The third video in my “BigRobsVan” (BRV) series is live in YouTube. In this video I bought a bunch of wood at Home Depot, cut out plywood in the shape of the floor, grinded all the rust off the floor in the front of the van, primed and repainted the front part of the floor with Rust-Oleum paint, removed/cleaned/reinstalled the front cabin’s floor mat, and installed swivel seat mounts under the front two seats. Whew — that’s a lot!

Half the clips for this video were filmed with my GoPro camera and half were filmed using my iPhone. The GoPro 11’s stabilization is amazing and I love filming with it; that being said, the battery life is abysmal, and swapping them out is a hassle. On many occasions I’ve switched to my iPhone while the GoPro was charging. For anything involving movement the GoPro outperforms the iPhone, hands down. While the GoPro’s battery is dead, the iPhone is the clear winner. The iPhone’s other advantage is that it’s literally always in my pocket, and there have been many occasions where it was the only camera I had on hand. Both cameras have their strong points.

I’ve been editing videos with Vegas (formerly Sony Vegas) for nearly 20 years. After using Vegas 12 for more than a decade, I upgraded to Vegas 18 a few months ago (thanks to my Patreons!). Vegas 18 turned out to be one of the buggiest, most unstable programs I’ve ever used. While Vegas 12 might have crashed once or twice in the decade I used it, Vegas 18 crashed multiple times a day. Unfortunately the only solution I found online was “upgrade to the latest version,” and so I spent $129 on that. Ultimately the money was worth it, as the new version is not only extremely stable, but adds some really neat features.

With that being said, I’ve got to find a better/more efficient way to edit my videos. I spent about sixteen hours over two days cobbling this video together. I spent essentially two nights after work adding and reordering video clips, writing and recording all the narration, finding and adding music, and then editing it all together. I can’t imagine other people making YouTube videos are putting this much work or spending this much time on their videos. I created my own hellish workflow, and need to figure out a way to streamline it.

I have lots of experience writing, blogging, and podcasting, but these videos scratch a new itch for me. I have a long way to before I can get “monetized” and am slowly building some followers, but even if that never happened, I would still make the videos because I enjoy the process.