Been 📍& Scene 🎬

Blogging For Fun

I’ve always enjoyed writing and sometimes I actually think I communicate better on paper than in the spoken word. You’ve more time to think about how to construct a phrase or describe something when you write. The shame of it is that my handwriting is now so bad, even I can’t read what I write. Thank heavens for the ability to type.

This page is dedicated to my written blogs that go hand-in-hand with the vlogs I’ve started sharing publicly on YouTube. I’ve been making videos about our travels for a long time, but only recently did I decide to start sharing these to people I’ll likely never meet.

The Travel Filmmaking Process

I needed a new hobby to keep me amused for the dark days of winter. Don’t get me wrong: I love cold, frosty days. I love autumn mornings when it’s still and the dew is hanging in the cobwebs that we never normally see. But gloomy days, blustery with drizzle, fill me with dread. It’s like a claustrophobia and I just cannot wait to see the sun again.

So, adventure vlogs and travel filmmaking has become the distraction. I can while away days at my computer and focus on the process of producing cinematic (and often emotional) short to medium length films based on the adventures we are lucky enough to enjoy.

How do I make adventure vlogs?

I love tech and gadgets and spend too much time reading about them and how to use them rather than actually using them. But I’ve learned how to create a system of capturing, storing, filtering and consuming the multiplicity of digital images we take.

I’m a Mac lover (but only fairly recently) and now need processing power to be able to produce the high definition (and hopefully high quality) content I love to share. But that process takes hours and hours to firstly pull together the content taken by Mel & I.

We both have iPhones, mostly shoot in “live” mode, so you automatically start with two files for every “still” photo (.HEIC & .mov) that allows you to choose the best “key photo” before you do anything. Add to this GoPro or other Action Cam footage, drone footage PLUS the MOVIE files both of us take on the phones too.

Starting to make a new cinematic movie could mean a treasure trove of several thousand image files. I then consolidate these into folders and numerous sub-folders to cater for different aspects of an adventure. 

Filtering & Rating

Then the fun begins as there’s no way ALL of those image files can be used! I then have to rank them, which I do using ACDSee Photo Studio for Mac. Using keyboard shortcuts, I can rank these from 1 (delete) to 5 (gold), but often I have too many “2’s and 3’s” that I’d love to include if only there was space and time.

Mel tends to shoot in Portrait too (which makes it challenging sometimes to include in YouTube Long-form videos), but they COULD be used for YouTube Shorts or Instagram – But ACDSee only has 3 Rating categories.

So even before I pull these files into a new Project in Final Cut Pro (using the folder structure in Finder as Events), I average around 30-40 GB of disk space. In FCP, you can use Proxy Media (so leaving the original files in place), but still the software is constantly rendering in the background, and before you know it, each 25-minute movie has consumed over 500 GB of space!