Seems like the rain may have stopped for a minute, so it might be safe to post this now. TL;DR– scroll down for a video of springtime Catskills greenery in the rain. A few months ago I swapped out my old desktop computer for a laptop/dock setup. The new setup is great, fast, etc.. The annoying part is dialing it in so that I can use it in all of the ways I need it. One of such, is basic video editing. On my old computer, I was using a super basic standalone video editing program that I had paid about a hundred bucks for. It was fine. I was ready to explore other options. Some casual preliminary research had me overwhelmed. Part of the challenge is that these days most of the ‘good stuff’ is subscription only, and cloud based. There are obviously a ton of advantages to this format. But for the non-tiktok casual video maker, the price point just doesn’t make a lot of sense.
I was discussing the above conundrum a few weeks ago with a friend of mine who is also a casual video maker. As luck would have it, he was able to give me some awesome options. I was eager to test ’em out. So a few weekends ago when it seemed like it was never going to stop raining, I decided to put a microphone on the cam and get some of the rainy sights/sounds of the Catskills in the spring. I have a small Rode mic with a dead cat filter on it, that mounts into the hotshoe of a DSLR. I was using a Canon 5D Mk IV with a 50mm f/1.2.
This is one of the first times that I utilized the touchscreen AF feature on the cam. It was pretty cool. I spent about 20 minutes walking around the yard to get some rainy springtime footage. I realized as I was loading the files into the editing program that the the mic picked up the noise from the focus motor, hahahaha. I’m sure that it didn’t help that I had the aperture wide open, causing the lens re-focus every time I panned the frame (which is visually annoying at times as well). But honestly, for the deminimus amount of effort put in, slash lessons learned in the process, the ROI was massive. This is especially true considering that the alternative was to just sit inside, listen to the rain on the skylights and read. Okay, not a terrible alternative option, but you get me. Anyway, the new editing program has many more options than I will ever be able to learn, so here is a quick and dirty little rinse that I threw together in case you need some help falling asleep–