A quick video of our latest trip to Big Bend National Park. Our 1st without the whole family but we had fun regardless.
Saw a black bear up close with some great experiences bundled up in a short trip.
Getting more comfortable with editing, color grading, and chroma key. Have tried all various types of programs and this has been the best without such a steep learning curve.
My favorite on this has been the ability to speed up or slow down video and audio tracks without my family noticing.
Nice. Looks like a great place to explore.
Hi @Neuner
Wow, looks like a great vacations place. The scenery is breathtaking. And the video quality is quite good.
A few notes I took while watching. I enjoyed your video, so please take this as constructive criticism 
I like you BIG titles
I also love the family snapshots at the end. Nice touch.
I noticed shakiness at some moments that I feel you could have corrected with the Stabilize filter. Like this example, at 00:30:
Without stabilization:
Wind noise. At some point, since there is music playing in the background and there is no other sound on the video than that wind noise, you could have simply muted the sound, leaving only the background music. Like here, at around 01:50 for example:
The video ends a bid abruptly. A one or two second audio fade-out on the music would have been nice.
Thanks for sharing!
I’m not a fan of the more modern cinematic ad nauseam video with over-the-top computer music that everyone’s trying to attempt on Youtube. It’s like they’re trying to be on the GoPro channel. They’re all cookie cutter and It gets old quickly as everyone is trying to do it. Way too many unrelated drone shots, etc. We like the hint at the playful, old school 8mm type, and since this is more for our family and not YT likes, it’s what I typically go for. It’s not for everyone.
We had 3 cameras on us, none of which are color or exposure matched on purpose. This also gives the feeling of different perspectives and interpretations.
Most of those clips are muted. The wind noise, foot steps, and rocks are intentional, especially on the vast overlooks, to convey more of the feeling in being there. The rest of my family, who did not go or have never been there, said the wind noise helped provide depth and convey the experience of standing over a cliff.
I also left the shakiness and added some grain / blow-out as its a hint at the early style of street strolling / filming and makes it feel more lively which is also the nature of my family’s personality. Also why the song selection that adjoins it.
We’re also not like others in that we don’t plan out our shots ahead of time. We don’t go on these trips for the video, the video accompanies the trip. The clips aren’t planned, they just happen as we goof around. Again, it’s a different look and feel than the travel over-polished blog nonsense we keep coming across on YT. It ends abruptly because our trips end abruptly. It’s for us, but it’s made public for if there are others that are interested.
This is easy to tell because we just say “Big Bend” for the title even though we only touch on a very small part of it. We don’t start off with an indepth exhausting voice-over explaining every little thing going on about forgettable facts of the area. It’s just us on vacation, simple.
I only post on here to show appreciation for this software as I’ve used quite a few others and this has to be one of the best, especially for the low learning curve. What ever style you desire, can be accomplished with this package.
One thing I really regret is not cleaning the windshield after the rain.
If you want to check out another one of ours with this style and inside jokes, it’s simply titled Durango. We’ve replayed this one at our home way too many times. Great memories for us.
I already saw that video a few monts ago. And a couple of your mountain bike videos.
My intention was not to depreciate your video. If you don’t want or need our opinion about technical aspects of the editing, you should probably mention it in your original post.
Nice video! I would like to visit that area now.
I understand the realistic style you were going for and I like your laid-back editing, as opposed to a polished hype video style. It feels like we as viewers were able to see the area for what it is, rather than what a travel blogger needing a paycheck wanted us to see.
I do have to agree with @MusicalBox about the shakiness though. I was unable to watch the whole video in a single pass on my 75” proofing TV. When the image is that large, shakiness induces headaches (small jitters in particular). It’s fine for phones and small screens, but does not scale to larger screens at all. I realize that’s probably not the market you were going after, so it’s not a criticism, but I did want to provide a different context.
Thanks! Whoa, on a 75" screen? Yes, that would give me a big headache as well. I’ll try and smooth out the shakiness next time as some of my friends and family may have the same experience.
Vacation memories almost feel real when they are played back BIG lol. In that sense, I think any effort towards supporting large-screen playback would pay off tremendously for you and your family.
I went back and reviewed, and something seems off that I hadn’t noticed before. You’re right in that the shakiness is bad but it wasn’t that way while previewing with Shotcut nor when we viewed the exported MP4. I hadn’t watched the Youtube version. I think Youtube might be accentuating the shakiness with it’s encoding?
We watched the MP4 with our family on our 55" and it wasn’t that bad. It was smoother like your stabilized version.
For the 1st export I had a frame rate setting of 23.976 but it made some of the valley scenic shots jittery / shaky. I then exported at 59.94 and it was much better all around. I think both rates were suggested by Shotcut based on the settings of the 3 cameras used. Does Youtube need 60?
I don’t know. I don’t see how, but I’m no expert. And anything is possible.
YouTube supports all common frame rates. My guess is that one of the cameras was shooting in 30 or 60 frames per second. When those clips were placed on the original 24fps timeline, Shotcut had to throw away either 6 or 36 frames per second to get 30/60fps down to 24. Throwing frames away makes the apparent movement of objects from one frame to the “next” seem more pronounced, especially if there is less motion blur to go with it. In particular, 24fps will look extremely jittery unless care is taken with the exposure to get proper-length motion blur trails. This usually involves neutral density filters when recording in bright sunlight.
By any chance, did you edit with proxies or preview scaling turned on? If so, the blurriness of those features may have masked the shakiness.
I honestly don’t know. I’m going to remove it and try and reconfigure it. I’m going to go ahead and apply stabilization regardless.
On the example provided above, what were the settings you used for the stabilization as it doesn’t appear to have zoomed in as much?
I used the default settings
When I first watched your video, I had similar mental reaction… that I could suggest edits or “improvements”… except that I also shoot in this unpolished style and figured you might have the same intention. So I didn’t say anything in that regard. Video editing is a pain sometimes. If you go out often, the time involved in polished editing means 1) you go out less often because you spend all your time editing instead, 2) you are less likely to record your adventures, knowing how much time it means when you get home and have to edit, 3) thinking too much about technology and gear when you are out and about takes away from the actual experience, 4) why spend dozens of hours sitting in front of a computer screen editing a video of an adventure when you could be spending that time out on yet another adventure, etc, etc, etc. All of those and more similar effects are negatives in my mind. I speak from my experience, as those 4+ concerns are serious struggles for me. I go hiking often, and so I try to keep my edits at a minimum and record as close as possible to how I want the videos to appear, with very little editing required. Otherwise I’d go hiking way less often and get sick of editing very quickly. As it is now, even keeping it simple, it takes WAY TOO LONG to edit the videos. I want to record my adventures, but I don’t want to spend hours to get them in an “acceptable” format to post. I’d rather it just happen magically.
I’m not a fan of AI because of what it is already and will further do to humanity… but if I could have my videos and photos be automatically edited better than I can do myself, I’d be tempted to use AI to achieve such a result. Once computers get fast enough to do real-time video editing via AI, it’ll probably make a lot of software kind of obsolete for mainstream normies. And even people who are very particular might enjoy the time savings of an automatic process.
Obviously if you want to grow a huge following on Youtube or make a “career” out of it, editing and stuff might be something to think about. But if you just want to have adventures outside, enjoy time with family, and have a visual record for memory sake, keeping it simple is good… for your mental health
Regarding wind noise, I understand what you mean to have the immersive feel, it can be cool. However, I started using a deadcat. Mainly because my microphone won’t pick up anything I’m saying or any other environmental sounds, if the wind is booming it all out. With a deadcat on, the microphone will still record what your ears hear, like wind howling through the trees, feet shuffling and cracking on branches, but there won’t be that crazy loud rumble that covers everything else.
Maybe if you don’t go out very often, video editing isn’t as burdensome. Like if you just go on a couple family adventures. For me it’s impossible to keep up with the editing because I go out so often. There aren’t enough hours in the day to both go on an adventure and do all the editing and uploading. I’m often weeks - or years - behind because I can’t possibly edit all the videos to get them up the next day before going out again.
Well, bad experience with the stabilization.
Any clip I stabilize, it has bad artifacts after the video is exported. Appears to only be in the shadows or that’s at least where it’s the easiest to see. This is regardless of which camera, which frame rate, which resolution, and how much stabilization is applied.
It has white sparkling dots like a glitter snow globe.
If I don’t stabilize, they go away.
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