Monday Mike 2: Happy Holidays

Monday Mike 2

https://open.tube/videos/watch/ef2d6439-ac9c-4aa6-a0ec-103a0703d3a9
The 2nd episode of the Monday Mike vlog.

Hi. I’m Mike and welcome to my vlog. It’s the 23rd of December in 2019, so I want to take a moment and wish you all a Happy Holidays. Today’s the first day of Hanukkah. Winter officially started a few days ago with the Winter Solstice, and Christmas is a few days from now. After that is Boxing Day in some places, and at various places around the world people are celebrating a variety of secular and religious holidays. To all of them and all of you, I say Happy Holidays.

Personally, I like the term Happy Holidays. It’s very all-purpose this time of year. I work with people from all over the world and not all of them are Christian. Because of that, it isn’t always appropriate to say Merry Christmas, but saying Happy Holidays covers a lot of ground. I also like it because a lot of people go on vacation this time of year and I may not see them until after the New Year, so saying Happy holidays is like killing two birds with one stone.

I’m still trying to get the hang of this vlogging stuff. Last week I put out the first Monday Mike vlog and I also put out the first Tech Tip Friday vlog. Putting those out taught me about how long it takes to edit a video, create subtitles, and upload the content, which is another way of saying it’s tedious and takes a lot of time, but it also tells me I need to practice more often and maybe try different editors.

So far I’ve been using Shotcut to edit the videos, but I’ve been finding some of its shortcomings. I mean it’s beta software. I get it. It’s not very full-featured at the moment, and it will probably get better in the future. But on the other hand, I think I could make the videos better if I tried out different editors.

At work, I sometimes help doctors edit surgery videos, and for those I use Adobe Premiere Pro, which is a very mature editor and has tons of features. If I wanted, I could use that to create these videos, but I’m trying to do these videos without using the resources at work and I would never choose to use Adobe products on my own. They’re too fucking expensive and they don’t work on Linux. Even if they worked on Linux, I still wouldn’t use them because of the price. Subscription software is a deal-breaker for me. For the most part, there are great open-source alternatives to most commercial software, and at home I try to use them whenever possible.

At the moment, Shotcut isn’t a great alternative to Adobe Premiere Pro. I mean it’s pretty good, but it’s not great. For some basic film editing, it works great, but maybe it’s more like Apple’s iMovie or Adobe Premiere Elements, rather than Apple’s Final Cut or Adobe Premiere Pro.

I plan on covering video editors in future episode of Tech Tip Friday, but I haven’t decided if I’ll cover Shotcut or something else. I’m on vacation from work for the next two weeks, so I have plenty of time to look at other open source film editors.

Speaking of vacation, it’s kind of funny but I’m getting sick. Last month, when we had a break for Thanksgiving, I got a cold. And now that I’m off work, I’ve got another cold. If that wasn’t enough, I was also sick when I took time off for the holidays last year. It’s almost as if my body’s telling me something, which is strange because you’d think it would like the rest and relaxation that comes with being on vacation. Anyway, I hope I get over it soon because I hate being bedridden when I’m on vacation.

Before signing off for the week’s vlog, I want to talk about all the different accounts I have. My main personal website is gottahavacuppamocha.com. I’ve had that website since 2002 and I love it as much as I love mochas. I’ve been on Twitter for over 11 years, and I don’t plan on quitting it anytime soon. That said, for the past year or so I’ve been over at tech.lgbt which is a medium sized Mastodon instance. I’m on there daily, and probably as often as I’m on Twitter.

My account at Open Tube is fairly new and was created just so I could have a place to upload these videos. Along the same lines, I also have an account at Pixfed.com where I plan on uploading photos I think people might like.

I’m a big believer in separating work accounts from personal accounts and all of the accounts I’ve listed are personal accounts. I have two sets of work accounts. One set is for my day job, which is the one that pays the bills, so to speak, and one I don’t plan on sharing. The other set is for this 10th Street Media/Federama side hustle thing I have going on and I may talk about them from time-to-time. Still I keep those accounts separate because I like to keep them removed from the rest of my personal life. My personal life is cats, and home ownership, gardening, and photography. My professional side hustle life is website administration, tinkering with code, and sharing some of my tech expertise. On a Venn diagram, there would probably be some overlaps, but I try to keep them separate as much as possible.

And on that note, thanks for watching.

The 2nd episode of the Monday Mike vlog. Hi. I’m Mike and welcome to my vlog. It’s the 23rd of December in 2019, so I want to take a moment and wish you all a Happy Holidays. Today’s the first day of Hanukkah. Winter officially started a few days ago with the Winter Solstice, and…

2 Comments

  1. If you’re going to look at video editors, please avoid the mistake most reviews make, which is just looking at how many features reach editor has. In my experience, where the real differences are, is how reliable they are when your project goes beyond a basic few clips, especially regarding audio sync and rendering bugs.

    I’d suggest making a test project that randomly throws a ton of random clips with transitions and compositing together, but has a soundtrack and something simple, that is edited to the beat of the music.

    This should show if the app is going to crash at render time or lose sync.

    Yeah it’s a bit more swirl than just looking in the UI for what features they’ve stuffed in, but these kinds of issues have traditionally been the ones giving medium-advanced users bad experiences with FOSS editors. It would be great to see if anyone is advancing past these and give them props if they are.

    By the way, you might want to consider putting up two lights, 45 degrees to your right and left instead of just one in front of you.

    Anyway cheers and all the best with the vlog series!

    1. Thanks for the comment.

      Those are some pretty good ideas for testing editors. I want to look at video editors in the future, but I still want to find one that does everything I ask of it. Since most editors are pretty complex, it would be impossible to look at all the features in a brief video, but it should be easy to give a brief overview and cover the major pros and cons.

Leave a Reply to lafnlab Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *