Playing Catch-Up

I always start writing a blog post by coming up with the title. Even though I know what I want to write about, the title gets me in a better frame of mind and can sometimes help keep me on track with the topic.

Not this time.

As soon as I wrote the title, I thought about "Catch-Up" and my brain went to ketchup.

As a kid, I loved ketchup. It went on my hot dogs and hamburgers, and I'd always dip my French fries in some. But in my teens, after I developed a like for mustard, I lost my taste for ketchup and went for more than 40 years without reaching for the red sauce.

But now that DW and I gather with friends every Tuesday for Trivia Night at The Jolly Taxpayer, in our neighbourhood, we've gotten into the habit of splitting a wrap with fries. There's a side ramekin with ketchup, and I've once again started dipping my fries.

And now, I want fries.

But this blog post isn't about French fries or ketchup: it's about playing catch-up. Specifically, when it comes to my YouTube videos.

When DW and I returned from our trip to Lake Superior and the Bruce Peninsula, I had five devices that contained video footage. I had my three Insta360 video cameras, my Sony α6700, and my smartphone.

It took me several hours to sort the images into folders. At first, I made folders for the days on which the video was captured, from August 9th to the 21st, but the dates didn't really tell me anything for storytelling so I renamed the folders based on the activities. I then made new folders for each of the YouTube videos that I planned to make and added video footage and photos, accordingly.

The only footage that didn't have a spot, at first, were the clips that contained some of our hiking. As I said in a previous video, I wasn't sure how I was going to fit some excursions into the full story of our vacation.

I left those clips to the very end of our Lake Superior segment of our trip, and that video was released last Friday.

It now takes me about two days to put a video together. The first day is spent in the Insta360 Studio app, into which I import all of the raw footage and edit each clip so that the camera shows what I want my audience to focus on. I can easily have 50 to 100 clips of video for one project, and it can be time consuming to get through them all.

As soon as the clips have been exported from the editing app to my work folder, I get to work on any animation that I want to use, such as showing a driving route to a destination. I'm not very good at these animations but I'm slowly learning, and what I create is "good enough" for what I need.

These files are exported to Animation folder for the overall project. Typically, I also have a RAW folder (which holds all of the unedited Insta360 clips), a Video folder (for the edited clips and any other video files from non-Insta360 cameras), a Photos folder, and a Project folder, into which goes all of the material that is created with the Final Cut Pro app that I use to create the end product.

It sounds like a lot but it keeps me organized. And all of this takes me the first day of my video production, which is done with my MacBook and an external storage drive.

Sample folder structure on my external drive.

On the second day, I get down to creating the final video. My MacBook isn't quite powerful enough to use Final Cut Pro to its fullest so I use DW's machine, which has an M3 Pro processor. It takes most of the day to create the video, from when I create the project, import the media, and pick the music, until the MP4 file is generated and uploaded to YouTube.

Ever since I released my P'tit Train du Nord video, I promised myself that I would release a video every week, on Fridays. And since then, I've kept that promise.

Knowing that I wasn't going to be able to produce videos while DW and I were on vacation, I found some old video footage of kayaking adventures—footage I had never put into a final video—and created three "Retro" videos that were released on the Fridays that I was away.

When DW and I returned home, I had no problem creating my first Lake Superior video in time for the next Friday. And as soon as I had it uploaded to YouTube, scheduled for its release date, I got to work on the next video for Old Woman Bay.

It was at that point that I realized that I would have a total of seven videos that would cover our entire trip: five videos about the Lake Superior area and two videos for the Bruce Peninsula. With releases scheduled for each Friday, the final video wouldn't be out until October 9.

Meanwhile, DW and I were still kayaking and I was still capturing video footage.

Coming soon to YouTube.

At the time of writing this post (last Friday), DW and I have been on three paddles and we are planning another weekend paddle. Video footage is piling up.

The day after each paddle, I create a folder for that outing with a RAW sub-folder, into which I pull the Insta360 footage so that the video card is clear for the next adventure. My external drive, which has a 1 TB capacity, was getting filled up as projects were not getting edited.

I mean, I have a life outside of making YouTube videos.

Last Friday, I uploaded a video to YouTube for a paddle that was taken on September 13. That left only the paddle from September 20 left to edit. I'm starting to catch up.

I imagine that by the end of this week, I'll be caught up with making my YouTube videos. However, I'm looking at early November by the time those videos are released on my channel, and in the meantime, I'll still be making videos.

I'm trying to determine if this is a good thing or not: on one hand, I'll have lots of content that could take me to the end of the year, when I typically run out of content. I tend to have a break in the early months of the year, when I obviously don't kayak.

On the other hand, the people who watch my kayaking videos to help them plan an outing of their own will see videos when it's too cold to go out, themselves. Will people watch these videos and make a note for next season or will they not watch kayaking videos in the late fall and winter?

Time, as they say, will tell. I don't know how many weekends I have left for kayaking. I hope I'll be on the water through October, which will give me videos into December. I'm still planning on creating my annual Favourite Photos of the Year video, for the end of December, and then I'll either take a break from creating videos, until DW and I travel again, or I'll come up with something new.

In the meantime, I continue catching up with my kayaking videos and I hope my viewers keep watching.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I have some fries to put in the oven. I hope we have ketchup in the house.

Happy Monday!