My First YouTube Video

I have spent the past couple of months putting together my first YouTube video. It is not nearly as easy as throwing together a blog post and so I don't plan on doing very many of them. I did learn a lot about the process though and that is why I put together this one.

While I enjoy spending time in front of my computer, I much prefer spending time outside. I wanted to start putting together some videos about our National Parks. Then I discovered that you need to have an expensive permit if you plan to record video for anything other than your personal use. So instead of starting with a National Park, I decided to start with Goblin Valley State Park. Note that there is no such restriction for photographs.

There are a lot of poor quality YouTube videos and I didn't want my video to fall into that same category so I tried to do it right the first time. I created my own script before heading down to the park. That gave me an idea of what video I needed. Then in March I drove to Goblin Valley State Park where I met my son with his wife and puppy. We spent the next day wandering around the park taking pictures and gathering video. I had 3 other people helping me take pictures along with 2 separate video cameras. One is an old camcorder unit while the other is an older action camera. We used the action camera for all of the rappelling shots. I plan to update both video cameras in the future but wanted to use what I had for this experiment.

As I compiled the video and showed early versions to family, I got some very important feedback. While I had a lot of video of the park, most people liked the still camera shots except for the rappelling scene. Video made that part more dramatic.

No video is complete without a soundtrack. I had all of my video edited together and then found a piece of music that I can use for free with attribution to the artist. It is no coincidence that my video is around 7 minutes long and exactly the same length as the music.

The last thing to do was to record the narration soundtrack. Recently I purchased a high-end condenser microphone complete with shock mount and pop guard. Then I locked myself in my bedroom which had the best acoustics in the house for recording my voice. Combining the narration with the music and my edited video didn't take long at all.

As I mentioned, I created the video as a learning experience. I am very interested in feedback. Is the video boring or does it hold your interest? Do you want to visit Goblin Valley State Park now? Please feel free to send me comment as I am looking to improve for my next video.