The big move - 8/9/20

It has been a busy few weeks. Finally starting to settle down and ease back into the routines.

Leading up to the move was a lot of work. Deciding what we actually needed and didn’t. There were many a trip to donate things we just didn’t have a use for anymore. Or it would be easier to replace once we got here. And in the end there was stuff that just wouldn’t fit on the truck. It was absolutely crammed full to bursting.

Here’s some images of almost everything we own packed up ready to move. About a half hour before we went to get the moving truck.

I originally had scheduled movers for the following day and planned to just let them do most everything. But weather didn’t look like it would be on my side there. It was calling for thunderstorms all day Wednesday and Thursday. So I sucked it up and did what I said I would never do again and moved my own stuff. I’ve moved myself more than enough times, with a buddy or family usually. But I got it done. It was several hours of hot sweating sticky labor.

After 3 hours we had it majority done and it was time for a break and some lunch. Then the washer and dryer and some odds and ends to finish out the day. Besides taking some breaks it was an all day event. Towards the back half it was just cleaning. Cleaning the old apartment to make it look brand new again.

Following morning was still more work. Truck had to finish being packed and the realization that not everything was going to fit. So close though. I rented a 16 foot truck because I thought that would be enough, and I really didn’t want the next size up of a 26 foot truck. I think we would have had a lot more damaged with an extra 10 feet. I packed the 16’ to the ceiling and on the unload the movers complimented me asking if I had professionals done it. I’m happy to report nothing was damaged in the move.

So, truck packed. Noon on Thursday the 30th of July and we hit the road. Thankfully the weather didn’t get as bad as it was predicted until after we left. We did drive through thunderstorms leaving the state.

That truck SUCKED. I don’t have a ton of experience, but I’ve driven a truck every time I’ve moved. 12 times by my count. This truck was by far the worst driving experience. And it was pretty new, only 15k miles on it. It felt so wide I thought I was going to run into everyone passing me. I felt every bump in the road like there wasn’t suspension at all. I constantly was picking stuff up that was falling and flying all over the cab. Keeping my phone upright in the dash mount was a constant challenge. Which really isn’t what you want when you’re using it for directions.

Another gripe may have been my fault which I accept the blame for. I don’t know for sure but I suspect that by packing everything on the left side and leaving the right side for the furniture threw off the balance. Which means that every little gust of wind or a tractor trailer passing by blew me all over the road. It was going to be a long trip because I could never get comfortable driving. You know how you get used to being in a vehicle going highway speeds and you relax and just kind of go on autopilot. That never happened. It was a constant fight with the steering wheel. I had serious hand cramps every night we stopped and I feared it would lead to carpel tunnel flaring up again.

It did get easier as I got used to it on the less busy highways, but starting out in Atlanta was not fun. So glad to be away from that traffic.

Plan was to do the trip over 3 days. Roughly 500 miles a day. First day was heading to St Louis, MI. But actually just outside of it because neither of us wanted to be in a big city. So a hotel in Caseyville, IL.

The trip was thankfully fairly uneventful overall. I will say Kentucky had the worst roads by far. That was one where I was pretty much yelling in pain or fear while driving. It doesn’t help that the major highway was closed down to one lane in each direction that was separated by a concrete barrier with barely enough room for this big wide truck. That went on for a good 20-30 minutes of me running off the right side of the road because it felt way too close on the left side with cars coming from the opposite direction. Sorry for anybody who got stuck behind me as I did well under the construction speed limit because I straight couldn’t make myself go any faster for fear of hitting something or running off the road.

But that was by far the worst point of the trip. Roads all over are not great but seriously in Kentucky. Potholes so big I thought I would get my tire stuck. I was bouncing all over that truck cab.

We arrived at the hotel late that night, ready to hit a shower and pass out. For the ease of the trip and finding food I gave up on a meatless diet as I had been doing for months and we pretty much ate fast food the entire time. Oh also we had a very grumpy kitty who hated being in the harness, hated being in the crate but did okay just sitting atop some pillows for the drive.

Quick picture of the first hotel room with a nervous cat who did not like the smells of the new place.

Day two of driving was getting easier at least. It was supposed to be the shortest day so we took our time getting out in the morning. First picked up cracker barrel for breakfast and brought it back to the hotel room. Oh also I should mention, for looking back at this in the future, this entire trip is during a full blown pandemic. We had masks in two separate zip loc bags for clean and used when we had to be around people. Like stopping at rest areas or the hotels. Brought a bar of soap and hand sanitizer with us everywhere. It would have been a challenge enough just to move across the country during a time where there wasn’t a virus killing thousands a day.

Day two was from Caseyville, Illinois to Lincoln, Nebraska. Shorter because it would be just under the 500 miles. Making the next day longer and further but it was easier finding a hotel in a city like Lincoln.

I would have loved to been able to take pictures of anything during the trip, but like I mentioned it was entirely unsafe in that truck. I was actively driving the entire time. We stopped to eat because I straight up couldn’t do it while driving. Plus that’s dangerous anyway so better to be safe.

So I can tell you day two and three were brought to you by CORN. Cornfields as far as the eye could see. We saw a little bit on the first day, even stopped right next to a field when getting gas.

I will say, the coolest thing about the trip on day two was driving past a HUGE John Deere tractor pulling a massive water tank. Even with them all the way over to the right off the road they still came onto the highway and took up most of the right lane. Thankfully no one was around by this point and it was easy to just move over to the left and pass. I did not expect the tires on that thing to be BIGGER THAN THE CAB OF THE TRUCK. It was MASSIVE. Really cool to see that. While we were driving I thought a lot about the cornfields and the farmers that work them. I would love to learn more about that lifestyle.

The hotel in Lincoln was much nicer. As was Lincoln in general. Turns out I have some extended family there who just moved within the last 6 months or so. It seemed really nice when we were driving through. Everything was nice and spaced out but they still had every store I could think of. It reminded me of the small metro Atlanta town I grew up in back 20+ years ago before the population exploded.

It had some really nice artwork on the wall too.

Onward to day 3.

The longest day of driving was ahead of us. We hit the road just before 6am. Needed to do almost 600 miles on the last day. This was the longest but easiest day of driving though. Out here there are a lot less people. And the laws are actually followed. Left lane is just for passing. No one is riding bumpers or cutting each other off. Mostly 18 wheeled trucks. By this point it was more cruise control and just pass anyone going slower. Which wasn’t much considering the speed limit was up to 75 and soon to be 80 but I couldn’t get the truck above 70. Literally it had a governor cap keeping it at 75 max and cruise control at 70.

About 2 hours outside of Lincoln we stopped for gas.

Look at how flat it is.

Now up until Lincoln it was all normal highways to me. Gas at pretty much every exit, rest areas. Typical for the road trips I had been on. Once you get past that though, it turns into nothing. Literally nothing. I started paying attention to the gas tank and guessing about how many miles I was getting to see if I could make it to the next station. I was filling up more often because what could ruin a move across the country worse than running out of gas.

We stopped in a tiny little town with a population of a couple hundred. Found one gas station was closed and had to keep going. Eventually we did find one that had two pumps, which I want to say was a step above where you would have to pull a cord to start the motor. It wasn’t quite that bad but it was incredibly loud and slow pumping gas.

We also grabbed a slice of pizza to go which wasn’t bad.

As we were resting, eating pizza and letting the cat use the litterbox (since we had already had one accident in the crate we were making it a point to stop and give her time for a little stress pee)

I spotted this cool run down train… thing. There were railroad tracks around and you can see a yellow car (caboose?) in the background. But there was just this pile of old rusted machinery.

So back on the road and headed towards Wyoming.

This place was empty, so I did manage to take some pictures of the scenery with my phone from the dash mount.

Now it was towards this point in the trip where the stress really started setting in. I believe when I had started the trip it had mapped us going along I-80 to Cheyenne and then up to Casper. But I’m guessing there was traffic or an accident or something when we left Lincoln that morning and it redirected us around Cheyenne by using some completely empty dead highways. There were farms and probably thousands of acres of farmland. And it was like that for hours.

During which time I lost cell signal because of course I did. Why would there be service out where there are no people. Also why would there be gas stations? I got to wondering about how the farmers there get and have gas for their farm equipment and their cars when going to a gas station would be so very far away. I have to assume they have their own tanks they get filled up and then pump themselves. They also probably live off the land a lot more since a trip to a grocery store must be hours.

So for a stretch of about an hour I turned off the AC and rolled a window down a bit and just sweated it out to try and save as much gas as possible. I was looking at how many miles were left and knew I wouldn’t make it if there wasn’t another gas station. But thankfully it didn’t come to that. It wasn’t a great time there for me mentally trying to organize how we would deal with a truck out of gas. I guess just leave it and take the car to cell service again where I would hire a gas truck? Is that even a thing? Surely that happens considering the stretch of land. A couple gallons in a little container wasn’t going to do much for that big truck.

Eventually we got back to service and I looked up gas in the upcoming town of Chugwater. Which no, I didn’t see anything open. But we were back at a full interstate. I-25 which was taking us the rest of the way. I think I tried getting off two exits on I-25 hoping there would be gas and getting right back on because nope. Just an exit with nothing around or any signs.

But by that point with the internet back I saw plenty of civilization in the upcoming town of Wheatland. Signs for a taco fast food place, I knew it would be fine and there would be gas so the AC went back on and I relaxed a bit.

Then it was smooth sailing on to the city of Casper Wyoming. Where we promptly got a mattress out of the truck and passed the fuck out.

Followed by movers the next morning, and unpacking for about a week. Which brings me to now. But this has been long enough and I do have some cool pictures to share of the landscape around us.

Onward towards adventure! 7/12/2020

Well, change happens quick as it turns out. And this will easily be the biggest change I’ve gone through.

Since I turned 18 I have moved my living situation… 10 times in the last 11 years. Not quite every year because I haven’t moved in the last 5 years. So 10 times in 6 years. That’s a lot.

But it’s time for another move, and this one is big. We’re leaving the heavily populated metro Atlanta area for the barely populated Wyoming. A move I am quite looking forward to being done. We found out this past Wednesday with a same day interview and job offer for my significant other. And since I’m remote, I can work from anywhere with a good internet connection. Which I made sure this place had.

So, towards the end of the month we’ll be hitting the road. Headed towards new adventures.

There will be a significant change that we’ll need to adjust to. I’ve started reading up and talking to people about what it’s like there. I hear very windy, and very cold. I’ll be getting a 4 wheel drive with snow tires before winter that’s for sure. And winter survival kits to keep in each of our cars.

We’ll probably spend a good bit on much better winter clothes. I’ve heard about how it’s usual there to bring a change with you for when you get in out of the snow.

Now our situation will be a little easier thankfully, since I only go out for wildlife and my girlfriend will have a short drive to their work and back. On major highways. Which I assume they are a lot more prepared than say Atlanta. We’ll still be inside a city, probably the closest to a downtown that I’ve ever been. But I expect things are a lot quieter and easier. Hopefully anyway.

I probably won’t have much to update here for the rest of this month. As I’ve already begun packing and all my photography gear was some of the first to go. It requires the most care to be packed up and it was the most readily available.

But I will return in August with, I’m sure, tons of new pictures and videos. I’ve already begun scoping out new nature viewing places to go to. Been reading about an annual Elk migration that happens there.

In the meantime, I uploaded all the videos I created over the last few months. Check them out here.

My Youtube Channel

Onward and upwards, here we go.

Post Production - June - July 2020

Woo boy. This is the big one. Despite the troubles I talked about in the last two posts, like formatting the SSD for Mac losing an entire day of shot footage. Or a monitor dying after only 2 or 3 trips out. Editing is where I really ran into troubles.

First, the “gaming” laptop I bought a few years ago is just flat out not powerful enough to handle what I was trying to do. I thought 16GB of RAM would be fine. It’s the most I’ve ever had in a computer before. Also don’t have a total crap graphics card. I think a 1060.

Not gonna cut it, as it turns out. So after I find out what the future holds and money gets set aside I will be buying and building an editing pc. Already been picking out parts and pricing online for a bit.

I did get one thing for editing, thanks to money from friends for a birthday that just passed, a fast drive for editing. Yeah the laptop has a built in SSD but that’s only 500 gigs. And as it turns out, processing 6k raw footage takes a lot of room.

So I picked up a terabyte of NVME SSD, with an enclosure and a nice USB-C cable. It’s better than nothing.

I already have an old external HDD that used to be storage for one of the xboxs. Now it’s the drive I put the raw files on. The NVME gets used for cached clips, and then I tried and tried to avoid using it because I knew it would be the slowest point of contact. But in the end I had to put a major amount of files onto the NAS server I purchased last year. Mostly to use as backup only for all my photography and general files I’ve saved over the years.

So to sum up, 500 gigs SSD inside laptop runs my OS and editing software.

2TB HDD holds the raw files that I decided to use.

12TB NAS holds all the backups and project files

1TB NVME SSD is nice and fast for the cached clips.

Cached clips are what you make when you need to actually edit the videos. I learned a hell of a lot over the last month, which I’ll try to condense some here.

I did have experience with Premiere Pro before going into this, but since the camera came with an amazing piece of software that would be far better for using the raw footage I was shooting there wasn’t even a question. And I’m so glad I didn’t even try anything else. Davinci Resolve has been both great and awful. Just like any other editing software I’ve ever used.

So to actually get my computer to scrub through 6k, 4k and 2k footage you have to optimize the media. Which is a simple process as far as grabbing all the clips and hitting optimize. Then it just takes, overnight. Not even joking it was probably a good 10 hour process. Pretty much every step of editing took a while.

I made a spreadsheet of all the footage I captured that I liked, more than half of it didn’t make the cut for one reason or another. Shakey camera, bad movements. Boring. Missed focus. The list goes on. So before it even got loaded into the editor I was watching all the footage and cutting. Usually the same or next day after shooting. My weekends had a pretty solid 50% dedicated to video production of some form or another over the last month.

Overall it was a hundred clips that had good stuff I liked. Then I was also going out and shooting some b-roll separately. Just clips of the general nature and surroundings for transitions. I had grand ideas of making one long video telling a story about these wetlands I was visiting and all the creatures that depend on it. Didn’t really expect to do voiceover from the beginning, that would just be a whole other process. Writing a script, doing research so I know what the hell I’m talking about. Maybe one day.

In a real movie studio each one of the steps I was taking would probably be one, or more persons jobs. I know for a fact you get someone who just does color grading. A colorist I read online. Well I can’t afford to do that obviously. So each step I took was just me figuring it out.

So, media into Davinci Resolve. Optimize and come back the next day. Start sorting all the clips by tagging them with colors for each animal. I was grouping them all so it would be cohesive with all the shots of the same animal together.

Let me tell you how many times I googled “Davinci Resolve…” and then whatever it was I needed to do. I can’t. Because it’s probably thousands of times. It was fairly constant, but that’s how I’ve learned anything. Photoshop, lightroom, premeire, after effects. Etc. If I don’t know how to do something, the hardest part is figuring out how to describe it into google so I can find someone who has already dealt with and is sharing the answer. The knowledge I have is 99% from just watching and learning from others on the internet.

After I got the clips trimmed down I started assembling them onto a timeline. Picking out which clips should go in which order, try to put ones where the background is similar so it looks more natural. The goal is to make it seem like all the footage was captured at the same place at the same time. Which is obviously not true as I said it took about a month and a half of shooting each weekend. But that’s even more taken care of in another step coming soon.

Clips trimmed, assembled and on separate timelines. Moving them all together for one big timeline and do transitions. You know, how to edit them together. Does it fade to black here? What if I do a built in FX transition. Some of them are fun, though I try to limit because they can often be distracting and over the top.

Finally I cobbled together what I thought would be a halfway decent video. B-roll to set the scene, all the clips from one animal and some more b-roll to break up between the different ones. About 24 minutes of footage in all.

Now the fun part, color grading. Similar to what I wind up doing in Lightroom in a sense. But way different process. Davinci Resolve has some great videos on their Youtube channel teaching you how to do this. And I obviously gobbled those up. I know some basics and that would be enough for what I was doing. I know there is so much more I can learn and do for the future but I had to limit myself to starting out small and just working alongside these videos. I learn better by doing anyway.

It was about two solid days of just color grading. Probably that alone took 15 or 20 hours. And I’m somewhat proud of what came out of it. I know there is so much better I could do, given the time and honestly a proper computer. But I was antsy to get it finished. Plus there’s only so much I could do with the footage I had. It wasn’t the best, I had to really crank the ISO in order to work with the light I had out in the field. It was cloudy a lot of the days I went out shooting. But I worked with what I had. I knew I could put noise reducing on annnnnd…

It broke my computer. Noise reduction as it turns out is the single most demanding process in editing. And it requires some real computing muscle to get it done. I am all too familiar with it in lightroom for a single image. And although some people have a taste for the grain reminding them of the old film days. Me, not so much. I want crisp clean footage.

I will say that one of the really nice things about the camera I went with, was the dual ISO thing. Which basically means I can more or less change it in post. I often was shooting at some really high 2000+ ISO. Even 3200. Not that I wanted to, but you have to figure it’s all a balance. As I mentioned in the last post I was shooting these animals from across a huge distance of several hundred feet. I literally couldn’t get closer without getting in the water. So I had to close that aperture to the smallest little pinpoint in order to actually be able to focus. Which means I need as much light as possible. Now I opened the shutter angle up as far as it would go, which isn’t great but that’s kind of the tradeoff. And the only thing left in order to get a usable image is that ISO and the grain that comes along with it.

As I mentioned the camera shoots in raw, and their software is awesome to be able to adjust some stuff like white balance and ISO in post. I would drop it as low as it could go and then adjust the image from there. Trying to reduce as much of the grain as I could. Then I would render out the whole video and do noise reduction separately to make the image actually viewable without killing me. (Not ideal but it was the best I knew how to do)

Only that didn’t happen. I set it to render and the computer laughed at me. I think it coughed and wheezed out some dust when I attempted that. A 24 minute video in 4k? At 50 frames per second? HA. The estimated render time was a week. A whole fucking week.

I spent several days trying anything I could, much to my frustration. Even dropping the quality down to 720p at one point just so I could watch it back and see how it looked.

In the end, through a lot of headache and failed attempts it just wasn’t going to work. So I scrapped the idea of one long video and decided to just cut it up into short videos of each animal. Those I could actually handle the render time, and the storage space.

So over the last few days that’s what I’ve been doing. Recutting the video down to just the individual shots and putting a bit of music to them. For a minute there I figured 4k was out and was just trying to work in 1080. But trimming down the length helped a lot.

In the end I have 4 videos ready to go. First one is already uploaded and going live in a few hours on Youtube. I scheduled it so I would have time to look it over after Youtube was done compressing the crap out of it. Hopefully it still looks halfway like what I can see on the raw files.

And that’s been the project I’ve been working on for a while now. It’ll come out as small clips kind of as a proof of concept. Can’t lie, I’m hoping to grow a bit of an audience and maybe if I’m lucky someone will see the effort that went into it and I’ll gain a patreon subscriber. I figured you have to start somewhere and I can only go up from here.

I’m not sure what the future will hold. This past weekend was 4th of July so I stayed the fuck home. I really wanted to go out just on Friday morning and just do a nature walk with a some stills photography. But then the Covid-19 cases jumped to over 50k new ones in a day and I thought “nah.” Oh and they’re still doing that, not just one day but many. As I checked this morning Georgia crossed 100k positive cases in the state. Not great. Even though I go out with a mask you know what is even more effective? Staying home.

There is a chance we’ll be leaving the state. Not to get hopes up, just to kind of mark the day. Girlfriend has a job interview for out of state. I would be absolutely thrilled to move somewhere with a much less dense population. More on that as it unfolds. Or not, if she doesn’t get it we stay right here. The money we decided was for a move becomes new editing PC money :)