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Video Editing And Social Media

Byrichard

In the past if you wanted to be a video editor you also needed to be a camera operator, and to be a camera operator you needed to be a video editor. By knowing both skills you shot good material because you knew how hard bad material was to use. As a result of this videos were worth watching with all of our attention.


In recent years, there has been a move towards multimedia editing, where you don’t expect people to watch the video while sitting in front of a TV. You expect them to be looking at a mobile phone while commuting, or scrolling through a social media feed. Job offers reflect this. You often see jobs that required perfect spelling and grammar, Adobe Premiere and Adobe After Effects. The need for an editor to be a camera operator is gone. We have gone from videos being made by camera operators and video editors who love their medium, to graphists, who overlay graphics over video. They’re making slideshows, rather than video content.


Today I started to watch a video about desertification and the graphics were so huge and prominent that I lost interest after just two shots. They are not using video appropriately. Videos should not be optimised for social media. They should be made interesting to view.


I spend hours a week watching videos on YouTube where the use of graphics is minimal or even non-existent. I watch hiking and camping documentaries that are half an hour to an hour long with minimal music and minimal graphics.


For a long time, there was the notion that content should be 1 to three minutes long for people to watch the entire thing. I think that this view is now wrong. I believe that with the coming of age of YouTube content creators, so the desire for longer form content has grown.


Tik Tok and User Generated Spam


For a while I really liked TikTok during this pandemic and then I fell out of love with it for two reasons. The first of these reasons is that it forces you onto the For You Page so you end up watching and following strangers, whom you will never interact with and the second is that everyone uses the same song, does the same action, but in their own individual way. This could be seen as fun, and many do, but for me this is User Generated Spam.


Over a decade ago we had Qik, We had Seesmic, we had Livestation and plenty of other video sharing apps, some of them live, others pre-recorded, and others for multi-camera streaming. TikTok had great potential to be a Seesmic style channel. We could have logged in, recorded a video, and had someone comment or respond. It could have been a way of conversing people with our voices. Instead, it is a talent show. There is little to no engagement. We don’t talk. We don’t get to know others. Furthermore, we’re just eyeballs looking at mediocre content, when we could do something more interesting.


I considered unfollowing plenty of accounts, but this takes time. I also considered that I could follow accounts that create original content. Paradoxically, TikTok gave me just the video to illustrate the point I am making. 😉


@bmcdiving

Been a Long Week Of Diving In This Beautiful WasteWater ??? #commercialdiving #underwaterwelder #wastewater #shitjob #livingthedream

? Astronaut In The Ocean – Masked Wolf

A Saturday Walk During A Pandemic

Byrichard

Last week it was comfortable and warm so it was tempting to go cycling. This week it has gone back to being cold. Yesterday it was cold and windy and today was cold but sunny. I went for my usual walk but rather than listen to a podcast I watched TikTok videos as I walked at full speed. I am so used to the paths that I do not always need to pay attention.


The paths are dry. It hasn’t rained in days. The rivers are lower than they’ve been in a while and in theory river walking may be possible once again, as long as you don’t mind cold feet.


What was out of the ordinary today is that I saw people walking through fields on two separate occasions. On one occasion it was a trio of older people and their behaviour made no sense to me, for the simple reason that you can very easily walk around the field, and that the field has crops on it. If you’re going to walk through a field make sure that it has been harvested, that it is fallow or that no cows are using it.


I later saw a duo of people doing the same thing on another field and this does seem odd. Why would two groups of people have the same discourteous behaviour of walking over a crop?


Rather than walk along the usual routes I cut through the forest, walking through leaves, over dead branches, between trees and more. I filmed the progress I made. At the moment walking through forests is easy because none of the undergrowth is out yet. Walking between trees is easy, and so is navigating. When the undergrowth grows in spring such explorations will no longer be possible. That is when cycling will be more fun. I look forward to the cycling season starting properly once again. I went to be on the bike, and to explore. I also want to feel that something is finally changing.


I saw a Trio of older women and I thought that they may be having adventures like the three men in Last of the Summer Wine. A trio of friends going for mischievous adventures in nature during their afternoon walks.


Day 51 Of Self-Isolation in Switzerland – Only Two People At A Time

Day 51 Of Self-Isolation in Switzerland – Only Two People At A Time

Byrichard

Today I went in to a shop without knowing that the limit was two people at a time. Paradoxically there were not two but five people in the shop because if you’re a parent with a child you’re allowed to be two, so there were four people. I saw no sign on the door because the door was open so I didn’t know. The shop in my village doesn’t have that rule.


It seems stupid to ignore the rule for two parents and their kids from separate families. I thought that I would walk my traditional summer route today but of course that was a mistake. A trio of three people from one family were walking lined up making it impossible for me to pass them without them entering my two metre exlusion zone so I waited by a petanque field for them to pass.


A girl and her mother were distracted doing something and the bike began to roll down a slope and I questioned, “How do I help without touching the bike. I thought of running and stopping it with my foot but as it gained momentum I ran out of time. It rolled into the road.


I was thinking “How can I help the mother walking with her children and I came to the conclusion that the safest part of the bike to grab and place it back on the pavement was the down tube. Saddles and handlebars are always touched but it’s unlikely that people, in normal circumstances would touch the down tube.


These are the things we need to think about during a pandemic. Helping someone as a spur of the moment thing is temporarily out of the question as a moment’s kindness could lead to tragedy, not that I expect either of us to be at high risk of catching the virus from each other. According to a recent article there were just 40 new contaminations yesterday. Now we’re even further into the long tail of the pandemic.


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Cat nap.

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Day 47 Of Self-Isolation in Switzerland – A Walk In The Rain
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Day 47 Of Self-Isolation in Switzerland – A Walk In The Rain

Byrichard

Yesterday I went for a walk in the rain. I walked for two hours, took pictures and listened to Echo Der Zeit and this episode of the Thru-Hiking podcast. Gretel Scarlet was the interviewee. She talked about South Bound (SOBO) hiking the PCT.


It’s interesting to see how different her attitude was to most people’s, how being a dancer, and someone who considers nutrition, speaks differently of food and injuries.


Thanks to the rain most people stayed indoors. This was a good opportunity to walk along routes that I have been avoiding for weeks due to the pandemic. In the process, my trousers and shoes got soaked so I was squelching along. Even cars were not that frequent. I crossed two people during my ten-kilometre walk.


A walk in the rain during the 2020 Pandemic.


I walked through a wooded part and the trail that I usually follow was now a river. I had to step to the side of the path to avoid walking through the “stream” that it had now become. My shoes were already wet from walking through some tall grass earlier on.


I used to be a cold water diver so being wet doesn’t bother me. I was comfortable for almost the entire walk. It’s only during the last kilometre when I turned to walk into the wind that I started to feel cold and tired. By this point my trousers were soaked and the humidity was moving upwards.


I had considered making the route longer when crossing the last village before home but decided not to. I didn’t want to have to walk along the road when agricultural paths were clear of people. In light of how I felt on the last leg that was a good decision.


@richardazia

##rain ##river ##switzerland

? Let’s Do It Again – J Boog

Day 45 Of Self-Isolation in Switzerland – The Need For Outdoor Exercise.

Day 45 Of Self-Isolation in Switzerland – The Need For Outdoor Exercise.

Byrichard

This aftrnoon reminded me of the need for outdoor exercise. I was feeling lazy and unmotivated to go outdoors. I thought that the rain would come back during my walk, as it did during my scooter ride, and as it did yesterday. I checked the weather app and I saw that we should have good weather until tomorrow so I took advantage to go for my walk.


This time I was light. I went with my AirPods, my phone, and money just in case. I walked the usual route but this time I think I saw farmers and their child, and plenty of people on bikes. It would be interesting to see how important a role physical exercise played in Switzerland managing to flatten the curve for now. With so much sunshine and exercise you’d expect the Swiss to be primed for coping with such a virus.


@richardazia

##cats ##catnap ##lazy ##afternoon

? Summer Days – Martin Garrix / Macklemore / Patrick Stump

Day 38 of Self-Isolation in Switzerland – Contact Sports
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Day 38 of Self-Isolation in Switzerland – Contact Sports

Byrichard

By May we may be able to go back to doing sports in groups as long as they are not “contact sports” in Switzerland. For me this means hiking, running cycling and other related sports. For me climbing is a contact sport because we touch the same hand holds as everyone else climbing the routes, we use the same ropes and we share quickdraws and belay devices.


This being said I also have no desire to do sports like climbing at the moment because they require us to stand around and socialise and I haven’t really socialised in at least 38 days. I need to ease back into the world of the extrovert. Hiking is a good way to do that.


Visual Studio Code


Today I started watching a course on Linkedin learning about using Chrome for webmastering but got distracted with the idea of installing a server on my mac book pro. I then got even more distracted by Visual Studio Code.


I like this piece of software because it’s free, intuitive to use and quick. A few days ago I had spent hours playing with another html editing tool and the process was so laborious that i wasted a lot of time. With Visual Studio Code it’s fast and I’m getting through the task of making the old part of my website mobile friendly.



The process is interesting. The more pages I optimise the more experience I gain and the more efficient I become. I found that if I remove some bits of code the page is mobile compliant within two or three steps and I can move on to the next page, and the next one after that.


In theory these pages should always have been mobile friendly because they’re light. There is no CSS or other clunk. Images are also small as bandwidth was an issue in those days. It still is, but we have a firehose rather than a syringe today.


Webmastering is great because time really flies when you’re working on a website. You can easily spend ten or more hours a day working on something and still have a few more hours of work. That’s why some professions look so busy compared to others. Of course it’s time consuming because I am still perfecting the work flow. By the time I’ve optimised every page I’ll be proficient at an updated skill.


TikTok


Last night I was unable to focus so I installed TikTok and looked at plenty of videos to clear my mind enough to be able to think about dinner. I must have been in the right frame of mind because I enjoyed quite a few of the videos and flooded my facebook timeline with examples. Don’t worry though, out of the flood I only got one like. It seems that no one saw the flood so it didn’t happen.


1SE – One Second Every Day


More in character with me is the One Second Everyday app. I created a compilation for every day of quarantine so far but I won’t share the video too frequently because it will be most effective when it has at least sixty more days.


That’s it for today. Time to think about dinner.