Tag Archives: vlog

Up North and Down South

Campervan in the early morning, with Lindisfarne behind.

Back in late February, while Rose was away, Tilly (may she rest in peace) and I departed on one of our campervan trips. As is often the case when I’m doing these out-of-season jaunts, I set off not really knowing where I would end up, my itinerary being driven partly by the weather forecast, and partly just by a desire to see places I’d heard of but never visited before.

It ended up being a tour mostly of north-east England and south-west Scotland, and I captured rather a lot of video footage over the two-week trip, which I’ve finally managed to edit into something watchable! Watchable for me, anyway: I do this mostly to give me a chance to relive the experience many times over, and I also make the videos available just in case they’re also of interest to others.

Dalcairney Falls

The first part of that certainly works very well: the long reviewing and editing process means I have detailed memories of several of my past trips where there would otherwise be just a vague, hazy recollection. (It also means that the videos are rather longer than if I were making them for someone else!)

But as for the second part — will others watch them too? — well, I appreciate that there are many people, probably most people, for whom the idea of watching extended video footage of other people’s holidays may be a bizarre concept, but there are also a surprising number who do get enjoyment from this kind of thing… especially other campervan & motorhome owners who might be looking for places to visit or stay on their travels.

Over the years I have built up an extensive set of custom lists on Google Maps with titles like ‘Want to go‘ and ‘Overnight stop?‘, which have proved very handy when planning any kind of trip, and many of the little markers they contain have come from watching others’ videos and thinking, “Oooh. That looks rather good…Let me just mark that…”.

Anyway, I’ve now uploaded the first few episodes to a YouTube playlist called Up North & Down South, and the remainder will follow over the next couple of days, in the hope that, as someone once said, “people who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like”.

First episode here.

Experimenting with a Sony ZV-1 while walking around Barrington

I’ve been experimenting with a Sony ZV-1. This is a compact yet very capable camera, and if I wanted to purchase something explicitly for vlogging, this might well be it. Assuming I wanted to spend 700 quid in the process, of course.

Yesterday, I took it with me while walking the dog, and was really quite impressed. In the process, I produced a video which talks too much about a particular bit of Cambridgeshire for those who are interested in cameras, and too much about cameras for those primarily interested in walks in Cambridgeshire.

I fear the overlapping set in this Venn diagram may be rather small, but it was for my own interest more than anyone else’s; I’ll just put it here just in case there should turn out to be anyone else in that small and exclusive club of South Cambs Vlogging Dog Walkers…

(Most of the audio is recorded using an Instamic)

One man and his vlog

Yesterday I realised I was looking particularly suave and debonair, so decided it would be the right time to point a camera at myself. Mmm…

If you want to try using a decent digital camera for videoconferencing, you normally either need:

  • something which will capture an HDMI output signal from your camera and feed it into your computer over USB, like the Elgato Cam Link,

  • or you need some software which can capture the live preview output and make it available to your operating system as if it were a locally-connected camera. On the Mac, I do this with a combination of Camera Live – which makes it avaliable as a ‘Syphon’ server – and CamTwist, which can take a variety of inputs, including Syphon, and blend them into a ‘virtual camera’ output. There are various tutorials online on how to do this. OBS is a similar popular app, but doesn’t yet support virtual camera output on the Mac.

  • Finally, for some versions of some Mac apps, you may need to remove the app’s signature (which identifies it with a certain set of permissions), to enable it to see virtual cameras as well as physical ones. At the time of writing, Zoom needs:

$ codesign --remove-signature /Applications/zoom.us.app/

P.S. Sadly, various other people have used the phrase ‘One man and his vlog’, so I can’t pinch it on any kind of long-term basis 🙂

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser