This episode has been so very long delayed! I was busy with a lot of little things, and I still am, so this episode isn’t edited. I start with what I did right after my previous episode, then I talk about some more things I was doing, including one that was emotionally challenging. I also did something I was able to do because apparently I’m now officially old. Or, something like that..
This is the 400th episode of the AmeriNZ Podcast!!! Who’d ever have guessed I’d make it? It only took me 6,028 days… I talk about all that first, then what I’ve been up to since last week’s episode. This episode is also 18 weeks in a row, actually.
Last chance to post an episode before the USA’s Thanksgiving holiday, so here I am! I begin talking about the Pike River mine disaster, because we’ve had a major development. Then, it’s a sad and fraught story about division and a huge fight in Auckland’s “rainbow communities”. I also talk about how I’ve had to explain the USA’s recent elections to New Zealanders, which isn’t new, actually. Then I have a question and some comments from the previous episode. Consider this the aural equivalent of a Thanksgiving feast!
Last time I talked about some storms down south. We had some bad ones last weekend. The bad weather has made it difficult to get my projects around the house finished. There are a couple items in the New Zealand news that are related to the USA—not political, exactly, but politics-related. Mainly, it’s about immigration and very wealthy Americans coming to New Zealand.
I made Thanksgiving Dinner this year! I talk about that first. Then, it’s on to the recent US election, and how it could affect expats as well as New Zealand. Then, I talk about the results of the NZ local government elections. There were good results. After that, it’s ome updates on how I’m doing, plus I share some of my confusion over “content creation”.
Earlier this week, I was in Takapuna for awhile, so I went and visited the beach there, which is the subject of my latest brief YouTube video. I haven’t been there in awhile, so it was nice to stop by.
Being winter, it was a little cooler than I would have liked, but the beach was still quite busy, anyway. The clouds were moving pretty quickly, so an area of beach that was in full sun one moment could be in shade the next. I didn’t realise that was happening until I edited the video.
I’ll let you in on a secret: At one point in the video I have a title that says it’s looking toward the Pacific. The truth is, on the eastern side of Auckland’s North Shore (where Takapuna is), everywhere one looks toward the east is looking toward the Pacific, though there may be islands in the way.
I used that phrase to give some sort of geographic orientation to foreigners, and so they’d know what ocean they were looking at. But that part of the North Shore isn’t really directly open to the ocean (because of islands). So, the label I added is a little misleading: It’s true, but probably not quite in the way some viewers will take it.
It was one of those times when simplicity was better than strict accuracy, something I’ve run into before when I’ve made these videos. Actually, I’ve learned a lot of things since I started making them. I’m sure that as I continue to learn more, and as I get more confident, I’ll make longer videos.
At any rate, making the videos has been fun. And, it’s always nice to have an excuse to visit favourite places.
This is another crosspost with AmeriNZ Blog, something I wanted to share here, too, because it gives some behind-the-scenes information about the video.
The video above is a short video I made this evening as an experiment. I wanted to see how easy it was to make a video using iMovie on my iPad. On the whole, it was pretty easy.
I shot some video of the rain this afternoon with an idea that I might make a YouTube video with it. This evening I was playing with my iPad, remembered that it had iMovie on it, and I wondered how hard it would be to use.
The first problem was figuring out how to get my footage onto my iPad. It turns out, my videos don’t automatically share to iCloud (probably a setting I made at some point). So, I uploaded them to Dropbox, then opened Dropbox on my iPad and saved them to my photos on my iPad (often called a “Camera Roll”)
After that, it was just a matter of figuring out how to assemble everything. I expect phone and tablet apps to teach me how to use them as I use them, but sometimes I get stuck. Apart from having to Google how to get video onto my iPad, this time I had very little trouble figuring it out.
However, there were a few things I haven’t figured out yet, like how to shorten the duration of onscreen titles and how to adjust the level of the music track (the levels in the video were automatic; the music was included with iMove, by the way).
If I’d edited the video on the Mac, I’d have no trouble with any of those things, and I would have edited out the camera shake in a couple spots. But I wanted to see what was possible—or, at least, obvious—to do on the iPad. Some day I may shoot some video and want to get it uploaded quickly (interestingly, one of the templates was for CNN’s uploaded videos from amateurs).
So, all in all, it wasn’t too bad, though I’ll use the Mac for editing nearly all the time. Still, it was kind of fun.
This was my second video so far this year, and this video is actually part of the “soft re-launch” of my YouTube Channel. I’m posting similarly short videos up until the actual relaunch, which is coming soon.
And all of that will be shared here on this blog. Of course.
The Technical Stuff: The video was shot using a 20.3MP Samsung DX 1000, and the still shot of water drops at the beginning and end was shot with an iPhone 5c. The video was edited on an iPad2 using iMovie, a built-in template and built-in music. The final video was saved as a 1080 HD video, then uploaded to YouTube directly from the iPad (which takes a lot longer than from a desktop computer, BTW).
This is one of those rare crossposts with AmeriNZ Blog, something I forgot to share here, too.
This episode has been so very long delayed! I was busy with a lot of little things, and I still am, so this episode isn’t edited. I start with what I did right after my previous episode, then I talk about some more things I was doing, including one that was emotionally challenging. I also did something I was able to do because apparently I’m now officially old. Or, something like that..
