I had the grand idea of starting a camping YouTube channel in 2020. I was watching quite a bit of Matthew Posa at the time. I even went camping in Death Valley with a couple GoPros. Over 1TB of recorded video and a failed 2 mile/2000ft incline hike at 8000+ feet later, I got overwhelmed and lost patience. Total views on that channel for the 3 videos I have posted is under 1000. An underwhelming number given that one of them is video of a black bear eating one of my security cameras.

Deciding

It has been just about 2 years since I made that camping trip. I registered a new YouTube channel when I created this site. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it. I wasn’t sure I was going to do anything at all. I decided to dust off the cameras and see what happened.

Months had passed before I actually started filming. Other real-life homeowner stuff was figuratively and literally in the way. Deck refinishing equipment and supplies had the motorcycles blocked in the garage. Once unblocked, they were out on the street to make room for more deck stuff. This deck was consuming all of my time.

Instead of filming, I bought more mounting hardware for the cameras and external mics. I fought the urge to buy a stupid amount of video equipment that I certainly don’t need with my track record of giving up. My camera collection is already too large for someone with next to no portfolio or following.

Getting out there and doing it

I didn’t manage to start recording before the snow fall. Luckily, my elevation was spared. I was able to escape the house on a day off when Mrs. Bald Rider had to work. I hit the road. She wanted me to go to the store to get some bread. She didn’t specify where. It was in the 30s but I still took the bike. There is a grocery store 150 miles from here. Seemed like a reasonable distance.

300 miles and 7 hours later, I returned home with two loaves of bread and two SD cards full of footage. There were a few technical problems on the road. My appreciation for folks who makes this look easy is skyrocketing.

Editing

I had subscribed to Adobe Creative Cloud for my camping adventures. Adobe is too expensive ($55/month? Really?) for the casual hobbyist and I despise the SaaS model. DaVinci Resolve is free. Easy decision. There’s only one problem. You can’t use GPU hardware acceleration without the paid version. I didn’t realize that until I started using it. So it wasn’t free after all. H.265 is stupid difficult to decode and my laptop CPU was a definite bottleneck. I am now fighting the urge to build a new desktop around an Intel 13900k.

As if there was any doubt, I’m not a professional. It took over 10 hours to edit the video. Most (nearly all) of that is because I used a separate audio recorder and syncing wasn’t as easy as I envisioned.

Rendering wasn’t too bad. I tried to use Resolve’s preset YouTube settings but the result was poorer quality than I’d like. The good news is that my laptop’s GPU can peg at 100% for an hour and never get above 70°C. That’s a nice change from my CPU which constantly gets to 100°C. I’ll have to do a review of Davinci Resolve after I’ve made a few more videos.

Publishing & The Future

The end result of my effort was 40 minutes and 33GB. I never had a problem with my download speed. 11Mbps is painfully slow to upload. 6+ hours.

As of the publishing of this article, I have over 20 views. That’s not many. I don’t care. I’ll count it as a win.

Deciding to upload to YT is a lot like starting this website. The decision is the easy part. Keeping the content flowing is something else entirely. Hopefully, when I go back and look at this in a year’s time, I can maintain publishing weekly website content and regular video uploads.

Like with this site, I hope to improve with each upload. I doubt I’ll upload another 4k video. Most people watch videos sitting on a toilet. They don’t need 4k. Unless they are really struggling, they don’t have time to watch a 40 minute video while sitting on the throne, either. That’s how you get hemorrhoids. I’ll try to make future videos shorter.

Here’s the result: