preliminary Editing on the road.

D7K wrote on 6/8/2019, 10:46 AM

I've never edited when I've been on the road. The opportunity to acquire a smallish travel trailer and opening up at least 5 states to wildlife videos has come about. I was doing stock wildlife videos and then not wanting to tent or car camp stopped me from enjoying it.

My question is this, I have a current laptop with a 500 Gig SSD, it's a fast i5 with 8 gig of ram. What I would want to do is use Vegas to break my shoots up into scenes - no hard core editing. I also have external drives I could take or even use some of my fast 128 Gig cards to work on. I shoot 4k on three Panasonic cameras.

When I got home all I'd have to do is hook the external drive up and I would be off and running for both stock and a wildlife video site.

I will try it of course, but does this sound like a reasonable work flow or will this drive me crazy?

Comments

john-brown wrote on 6/8/2019, 11:27 AM

Five years ago, we needed a new tent, but my wife decided that I was getting too old for tenting and that we should get a tent trailer instead - best of both worlds. I love it!

I do exactly what you are saying. I bring my camera gear, Surface Pro, a 2 TB WD My Passport external drive, some USB memory cards, and a portable Iriscan Book scanner. I dump video and audio onto the external drive, copy to memory cards (always have a backup) and start projects, doing rough cuts, etc. Most importantly, doing this allows me to see what I missed and I can usually go back and record it before leaving. Don't forget the audio part; you may want to go back and record sounds that didn't turn out well with the video recordings.

I bring the scanner because I have run into situations where there are documents that I can't keep but can scan. Last year, for example, a park had a brochure with information about the trails that we did. They only had 1 copy. Again, doing this helps see what information is missing.

Just don't spend too much time editing and not enjoying camping. And, there are sometimes rainy days for editing.

Get the trailer, go camping, make videos!

D7K wrote on 6/8/2019, 12:26 PM

I'd only be doing this at night. Sounds like you find it a good work flow.

Marco. wrote on 6/9/2019, 4:49 AM

The workflow you intend to use is fine, this should work. The bottleneck, especially for editing 4k video, is using a notebook without external power supply. Running it from the battery will heavily slow down your CPU.

D7K wrote on 6/9/2019, 8:09 AM

Sometimes I would be in camping parks that do have AC power. I currently only use the laptop for astro photography, but I seem to remember on this laptop I can actually set the speed at which it runs (was a high end Laptop once upon a time🙁)

Musicvid wrote on 6/9/2019, 12:54 PM

But don't use a common inverter to supply 120vac to your laptop charger. The dirty AC cannot be filtered adequately to prevent spikes and spurious RF from getting to your laptop, which in some extreme cases could wreck it.

I do think your plan is sound, however. May be not needed to use something as powerful as Vegas to do location and rough cuts.

D7K wrote on 6/9/2019, 2:43 PM

Since I have it and can have it on 2 machines it keeps the costs down. But yep a filter would be good, but I also have 3 spare batteries (astro imaging can be a battery eater).