How to Set Up a Workflow for Vlogging
I’ve been meaning to start a vlog probably since college, and I’ve just never gotten around to it for essentially what comes down to fear. This fear has made me procrastinate and put it off for years, but I finally made the decision to just get started.
One issue I ran into a few months ago that allowed me to procrastinate even more was running out of storage on my computer. I have a 2016 13-inch MacBook Pro with only 250 GB of storage, and with the number of videos I’m uploading and the amount of memory each one takes up I quickly ran out of space.
Today I finally decided I’d tackle the problem because I realized that this was the biggest problem to me starting. I knew I needed to get into a workflow for uploading videos regularly, and overcoming this hurdle before that was a must.
Setting up a work environment for creating videos isn’t rocket science, but there were enough unknown unknowns for me to resist solving the problem. I also knew I’d need an uninterrupted chunk of time where I was focused enough to work out a solution and have the patience to see it through.
Here is the TLDR for anyone who’s impatient like me. All I really did were two things, both in the interest of saving space:
- Move my photos library onto my external hard drive, and clearing space on my computer.
- Create a new Final Cut Pro library onto my external hard drive where I’ll do all my editing.
The rest of this post is a step-by-step summary of how I set things up so that hopefully anyone else running into the same problems as me can just get started rather than trying to figure everything out from scratch.
Enjoy!
The first thing I did was buy a 4TB external hard drive. I went with Seagate because of their price, reviews, and past experience, but I honestly don’t think it matters which brand you go with. I chose 4TB because I thought it was the most economical and there’d be the smallest chance of it filling up while I was on a 3 month trip.
One important decision I chose to make though was whether to choose a Solid State Drive (SSD) or a Hard Drive Disk (HDD). HDDs are older tech, with a spinning disk and moving parts. SSDs are newer, slightly faster and have no moving parts. But the difference lies in their price, with SSDs still being significantly more expensive.
The main benefit for me of an SSD would have been to have something that was shock-proof. Since I’d be moving around a lot there’s a chance an HDD could get damaged and all the data could be lost.
But the price difference was steep enough that I opted for an HDD anyways and being careful with it.
Here’s a link to it and a comparable SSD on Amazon:
Seagate 4TB (thumbnail didn’t load for some reason)
Once I had my HDD I plugged it into the computer and just followed the instructions. There was some reformatting I had to do so I just followed on this tutorial:
Tutorial for formatting Seagate 4TB drive
Quick note, make sure you’re following the right tutorial for your version of MacOS. Unless you’re running windows, in which case I don’t think you’ll need to reformat.
Once I had that all set up, I transferred over my Photos library to my external hard drive. This was as simple as dragging and dropping.
Here’s the tutorial on transferring over photos library to an external HDD:
There are a couple subtle points in that video about how Photos will default to using a specific library. Keep that in mind for later because it’ll be important.
The other thing I realized that I could have done a lot early is ask for help online. There are tons of forums where people ask and answer questions, that I’ve relied on in the past when solving particular problems. I just typically don’t post to them myself and just rely on others having the same issue as me.
In this case, I decided to leverage the valuable resources on the Metacortex.
Here’s my post on Quora:
And another on Stack Exchange:
I figured two lines were enough.
The biggest lesson for me here was just patience. I won’t necessarily get answers right away from these posts, but odds are the answers will be better and more fleshed out than a Google search.
And in the meantime, I could also keep searching in parallel.
After that, I followed this tutorial on how to move a Final Cut Pro library to an external hard drive. This was a little more nuanced than transferring the Photos library, but still not too complicated.
I also did a bit of research on how to structure things in a way that made sense and learn a little more about some of the terminology surrounding Libraries, Events and Projects so I had some idea of what I was doing:
And then lastly, there was a small issue I ran into with using media from the Photos library on Final Cut. For some reason, it wasn’t detecting it and I couldn’t figure out how to easily move media over. The answer came in this post:
The last paragraph from the above article is key:
Tip: If you want photos or video clips from a different photo library to appear in the sidebar, open the other photo library in the Photos app. Then, in the General pane of Photos preferences, click “Use as System Photo Library.”
This is what allowed me to actually use my external Photos Library and start importing media from it into Final Cut.
Key thing: Make sure to restart Final Cut! If you don’t the changes using the external photos as the default won’t show up and you’ll be confused.
And lastly, here’s a short video I watched on how to organize my libraries/events/projects. But since I haven’t gotten into a ton of editing yet, I haven’t really done of a ton of research in that area.
One of the biggest challenges I always face with starting a new project is getting over that initial hump that comes from getting into a solid workflow. In the past I’ve used it as an excuse to procrastinate because dealing with uncertainty for can be uncomfortable at times. Especially when it comes to something as personal as creating videos of myself talking on camera, which is nerve-wracking enough as it is.
But I’m done letting this be a barrier for me to get started, and hopefully this post will help someone else overcome that barrier more quickly than I did.
In terms of overall time, it really just took me the better part of an afternoon, and that’s only because I procrastinated a lot in between. That said, I’ve known storage was a problem for at least 6 months, and have just consistently put it off because of my own fears. But I made it a point to get it done, and I decided to write a blog post documenting this whole process for future reference and for anyone else interested in starting a vlog.
Hope this helps!
