Tuesday, September 01, 2015

It's not that easy

to make a video.

I have been tinkering around in the shop, working on a project I have in mind.  

I thought I should get footage of it to make a build video for my You Tube channel.  Sounds easy, just put the camera on the tripod and hit record.

No.

First of all, the ash that I had originally planned to use, left over from my guitar build, is so dry and hard my hand planes will hardly touch it.  So I put it through the planer and got it to the thickness I wanted.  Then my inexpensive hand saw just skipped over the face of it and marred it badly.  So I tried to cut a bit more off and then true it up with the hand plane......no success again.  Not being the kind of guy who gives up, I am changing the wood selection to pine...easy right?

Well, there is more to this process than just choosing the wood and banging it together.

Other technical difficulties have been battery life in the camera, and the size of the memory card.  I just discovered that when you take the battery out of the camera and charge it, the camera reverts back to a high definition mode that eats up space on the card like mad.  So I lost a whole bunch of footage, or rather, the camera filled up and stopped recording.

There are other pitfalls I am discovering too.  Like when you hit the tripod with your elbow you get lots of footage of a floor and only the sounds of work in the background.  I guess I wasn't paying attention.

  I am currently running the shop on an extension cord (as shown in the previous video) and I must unplug the lights to run the table saw.  The limiting factor here is the cord itself.  Despite being a decent outdoor cord, it cannot handle the power requirements of it all at the same time.  

Good news is that the cord is plugged into a 20A circuit, so there is enough power there to do it.  I am going to replace it with a 10 gauge cord meant to hook up a recreational vehicle to park supplied power.  It is rated at 30 amps so I won't have the worry of overloading the cord and have it burn through the insulation on the cord.  Once that is in I ought to have enough power to have the lights and table saw going at the same time.  Which will be good for the videos.  While there is enough light naturally in the shop, it looks very dark on video without the lights.

A step at a time.  The only way to find out how things work out is by doing and improving as I go along.  But for now, I am waiting for batteries to charge so I can get back to it.  Here is some raw video showing what I mean about the light situation.....this is not going on You Tube, so it is kind of a blog exclusive.


About all I can do right now is sit back and chuckle at the situation and keep trying.  I hope I can grow the channel a bit and provide some useful video for people to enjoy.  It is not exactly instructional, but a lot of what I watch on You Tube is just folks being creative and making things.  I am not making any money off it, that is not part of the plan right now.  I hope to provide some free, entertaining video with an extremely low budget, in hopes that others will be inspired to do the same. 

 I would also like to keep it so that the average child can watch it without parents needing to worry about what their children  are exposed to.  Coming from a background of factories, mines and shops, I have frequently used and have been exposed to all kinds of profanity.  It is something that I have worked on changing for several years and you will not hear it on my channel.  It is tough to change a lifetime of habits, but it is important to me to have respect for my viewers.
  
Oh, another pitfall....the bandwidth on my internet connection means it takes a long time to upload things.  I could get a better connection speed, but that is not in the budget and that would go against what my purpose is here.  If I can do it, so can anyone else.  I am not very proficient with computers and editing video and such, but I have a bit of a stubborn streak that I am relying on to get this done.  So, until next time....

Thanks for dropping by!


Edit:  Upon my reviewing of this entry I noticed that the You Tube logo is on the video, so it may not be so exclusive after all.

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