Recently I have been wondering if I would have any fun recording my bike tours. And how much time video editing would cost me? When I told Hotte about the idea, he was kind enough to borrow me one of his. So with the help of Matthias Mini-SD I started my first trial this weekend. The tour Matthias had plotted in the Pfalz (Rhineland Palatinate) was absolutely wonderful!

My learning

Some things I learned: My old Macbook does take some time to compile the videos. It never finished the stabilization of the video. Oh well – it’s been ~ 10 years ago that it was the top model 😉 Maybe the built in “hypersmooth” from the later camera models would help there.

I didn’t really understand how the old GoPro Quik Software was meant to work. A shame since it had some nice background music to use. But since GoPro has also discontinued development for their desktop software I might as well not even start that way.

In the end I just used iMovie from Apple and am really happy. Got used to it in a very short amount of time. I think the result isn’t too bad for a first attempt… In the end it actually took longer to find some music to add as background than editing the video. Interesting for me the flow was different than expected:

1) add the video clips just roughly in sequence first
2) search for some rather fitting background music
3) align the videos to the music – e.g the upbeat starts when you enter the single track
4) change the tracks for the background according to the content shown

Distribution

After I had finished the first version I wondered about how to share it. Even at reduced 720p the file still was ~900 MB. Hmm – If I don’t find a place where to put all the data, I will soon run out of space .

So why not use YouTube. And that’s how I ended up re-doing the video with tracks from YouTube Studio. I really did not want to run into any copyright infringements.

Conclusion

This was actually a very fun project to do. I am keen to experiment some more on the upcoming rides. Hotte told me that differing angles make the clip more interesting which I definitely want to try out! Since last Saturday’s tour was under a schedule – had to be home in time – I just kept the camera in one place.

Note: After receiving some first feedback a short note. It is a little long with 9:34 min. I gave up editing at midnight. So maybe I’ll upload a shortened version later. Unfortunately have to do some real work now.

Note: Hope this 4:18 min version is an improvement. If not – I will ignore any feedback given 😛

So thank you Hotte for the camera and Matthias for the tour!! More to come soon.

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