I am placing a hold on new videos until this new computer arrives. The goal is for all videos going forward on YouTube will have a 4K option. My issue has been anything beyond 1080p FULL HD bogs down my system and it's impossible to edit. Even the 1080p stuff is so slow that something just had to give.
I've been slogging along on machines that were made for internet surfing, not professional video production. The catalyst was buying a new 4K action camera and deciding to shoot in 4K at the recent Dallas Guitar Show. While I had 4K capability all along with my Sony AX53, which I used over the bench, I didn't see a need to shoot in 4K for amp repairs. It just didn't seem worth the additional time and disk space. Plus, 1080p always looked pretty great to me, especially on the devices most people watch on, like phones.
Deciding to shoot all that video in 4K was an attempt to see how good the camera could be at full capability. Little did I know, when trying to compress that video down to 1080p for editing, my computer would take abut 5 HOURS to render about an hour worth of video, which was the straw that broke the camel's back.
So here's what I got coming. It's an MSI Katana. They bumped the price up by almost $200 AFTER I bought it! Mistake in the listing??? I'm guessing yes. Before spotting this one on Amazon, I bought n HP Envy with the same i9 processor, but with a lesser Geforce RTX 4060, 32gb DDR5 RAM, a 120hz monitor, and 1TB SSD. It was a nice machine which would have worked, but after tax, it cost over $1600. So the Katana for $1400 AFTER TAX looked like a steal. I sent the HP back today and bought the MSI instead. I splurge so rarely on anything that my credit card company put a hold on the payment, flagging it as possible fraud. What's worse, they didn't send me a text letting me know. Only an email (which I never check). Luckily I caught it just in time before they upped the price on the thing. PHEW!
I'm in the process of creating the demo for an upcoming video on a 1974 Fender Twin Reverb. This is the point where I'm editing the video and audio layers all together with green screening. The studio-captured audio is not added yet. This is just a rough video mix with the RAW camera guide audio for the drums and guitar ONLY! So this is what the drums and rhythm guitar are sounding like in the room by themselves with no close miking and no post processing (other than a bit of compression and EQ). I am actually kind of shocked how good this is sounding even though one of the camera mics (the one for the drums) is from a DJI Action Cam and the other (for the guitar) is a Panasonic camcorder mic. Usually when making this kind of demo, the raw camera mic audio acts as a guide when lining up video clips on the editing timeline and then gets deleted from the final timeline before publishing. In some cases, I will even mix in a hint of the raw camera microphones with the studio mix to give ...
So it's been a minute since I put up a regular video. My neck and shoulder have been acting up again. I've been prescribed some meds for it which have been helping alleviate the symptoms, but the underlying cause (which I am certain is arthritis) is obviously still there. I can play guitar in short bursts, but even holding a guitar and extending my left arm outward to press the frets results in pain. On top of that, my wife recently suffered a partially detached retina in one of her eyes. She woke up with a large dark spot in her field of vision which necessitated a surgery. She's still in recovery for that. So it's been a mess around the Guitologist house of late. Good news is I can at least film stuff that doesn't require me to play much at the end of the video and I can edit video. I have a couple videos in the can that need to be edited, so I'm back to work, at least partially.
In other news, my daughters both have music lessons in their schools this year. The eldest daughter is taking...
I just noticed there's a Fesley Les Paul like the one I reviewed recently in black for $188 on Amazon right now. If someone wanted one but got put off by the price hike after I made my video, here you go: https://amzn.to/4ncaT01
They have the gold tops back in stock too.
