Lost Video

Anybody who follows me on my two main social-media platforms, Mastodon and Threads, knows that I often post what I call a random photo of the day. I started doing so almost immediately after starting up on Mastodon and took it up a few months after I opened a Threads account.

What I do is that I go to various places where I've stored photos, depending on the device I'm on at the time: my Google photo albums, Flickr, or, if I'm using my home laptop, from my photo database. I would basically grab a random album and close my eyes as I clicked inside the album or folder, or, if I was using my smartphone, I'd swipe an album quickly, making the photos fly by, before tapping on the screen to make them stop and selecting a photo.

If I randomly selected a photo of family members, a picture of food, or of one or more of my cats, I'd usually choose again, unless the photo was well-composed and well-exposed. I've wanted to always put a good photo forward.

On a couple of occasions, I've selected the same photo twice, but that doesn't matter. That's what random is all about.

On the weekend, I was scrolling through my Google photos on my smartphone and my finger landed on a video instead of a still, and it gave me pause. It was a video that I hadn't thought about in almost 13 years and it was all but forgotten.

Before I was giving any thought to having a YouTube channel, I wanted to make simple videos that I could keep for posterity. I didn't really own a video camera and because my smartphone, at the time, was an iPhone 4s, I never even contemplated using it to make videos.

I still have it and it still works.

But one day, I saw a pocket-sized video camera for sale in, of all places, Chapters-Indigo. It was a basic, digital video camera that shot 720p video. It was easy to use and, best of all, let me get the video clips from the camera to my computer by simply flipping out a USB connector.

And, at about $150, it was cheap.

I didn't use it much. I captured William and Catherine, the Prince and Princess of Wales, on that Canada Day, as they rode a horse-drawn cart along Wellington street. I captured some video when our family was on vacation in Cape Cod, but there were far too many random clips to use in any kind of cohesive video.

But in October, I decided that I'd go on a bike ride from my home to downtown, and back, on a circuit that I often did back then, and I thought I would attach the Flip camera to my handlebars. I cycled to Hog's Back, along the Rideau River to almost the Rideau Falls, to Parliament Hill, and back home via the Ottawa River parkway and Woodroffe Avenue.

It was the longest 50K ride I've ever taken, with many stops along the way.

When I got home, I must have transferred the video clips to my computer and added them to my Google album, but then I never did anything with the clips. They lay forgotten until now.

So, on Sunday night, I transferred all of the video clips to a thumb drive. Yesterday, I made a quick intro and outro to describe the video, and put everything into a folder on a solid-state drive where I keep video projects for my YouTube channel.

And last night, I started creating a full-length video.

It's not a bad video, except for one major issue. All of the video footage that was shot while I was moving on the bike is awful. The Flip video camera has no stabilization of any kind and must have a frame rate of 25 to 30 fps.

As I explain in the intro, the shaking makes The Blair Witch Project look like it was shot with the aid of a gimble.

Nevertheless, I plan to post the completed video on my channel in the next couple of days (maybe, even today), just for shits and giggles. But this video has given me an idea, too.

Thirteen years later, the technology in pocket-sized video cameras has improved tenfold. I have three video cameras that have built-in stabilization that smooths out any bumpy road.

In October, I'm going to retrace the route from this video. Knowing what I now know about videos, I hope to make the newer video more watchable.

Stay tuned.