My first day of travel — in vlog format.

Well, I’m off on this year’s snowbirding trip to points south. I came very close to not going. It was last week’s cold weather snap and the fact that my house-sitters had no where to live if I didn’t leave that finally got me packed and out the door.

I’m trying something new this year: video logging or vlogging of my travels. This video is my first stab at the format. It’s not perfect but as I edit and compile the video, I get more ideas on how to make it better so I expect my entries to improve as time goes on.

Why am I doing this? Well, I want to be able to vlog my future boat journeys. Let’s face it: most people these days would rather watch a video than read a blog — even if they both contain the same content. And I really do get a kick out of showing off some of the stuff I see and do along the way. So these videos are my way of learning how to and practicing vlogging.

I’m using three cameras to make these videos, but I’ll likely streamline it down to just two. A GoPro Hero 8 produces time-lapse videos of my drive. I think folks might get a kick out of seeing some of the terrain I drive through. There’s a whole lot of nothing out west and the folks who live in big cities often have no clue. (Yes, I did pass a “Next Gas 111 Miles” sign yesterday; if the camera caught it, I’ll share it.) It’s also interesting to see how the geology changes. And the weather.

The other two cameras are actually iPhones. One is the iPhone 8 Plus I got for free about 3 years ago when I bought my iPhone XS. It’s not connected to a cell plan but it still works great as a camera and on an Internet connection for creating and sharing content. I had it set up mounted to make selfies while I drove. I later realized that I didn’t like the way I had to do a freeze frame of the video to insert my commentary so I’m likely to discontinue it. The other is my new iPhone 13 Pro, which I use for handheld selfie videos while out of the truck. I’ll likely set this up to record occasional selfies behind the wheel. Two cameras is enough. It’s not like I’m flying a helicopter or anything. ;-)

I compile the video content on my MacBook Air — the same one I was “forced” to buy back in August or September while I was cruising on the Great Lakes. It’s a better machine than the 2yo MacBook Pro I’d been using so I got that machine all clean up and sent it back to Apple for a $380 gift card and set this one up as my main laptop. I use an app called Screenflow, which seems to work fine and gives me picture-in-picture capabilities. It also does a great job optimizing the rendered files so they’re remarkably small, even at 4K resolutions.

The main hurdle I’ve got is to get the video uploaded. My laptop uses my iPhone or iPad as a hotspot and Verizon has managed to degrade hotspot upload/download speeds to the point where it’s nearly impossible to share video. So I fooled it today by using AirDrop to send the finished file from my laptop to my iPhone and then upload it to YouTube from there. (It’s still taking quite a while, though, so maybe Verizon fooled me into thinking that would work?) I may have to upload these in batches in the future, possibly when taking up table space at a Starbucks or other WiFi hotspot with decent bandwidth. But since I don’t expect to see those more than once a week or so, don’t you expect to see these posts much more often than that.

That said, here’s the video:

I also want to say again that I’m just a few (11 as of this morning) YouTube Channel subscribers short of being able to do livestream videos from a mobile device. If you’re not a subscriber, why not?