I just got back from vacation. I went with my 2 sons on the Royal Caribbean’s cruise ship called Liberty of the Seas. It was the first time for each of us. We had an absolutely wonderful trip traveling to Miami, Haiti, Jamaica, Grand Cayman and Mexico.
In the past, I’ve taken lots of picture on vacations using 35mm and digital formats but I haven’t ever use video. The tremendous growth in the use of video over the last few years, especially on YouTube prompted me to give video a try. I have always felt that video production was difficult, time consuming and expensive but it appears that the opposite is true. In a recent post by Gideon Shalwick of Brick Marketing: Video Tips to Use he debunks each of these myths.
So, for this vacation I thought I would try and create a video record of the cruise. Below I have uploaded a few videos to YouTube and added a link to the video from this blog. Enjoy.
By the way, before the cruise I purchased a Mino HD video camera from Flip Video for about $250 at Best Buy. I looked at a similar recorder from Sony but the Flip Video was so simple to use that I couldn’t resist. The quality of the videos is lacking but that isn’t the fault of the camera – it is the human taking the shot (one of my sons or me). Sorry about that – this was our first time shooting video.
The first shot is of the cruise ship, The Liberty of the Seas, at dock in Miami while we were traveling to port via taxi.
The second shot is disembarking at Labadee, Haiti. Labadee is basically are resort owned by Royal Caribbean – very touristy – but the food was great.
The next video is taken by my son as he rides down the Dragon’s Flight zip line. Tons of fun and not as scary as it looks. Loved it. Great view.
Another shot by my son. This time of the swimming pools on the 11th deck of the Liberty of the Seas. Weather was great for the first half of the trip and then it deteriorated.
In Jamaica we went to Bob Marley’s grave at the town of 9 Mile. We had a great bus ride singing Bob Marley tunes for an hour there and an hour back. Wonderful. This is a shot of our tour guide, Crazy.
The next shot is of the Atlantis Submarine surfacing in Cozumel Mexico. We boarded it and went down to 120 feet below the surface. Very scenic. Lots of fish and sea creatures.
At about 50 feet we saw a stingray.
The final shot is in Carlos n Charlie’s Cafe beach side in the pouring rain. But we had fun anyway.
Overall the trip was fantastic.
Regarding the topic of using video in a blog, I learned quite a bit. Shooting video so that you get good quality footage is harder than it looks . Using Movie Maker is a little tricky. Uploading the videos to YouTube is easy once you figure out that not all formats are uploadable. Linking the videos to a blog page is easy. But all of these steps are time consuming.
Footnote, a day later:
After I uploaded all the videos, I realized that the audio was faster than the video portion in each file. As a result, anyone talking sounded like a chipmunk – not kewl. I tried and tried with Movie Maker but I was unsuccessful in fixing the audio. The raw files were fine but when I uploaded to Movie Maker the chipmunks came back. So I spent a few hours trying to find another video editing program that was free and usable. I tried a bunch and finally settled on a free trial of Corel VideoStudio Pro X3. It took a while to learn how to use the program (maybe another post) but eventually I was able to edit the videos (again) and post them on YouTube.
Awesome post – so jealous! Especially love the zip line video. Very cool work with the Flip – well done. But I agree, not as easy as it sounds!
Next time of course you’ll take me as A/V technician/margarita boy. Right?
Cheers,
Doug
WOW!!!
That looks like so much fun!!
I want to go now.:(
It was a great trip. Thanks for your comment.