A little while ago, I noticed there was a 4K action camera on sale on Amazon, and I felt compelled to buy it.
Spoiler alert, I did.
Fast forward towards the end of 2022, and I wanted to put it to good use. I tried out the camera while heading down to the Nagasaki City Dinosaur Museum in Nomozaki but ultimately decided to document a train journey from Nagasaki Station to Hakata Station on New Year’s Eve 2022.
Yes, I could have easily taken either the bus or the West Kyushu Shinkansen service, but I wanted to challenge myself a bit.
Could I make a video documenting a train journey in which I take only local trains?
I’ll let you watch the video below so that you can make that judgment yourself.
As for the quality of the video footage, it’s obviously not the greatest. For the price that I paid for the camera, I am not going to complain about it, though.
The biggest challenge came from putting the footage together to create something coherent. This meant looking through all the video clips I recorded before transferring them from my memory card to my iPad Pro. Even then, I had to select which parts of the chosen video clips to use in the final video.
Here’s a piece of advice for those who think making videos for YouTube is easy.
It’s not.
Think of the finished video as an essay. You need to be able to self-edit your work as you do with written prose. Otherwise, you’ll keep waffling to the point where you have derailed yourself.
I had some fun working on the subtitles. With that said, my respect for Japanese travel YouTubers has increased even more. I’ve stated my reason towards the end of the video, but here it is again.
In addition to all the editing they have to do, those YouTubers still choose to provide English subtitles for the convenience of their global audience. Even if they rely on a translation tool to do the bulk of the work, they still have to “tidy up” the machine translations to make things comprehensible.
I ran out of steam with my subtitling just short of the halfway point of my video, and I’m a native English speaker.
Using LumaFusion was an educational experience. While my video was edited on my M1 iPad Pro, I’m glad it’s also now available on Android devices running Android 10 and newer. It’s pricey, but it’s worth the cost.
This will obviously not be the only video I’ll be making. Now that I’ve tried video editing, I’m interested in seeing how I can further improve myself.
Stay tuned. In the meantime, let’s have a chat.