Category Archives: Call Me a Geek

The things I do and think about computers.

The Video Editing Audio Workaround

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The hoops I have to jump through to get the cockpit audio right on my YouTube videos.

I’m in the process of switching from ScreenFlow to Filmora Pro as my primary video editing software. I needed an editor that could edit 360° videos to add title screens, callouts, and additional audio. To my knowledge, ScreenFlow could not do this. That didn’t surprise me since ScreenFlow was designed primarily as a video screen capture and editing tool and the only reason I was using it was because it was cheap and it supported picture in picture.

I should mention here that in the past, I’ve used iMovie (limited) and Final Cut Pro (the old version was great; the X version is not). I knew that Adobe Premiere would do what I needed it to do, but I was not at all interested in paying Adobe a monthly fee to be able to access the files I created with its software. I believe software should be bought — not rented.

Filmora has a bunch of really good tutorials on YouTube and it was pretty easy to learn — not that I know everything about it yet. And the “lifetime” price did away with the nonsense of software rentals, letting me buy the software just once and get free upgrades and free customer support forever (however long that is). It was $180 after tax, which fit my budget.

But…

It wasn’t until I’d begun using Filmora Pro that I realized that it lacked a feature I really needed: the ability to turn stereo sound into mono sound.

Let me explain.

My videos usually have two sources of sound, each for a different type of sound:

  • One GoPro Hero7 Black records ambient sound — normally, that’s the sound of the engine and rotors as I start up, fly, and shut down. In the beginning, I left this sound out, but a lot of my fans claimed they liked it. So I made sure I had one camera running to capture that, even if I didn’t use the video that went with it.
  • Another GoPro Hero7 Black records the sound in my intercom system — normally that’s the sound of me talking to the camera or on the radio or phone. (When I’m on the phone, you can only hear my half of the conversation.) That’s captured through a connection between the camera and my intercom system via an NFlightCam Audio Cable. Channel fans apparently really love my narrations — who knew? — and the sound of radio chatter, so this is an important component of my video setup.

The problem is, the intercom audio is recorded on just one stereo channel: the left. (This is a shortcoming of the cable which, according to the folks at NFlightCam, is a problem with the one part of the cable they buy from GoPro for their products. In other words, according to NFlightCam, it’s GoPro’s fault.) If I use this audio in my videos as is and someone listens through stereo speakers or headphones, they notice that the voice is coming from just one side. And they complain.

When I used ScreenFlow, it had the ability to turn stereo channels into mono. That combined the left (with sound) and right (with no sound) into one channel that sounds like it’s coming from somewhere in the middle. That got the complaints to stop — when I remembered to take the extra conversion step.

But Filmora Pro doesn’t support the combining of two stereo channels into one mono channel. So there’s no solution in this software.

Of course, there’s a workaround — export the audio only, convert it stereo to mono, and import it back into Filmora Pro. Here’s how I do that with the software I already have:

  1. QuickTime Pro Registration
    I save old software and I’m very glad I saved this application. My iMac is running MacOS High Sierra; I don’t think this will run under Catalina on my laptop.

    Open the video clip with the single channel stereo sound in QuickTime Player Pro 7. (Note that I didn’t say QuickTime Player, which is the current version of the software. No, I’m using the version from 2009: QuickTime Player 7.6.6, which requires a registration code. This was the good version of QuickTime, which allows editing and screen recording and includes all kinds of other neat features. I recovered and saved this version when it was overwritten by the limited feature version that came after it.)

  2. Convert to Mono
    Why can’t Filmora Pro have a Channels pop-up menu like this one?

    Use the Export command under the File menu to save the Audio Only as Sound to AIFF. Before exporting, click the Options button and be sure that Mono is selected from the Channels pop-up menu. This is how I convert stereo to mono, but the resulting file is not compatible with Filmora Pro.

  3. Double-click the resulting Audio file in iTunes to import and open it.
  4. Use the Convert command under the File menu to Create an AAC Version.
  5. Drag that version out of iTunes and into a Finder window to export it. I now have a version compatible with Filmora Pro.
  6. Drag the audio file into Filmora Pro’s media window.
  7. Drag the original video file into the Filmora Pro timeline.
  8. Unlink the video file’s original audio track from the video track.
  9. Delete the unlinked audio track from the timeline.
  10. Drag the mono audio file into the Filmora Pro Timeline and line it up exactly with the video track that remains. That will synchronize the two tracks.
  11. Link the two tracks together so they cannot be edited out of sync.
  12. Repeat the above steps for every video clip with a cockpit audio track.

And then…

From that point, all I have to do is add the second audio/video track — assuming I want the ambient sound audio track to play behind the cockpit audio — synchronize it with the cockpit audio/video so the sounds are right, unlink the audio/video from in that second track, get rid of (or adjust the size of) the second video clip, and add subsequent clips, doing the same for each, for the length of the video. I also need to be sure there’s 20 seconds with nothing much going on at the end so I can add end cards. Then I add the title screen with “theme music” and animation and any annotation text, including a reminder that the video description has lots of information that might answer viewer questions.

In all, I think the video editing process takes about 10-20x the amount of time in the video clip. So, for example, a 10-minute video would take about 100-200 minutes to edit.

Rendering varies depending on the length of the video, but at least it doesn’t require any additional effort on my part. Uploading to YouTube also takes a while, but only a few minutes of actual work as I fill in the form with the video information.

So yes, it’s involved.

A lot of folks think flying a helicopter is hard. I think it’s a lot easier than editing a quality video.

About the BOGO iPhone 8+

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How I got conned into getting a second phone and why I don’t mind.

Back in September, when I was on vacation in Washington, DC, I upgraded my old iPhone 7 to an iPhone Xs. It was just under 2 years since my last upgrade, but the iPhone 7 had a tiny scratch on the camera lens. I was facing either $80 to repair a two-year-old phone or $1000+ to buy a new phone with a much better camera. I went with the upgrade.

While I was there at the Verizon store in Union Station, the salesperson excitedly told me that because I was 55 or older, I qualified for a buy one get one free offer on a second phone. “I don’t need a second phone,” I told her. “I’m one person.”

“But it’s free,” she said.

“What kind of phone?” I asked, figuring I could get it and sell it on Craig’s List. “An old flip phone?”

“Any phone we sell that lists for under $1,000,” was the surprising answer.

“And what about using it?” I asked. “Do I have to pay more every month to have it?”

“No, she told me. “Your monthly service cost will be the same. You just have to keep it for two years.”

Red iPhone 8+
It’s pretty and I am partial to red.

This sounded too good to be true, even though I couldn’t sell it right away. The way I saw it, it would be an insurance policy; if I broke my other phone, I could use this one. I was hooked. I picked out a red iPhone 8+, which is known for having a good camera. That’s the big screen iPhone. Too big for everyday use, in my opinion, but what the hell. It was free.

Except it wasn’t. I had to pay sales tax on it. That was nearly $80.

She activated my iPhone Xs and I tossed the boxes for both phones in a shopping bag. I finished my vacation 2 weeks later, packed them in my luggage, and brought them home. I put the boxes on a shelf in my office, never even bothering to take out the red phone.

Fast forward to the other day. After getting a phone call while I was recording a video, I decided it might be nice to use a different camera for all these YouTube videos I’ve been making. I thought immediately of the red phone still in its box. The big screen would make it easier for my 55+ eyes to see what I was shooting. I retrieved it, plugged it in to charge its dead battery, and called Verizon to make sure I could activate it and use it without paying additional fees.

I was on the phone for over an hour with the customer service person. Turns out that the Union Station salesperson wasn’t exactly truthful. Although my bill was about what I expected every month — higher than the old bill but just enough to cover the cost of the $1200 iPhone Xs I was paying off over 2 years — I was paying extra for that new phone. I didn’t know it because I never bothered looking at my bill. Service was $40 each per phone and I’d been paying $40/month since September for a phone in a box just draining its battery.

Imagine how pissed off I was. Maybe you can’t. I can get pretty pissed off. I could feel my blood pressure rise.

She did more research and we discovered that my old plan had been $85/month for my one phone. That included unlimited talk, text, and data. The new plan with the BOGO phone was $60/month for one phone or $40/month per phone for more than one phone. So, in reality, I was paying slightly less for my plan every month with two phones than I had been paying for one phone.

But I would be paying $20/month less if I had just one phone. Still, $20/month wasn’t going to break me. Hell, I hadn’t even noticed the difference.

I thought about the situation I’d found myself in. In my mind, I was basically getting two phones for the price of one. At the end of my two year period, I could sell both phones and come out fine. (I keep my phones in pristine condition with cases and screen covers.) In the meantime, I could use this new phone for video stuff; it had exactly the same plan as the one I was using every day.

To sweeten the deal, the Verizon customer service rep put a $100 credit on my account, basically covering 5 months of what I’d paid ($80/month paid – $60/month what I would have paid with one phone = $20/month).

Of course, I wound up keeping the phone. It was a hell of a lot easier than fighting with Verizon about taking it back. And I really do like the phone for the video work I’m doing. The big screen rocks and the camera quality is better than I need.

But I did learn a valuable lesson: The next time I upgrade my phone, I’m taking my bill along with me and will compare the current bill with the new bill. I’m not going to pay for equipment I’m not using again.

My YouTube Surprise

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I check into my AdSense account and find a bunch of money.

I’ve been publishing helicopter videos on YouTube for more than 10 years. I was always fiddling around with one kind of camera or another, getting footage in flight, and then putting that footage online. Lots of people found it interesting. I just thought it was neat to share something that had become quite commonplace to me.

In 2016, I set up my YouTube account for monetization. That means that when YouTube put an ad at the beginning of one of my videos, I’d get a cut of the money they collected from the advertiser. I didn’t expect it to be very much — after all, it wasn’t as if my videos went viral or anything. I didn’t even have that many subscribers.

That apparently all changed at least a year ago. Somehow, the Flying M Air YouTube channel attracted more than 43,000 subscribers. And one of my videos — Home to Airport, by Helicopter — got 8.6 million views.

I didn’t know this. I’d set up YouTube to contact me via a Gmail account I never check so I never got any communication from them. I actually learned all this the other day when I was poking around my YouTube channel.

Wow, I thought to myself. That’s kind of cool. But shouldn’t I have earned some money with all those views?

I poked around some more. I wanted to make sure I’d set up YouTube with the correct banking information. I had a hard time finding where the settings for that were. But before I found it, I found something else: $7,700 of earnings in my AdSense account.

My Earnings
Surprise!

It seems that for the past three years, Google had been collecting ad revenue on ads played at the beginning of some of my videos and had been faithfully recording my share in my account on their system.

But why wasn’t I getting paid? It turned out that I’d never completed the setup — I’d never given Google my tax ID or banking information. Duh-oh!

You can bet I handed over that information as soon as I figured out where I needed to enter it.

And the next morning, all that money appeared magically in my savings account.

Needless to say, I’m now very motivated to create new videos. I hadn’t realized it, but it had been about two years since I uploaded one. There were hundreds of comments waiting to be moderated and many were from people asking me why I wasn’t making more videos.

I’ve been doing a bit of flying lately and I set up one of my GoPros to capture video and audio of most of my flights. I put together the other day and, a day later, created a short at the end of that flight.

Bonneville Dam
One of the highlights of Tuesday’s flight was an overflight of the Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River.

I just went through the new comments on those videos. Most folks are thanking me for uploading new videos and telling me they want more. It’s very rewarding — and I’m not talking about the fraction of a cent I get for each view. It’s nice to know folks are out there waiting for new content. It’s nice to have them welcome me back as if they really missed me.

I’ll do my best to record new videos while flying — including new cherry drying videos this summer — and get them online. I hope you’ll check them out and maybe even subscribe to my YouTube channel: FlyingMAir.