Expand Your Life

This past weekend the Edelman Digital Bootcamp was held at UGA. I decided to make shooting a video and putting it on Youtube my ”new thing” for the week. Well, maybe I should say attempt putting a video on Youtube. The process proved to be quite tedious and difficult, much to my dismay.

Sadly, I had never even operated a true video camera before. I have a very nice digital camera that is capable of taking decent videos and even better pictures. However, for the bootcamp, a university camera was provided. After a quick tutorial, I was on my own. I attended a seminar on tactic and strategy, presented by Monte Lutz. I tried to pretend like I was a professional journalist trying to capture the essence of the lecture. I tried strategically stop and record his speech at the right times. I played with the zoom and practiced holding the camera steady. Once I decided I had filmed a pretty good amount of content, it was time to put the video on Youtube.

This was supposed to be the ”easy part.” Little did I know, it was going to be an incredibly frustrating endeavor. The first thing that went wrong was that the cord to connect the camera to the computer would not fit in my computer’s USB port; it would only fit a Mac. After much scrounging around, I finally found someone with aMac who was willing to let me use it. After the video finally downloaded, I began trying to edit it.

The editing program was confusing and difficult to use. After spending much time creating a title screen, cutting out unwanted clips, and playing with transitions, I was ready to save. The computer had other plans. It decided it didn’t want to save, and forced me to exit the program. Thus, downloading attempt number two began. I sat throught the eight-minute video once again and waited for it to download. Once it finished, I tried to save it immediately. No such luck. After the third time of downloading the video, it finally appeared to save. I gave up on editing it and tried to just go ahead and put it on Youtube. I was exhilirated to find that the video was the only thing the browser wouldn’t let me click on to upload (please catch my sarcasm!). I clicked on another saved item that appeared to be the video, only it was the wrong clip. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway, because Youtube never finished uploading it. I finally had to call it a day. As I was leaving, someone asked what I had learned about uploading videos to Youtube. My reply? Make sure you have a lot of time and patience!