Bengfort.com

Well, as you can see above, I have just posted my first ever attempt at a video blog or “vlog”. It’s not great… Pretty much, I look stupid on camera, and I can see why no one takes me seriously, I kind of feel like a buffoon! Most of the vlog is pretty self-explanatory, but I just wanted to share a few comments here below, for those of you that are still interested after 8 minutes! (Only a unique few who have to love me, I’m sure…)

So first off, for those of you who may be on a ship or have a poor internet connection, I’ll get a transcript posted when I see how good YouTube’s machine transcription is. I’m not sure if I’ll add that to the end of this post, as an attachment, or as a separate post. If you have thoughts, let me know in the comments.

Next… I hate Windows Live Movie Maker. This is the software I used to edit the video, and as you can see it did a bad job. What I saw in my little preview video before publishing is not what the final video turned out to be. There were some awkward cuts, etc. I think you know where they were. I originally downloaded it because I thought it could capture from my webcam directly… turns out that was Windows Movie Maker (nee “live”), and the new version no longer does that (just because you’re free, doesn’t mean you should be cheap!).

Then I had some problems after I uploaded it to YouTube, because YouTube tries to re-encode the video. I tried again, and cut it with Adobe Media Encoder to a better format. Still it doesn’t look great on YouTube, so obviously I have some lessons to learn. Unfortunately with a 15 minute encoding time, both from Windows Live Movie Maker and Adobe Media Encoder for an 8 minute video… I’ll pass on doing it again. Lessons learned for next time, right?

So this was my adventure: what I thought would be an hour or two tossing up a video onto the blog turned into 7 hours (1pm to 8pm); seriously I have 200% more respect for vloggers now!