I watch YouTube videos sometimes. I admit it. Actually, I watch them more than sometimes…it’s sort of like crack cocaine to me. And I watch everything. From comedians whose entire body of work seems to exist only on YouTube, to old episodes of Iron Chef (the original, Japanese version of course) to videos about gangsters and prison, to entire Yes concerts. My current favorite however is Jeff Bradshaw’s “Redneck Restoration“. This guy can literally find an old motor that has been sitting in a field (without the vehicle) for the last 15 years and make it run. His videos are rough and primitive. He puts the camera on a tripod and films himself as he cracks the cover off the differential of a 1958 1 ton truck. Then he carries the camera into the auto parts store and records his banter with the employees. Looks simple.
I’m more interested in search engines than auto engines though and all the gurus say that YouTube videos (YouTube is owned by Google) can help a website rank highly in searches. No problem thinks I; “If Jeff Bradshaw can do it, then I can too” So I figure I would record myself putting together the Surly Ogre/Rohloff build then under way. After an hour or so of setting up the camera and lights I’m ready to boggle the minds of the brethren with my mad video skills. I would time lapse the repetitive, dull operations and then slow the video back down to normal speed to highlight some particularly difficult step and to impart my sardonic and incredibly useful revelations.
Guess what? It’s way more difficult than it looks. My video was pretty much unusable. The lighting was bad and the bike blocked the view of whatever I happened to be working on. I even attempted to use two cameras, but that didn’t simply double the exposure of my ineptitude …it became more of an exponential display of incompetence. In fact, after “recording” for some time, I discovered the battery in one of the cameras was dead. And I didn’t even get far enough along to worry about the editing.
Since then we have been lucky to find a young fellow (the Bike Hermit has several pairs of shoes older than he is) to film, edit and post videos for us. Our YouTube channel is called “Bike Touring with Bike Hermit” and we have instructional videos along with product overviews and product un-boxing videos. So please check it out. Leave comments and let us know what sort of things you would like to see covered. Here’s a sample:
