2023-12-25. Merry Christmas. Today is my 13th day in Napili. I’ve made time every day to write something and edit my travel images. It’s funny that I’ve felt the need to make sure that I post in my Day One journaling app, stuff that doesn’t always make it to my online posts. As of this post I have a 71 day streak of posts in the Day One app. Alas, all of the writing has been about the trip and blog and I haven’t made any effort to do the longer form writing that I was wanting to do before the trip. I don’t know that that will change for the last five days of the trip. I’m okay with that.

As mentioned, I’ve made an effort to edit and post images as quickly as possible. Over the course of the trip I was tracking about two days behind from when images were taken and when they were posted. But by Friday I caught up and got all of the images and videos from the trip posted. Then on Saturday we went to Haleakala National Park, which took up the whole day and I shot over 180 images and videos and brought out my Sony A7C full-frame mirrorless camera. I worked on editing the images most of yesterday and decided to put together a video from all of the videos I shot on the drive up the mountain, but I still need to finish editing the images taken at the top of the mountain and write up the story. I might be able to post Saturday’s images/videos by the end of today, Monday, more likely tomorrow, Tuesday. 

One of the questions about this trip was whether I’d be able to keep up with what I wanted to do even though I’m limited to my iPhone, iPad and Sony camera and no laptop. As far as shooting, editing and posting images quickly, I feel comfortable with my setup. Some things would be easier with multiple monitors and a setup with a real file system, but it works. I’m not shooting as much as I did on my 2017 summer cross country trip or on any NASA launch experience, but it works. 

When I attended the launch of the Orion capsule in 2014 I remember seeing other attendees quickly pulling out their laptops whenever there was a break in the action to upload and edit their images and videos. I’m sure they had their work posted before the end of each day. I posted an edited video from just the launch last August, nine years after the event, but still haven’t posted most of the images or video from the three days I spent at Kennedy Space Center. So, I’m getting better but there is a lot of room for improvement.  

On this trip I’ve been posting the short videos unedited to YouTube, but I felt the need to pull all the clips taken on drive up the mountain on Saturday into a single movie and I used iMovie on iPad to edit the video. I’m not really happy with iMovie on iPad. It was good for assembling the clips and adding stills but the options for adding titles is pathetic. There’s no template for creating traditional credits or even for creating lower-thirds. That’s kind of missing some basic video editing requirements. Before this vacation, I hadn’t posted any edited videos because I was hoping to transition from iMovie on my Macs to Final Cut Pro but that didn’t happen. That’s still the plan on the Mac when I get back from this vacation, but I’m really disappointed with iMovie on iPad. Here’s a link to the iMovie on iPad version of the video. (I’m providing the link because it looks like I can’t embed the YouTube version on to my blog and even after reducing the video to a 540 resolution version, I’m having issues uploading it to my WordPress site. Ugh).

I know that there are other options for the iPad, like Divinci Resolve and LumaFusion. But I’m using an older 2020 pre-M-chip iPad so I don’t know if my iPad has the horsepower for those other programs and I know Final Cut won’t run on my iPad. So video editing on my iPad isn’t great, I can assemble clips but it might be better to just drop a bunch of images and videos into an album let the AI built in the Photos app put the video together. There’s an idea… 

With that in mind, after my experience trying to edit video on my iPad with iMovie I created another version of the video by dropping stills and video clips into a Photos.app album and then clicking the “Play Video memory” option. It shorten the seven minutes of clips to just over one minute and added its own background music. I like it. Here’s the Photos.app AI version of the video:

I went back to iMovie to try to drop out the background audio of one of the clips from my iMovie version because the incidental music playing, Pressure by Queen/David Bowie, got flagged for copyright violation on YouTube. Alas, iMovie on iPad would not let me drop in music unless the track ran from the beginning of the movie all the way to the end (eliminating all of the other incidental music). I could drop in a silent track to pad where my music popped up, but nah, just gonna let the flagged video version remain as an example of a video editing product being too limited. Ack, indeed.

I wrote about this before, and I know that I don’t have to do anything right now, but when I think about what I want to do next as far as my tech, for doing work around town, I’m interested in getting an iPad mini to be my digital reporter’s notebook, etc. It would be something that I can stick in my cargo-pants pockets (actually 5.1.1. Tactical pants) for extreme portability with full digital access. I can get a small Bluetooth keyboard for doing any extended writing. But if the future involves more travel where I’m away from my home, it might be more important for me to get something like a MacBook Air (14-inch) which is powerful enough to do Final Cut Pro (and the other video editing options) and anything that I would do on my desktop. In that scenario I’d see about recycling/selling my 27” iMac and then when at home the MacBook Air would be the second computer in my high top/dining table. It all depends on whether I’m anticipating more around town work/writing or more travel writing. It would probably help if I could find a way to generate income/revenue with my writing. Right. Back to work.