Lessons Learned from a Noob Capturing & Documenting a Tiny Adventure with Video

Truong-An Thai
Sep 8, 2018 · 3 min read

Capture everything. I stepped in goat shit and in the midst of thinking why I woke up that morning, totally missed out on capturing that moment. You can always edit down but can’t go back to capture shit like this.

FINALLY DONE! 7.5 hours of video footage captured across 2 days, edited down to ~10minutes!

Watch video on youtube: https://youtu.be/xixj5MFWeAM

I decided to document our Labor Day weekend staycation trip on video. We took a trip to Natural Bridge Wildlife Ranch, a 400-acre safari park on the northern outskirts of San Antonio, near New Braunfels, Texas. Later hung out at a friends house with a pool and hot tub, drank some cognac (XO) while the kids slept (not captured). Next day we got some Dim Sum and then went to a friend’s kiddo bday party out by Brush Creek Park.

Was great to see that our kids actually ENJOYED watching the video! Now they can relive it ;)

Video camera equipment used and that kinda stuff:

iPhone 7plus

GoPro Hero Session5

SMOVE Mobile Smart Stabilizer Gimbal

Video Editing: iMovie on Macbook Pro

Music: https://brokeforfree.bandcamp.com/album/petal

What I’ve learned:

1. Capture everything. I stepped in goat shit and in the midst of thinking why I woke up that morning, totally missed out on capturing that moment. You can always edit down but can’t go back to capture shit like this.

2. While I am the total noob to video capturing and post-editing (learning the tools), I think the hardest and most time-consuming part was how to tell your story. Editing down hours of footage to minutes means you have to be extremely selective of what you are adding to the timeline.

3. iMovie did not let me export higher than HD 720p (1280 x 720) since two of my slow-mo clips were captured on the iPhone using 720p @ 240fps. Not sure why I didn’t choose 1080p, 120fps (perhaps 240fps sounded cooler?). Totally sucks but lesson learned.

4. Getting error 1004 from iMovie during export is a soul sucker. The solution was to trim .5 to 1 second in front of the clips causing an error. Unfortunately, it was trial an error figuring out which of my 30 clips was the culprit. So I just trimmed all of them which shifted the music and audio sync. Google is your friend.

5. Had to google time-lapse vs speeding up the video in post edit. Seriously had no idea how time-lapse works.

6. Not sure why the GoPro Session 5 took time-lapse photos instead of video, so I ended up with 8000 images from 1-second time-lapse intervals. Still, have no idea how to stitch them together in iMovie to use in the project.

7. The SMOVE Mobile is one badass gimbal/stabilizer. Except its way to smart for me and I couldn’t control it. It has its own brains. Gonna learn all the modes, maybe dumb it down a bit. The stabilizer is amazing though. Oh, and I got compliments from strangers on the gimbal and injuring about it. I’m such a PRO.

8. When using your iPhone to video capture, the battery is drained way-way faster than normal daily use. Fortunately the SMOVE mobile gimbal can charge your phone. Sadly, it does not come with a MicroUSB to Lightning adapter. Ordered.

9. Capturing footage is hard work with two little ones running around.

10. This stuff is fun, creative and makes you get outside of your comfort zone. Talking about something on video was quite uncomfortable. It is freakin’ hard work pre and post. Mad respect for video producers/post editors/vloggers!

Truong-An Thai

Written by

Emp#1 @FloSports. VP, Engineering. Coding is hard; People is even harder; Writing is really, really, really hard. http://www.linkedin.com/in/bithai

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