself was when I was speaking. I generally point the camera at myself because I have something to say. But to use this voiceover technique, you need video of yourself doing things when you’re NOT speaking. I think this voiceover technique works most efficiently in two situations:
You can use voiceover when you have a clear idea of what the video is going to be about and you even have a script in advance. This is the Grand Tour approach.
You can use voiceover when you do a voiceover for the entire video and tell the whole story that way. This is the WHTC approach.
When I tried to add voiceover to the video I shot of my ferry ride, it was a disaster. I couldn’t make it work easily. And to make it work would take far too long.
However, the good news is that in my voiceover attempt, I learned a lot about the technology to do it. I had a lot of trouble when it came to connecting microphones to my MacBook. But I discovered that it works quite well on this Asus VivoBook. I simply plugged in the Boya shotgun mic using my long Rode extension cord, and I was able to record video for The Blue Dot easily. It just worked. I didn’t have to do anything or change settings for audio input and output. It was intuitive and easy. And when I used voiceover on video editing, I simply plugged the Boya into my phone and recorded directly into the Kinemaster editing app. The technology worked out surprisingly well. I wasn’t able to do the full voiceover that I wanted, but I did end up using a little bit here and there.
I also ran into trouble when I tried to make the video shorter because when I deleted sections, I also deleted information. And then I felt like the video was lacking information because it wasn’t clear what I was doing or where I was going. Therefore, when I deleted long sections, I then felt like I had to add back in shorter sections to re-insert the information that was lost. For example, in the extended cut, there is a very long portion I shot inside my room in Port Dickson as I talked about the day to come. And I included a lot of information. And then I talked a lot as I rode my bicycle to the dock. For the short version, I deleted all of that so I could cut directly to when I arrived at the port. But then it felt like the stage wasn’t properly set for the journey. So then I added some Google Maps with voiceover to explain about the Indomal Fast Ferry company and how they have ferries going to Tanjung Balai and to Dumai. And because I needed to add these sections of Google Maps and voiceover, shortening the Extended Cut took the entire day. It was a LOT of work. But at least I learned a few things.
Because of all this video editing work, I am already far behind in terms of my plans for Sumatra. By this date, I could have already arrived at Lake Toba on my bicycle if I had just started cycling the morning after the ferry docked. But, as always, I’m feeling a strong conflict between living life and editing video. When you are editing YouTube videos, it becomes a full-time job. And then there is no time to actually go out and do the things you want to make videos about. Perhaps I just need to be more efficient. I still haven’t managed to find a nice balance between the two.