Now The Real Work Begins

Seven hundred and eleven video clips. Nearly 12 hours of material. About three-and-a-half months, off and on, of trimming, framing, and editing. All so that I can organize them to make a cohesive video.

Or more. Very likely, more.

Lagos, in the Algarve.

It's taken me this long to pull the video clips of our trip to Portugal from my various cameras, editing the 360-degree segments as I did so, and download those clips into a project folder, from which I can start the real work.

As much as I enjoy creating videos of DW's and my various adventures, I'm not a particularly good video editor and I find the actual time spent stitching each video clip into a story to be taxing. I much prefer photo editing and writing.

I'm not exactly sure how much time I've actually put into editing all of the clips and exporting them from the cameras. For a typical one-minute clip, I can spend about five to 10 minutes directing the 360-degree lenses to my focal points, pivoting as the movement takes me to another subject, trimming off the portions of the clip that I don't want to use, and exporting the final file from the camera onto my smartphone.

I then have to connect my phone to my home computer and upload those clips to an external storage device. I also upload the video that I captured on my smartphone, as well as the video that DW shot on her cameras.

Yesterday, I finally exported my last clips from my video cameras. Now, the real work begins.

I likely won't use all of the clips but at least I have them ready to go. Obviously, I'm not going to make a 12-hour video. Nor will I make 12 one-hour videos. Nor 24 half-hour videos.

You get the idea.

I'll likely make a short video of our time in Porto and the Douro Valley. I'll make another video of our visit to the Algarve. And I'll definitely make a video of Lisbon. Maybe two.

And to start, I've created a video that shows the highlights of the entire Portugal trip and is just under three-and-a-half minutes long. Think of it as an amuse bouche for what's to come.

Another video will hopefully be ready to share sometime in February. I hope to release at least one video on my YouTube channel each month until I've adequately shared our Portugal vacation (I promise they'll all be short: not as short as this video but short enough).

Stay tuned (also, please subscribe to my channel so you'll know when a new video comes out).