Right before JoCo Cruise 2020, I bought a 256GB SD card, just as a treat, so I wouldn’t have to worry about switching between 64GB cards and offloading videos to my Mac when recording as many events as possible. I discovered too late that my camera (a Nikon P7700) was too old to support 256GB cards, and when I got home from the cruise we were in lockdown, so I couldn’t return the card. This ultimately led to my buying a new camera (a Sony ZV-1) in late 2021 which would support the card, and I am very happy with this application of the sunk cost fallacy.
I planned to test out the camera at a Burning Hell show in Vienna (which would have been my first in-person concert since the cruise), but Austria went back into lockdown, so instead, I recorded myself talking about how I got to work at CERN, as a sequel to That time Steve Wozniak bought me a laptop and That time Steve Wozniak taught me to Segway and then played Tetris and pranks through a concert. I recorded 36 minutes continuously, in 4K, and I ran out of things to say before the camera had to stop for any reason. My old camera would have to stop after less than 30 minutes recording in 1080p, due to the 4GB file size limit, so I’ll call that a success.
Whether my 36 minutes of talking about my route to CERN is worth watching is up to you to decide:
The video is fully closed-captioned by me, a human, so if you prefer skimming text to watching videos, click the … symbol (at the end of the line below the title) and choose Open Transcript.
The Burning Hell are making another attempt at a Vienna show in September, so here’s hoping I can run that original experimental design.
I’ve since been on JoCo Cruise 2022, and found the camera much less stress than my old one for recording concerts. I not only don’t need to change the card as often, I’m also not limited to 4GB files, or by the battery capacity, since it can use an external battery pack. So I’ve recorded most events continuously. The new camera also shows me what it’s focussing on, and I can change that using the touch screen, so from what I’ve seen so far, I haven’t had any incidents of an entire video being out of focus.
The only issue I had with the new camera is that if I start recording video immediately after turning it on, it doesn’t show it’s recording for another second or so, so I’d often press the button again and inadvertently stop recording in my attempt to start recording. In most cases I realised what had happened immediately and start recording again, but in one case I didn’t notice for a while and missed the introduction of a performer.
I used to do most of my lightweight cruise video editing in QuickTime Player, but for whatever reason its ‘Split Clip’ option is disabled for the videos from my new camera, so I’m trying out LosslessCut. It has a few issues, but I’ve found workarounds for them. One great thing about it is when I cut a show into individual parts, it can not only export those parts as individual videos, but also give me a list of times for those parts. I can paste them into the YouTube description of the full video so that they show up as chapters.
With the help of to that feature, I’m uploading most of them as full shows with chapter markers, and putting them into a playlist of the whole cruise as I do so. I’m also splitting shows into individual songs/stories/questions when relevant, and uploading those as separate videos, so I can add the individual pieces to other relevant playlists. Look in the description of any of the full-show videos to find a link to a playlist of the individual parts of the show. It will take a while to get everything processed and uploaded, so subscribe or check back later to see more.
Another thing I did (and recorded some video of) during that trip was marry Joey Marianer, but that can have its own blog post later. If you’re impatient, you can check out the Joey-Angela Merger playlist.
Creative Output 