Time to upgrade a bit
It would seem that I’m either organizing or improving my shop all the time in some way shape or form. So much so that a good amount of my available shop time gets spent fiddling around and tweaking things to make the layout fit my work flow. I have found that when I am working on an actual project I am more efficient because of a neat and organized shop. As some of you might know, I have started making build videos of projects I am making. At first it was just to share with the rest of the woodworking community what I had going on in my shop. It has since since morphed into not just showing what I was doing but how I was doing it and that in turn became what is now Woodshop Confessions. Now I realize that this comes at a time where there is a virtual rise of woodworkers and other folks making videos of their craft. But I love the fact that there are so many creative people from every experience level sharing what they’ve made. My list of subscribe channels on YouTube goes on for miles. If fact if you ask my wife, I’m either cleaning or organizing my shop, watching woodworking videos on YouTube, or a combination of them both. Oh and lets not forget that she mentions falling asleep to the sound of power tools coming from my ipad.
I never realized how much work goes into filming and editing all those videos until I started. Being the new guy I have a lot of work to do. In order to try and improve the quality of Woodshop Confessions I decided that I should do some upgrades. I found three areas that I believe that I can make some improvements on the production side of my YouTube Channel and those are the video, audio, and editing quality. Well four if you count me getting more comfortable with being in front of a camera.
The first of these categories that needed attention was the video. I started off using my Iphone to record the video and although the quality was not bad at all, I quickly discovered that available memory on the phone was an issue. This was because I have the 16GB Iphone and with all the cool apps that I have it didn’t leave much memory for other things like recording HD video. I would end up doing a little recording in the shop and then go inside to dump the video on the computer… then run back into the shop to record some more. To fix this issue I purchased the GoPro Hero3. I found a great deal on it due to the release of the GoPro Hero4. This really helps make things a lot easier and allows me to record HD video for over two hours with my current SD card I have installed.
The next two improvements on the list is the audio and editing equipment. I would like to ask for your help in making these upgrades. I have started a Kickstarter Campaign to raise some money to purchase a lavalier microphone, a better PC, and better editing software. I would really appreciate your support in this endeavor. You can visit my Kickstarter page and make a small donation or just share this post or the link to my Kickstarter page will all your friends, family, or if you don’t like crowd funding posts then please by all means share this with your mortal enemies.(https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/706728814/new-editing-and-audio-equipment-for-woodshop-confe). I have added a few rewards for pledges of donations as a small token of my appreciation. If we successfully reach our goal of $1500 by the allotted time I will use those funds to purchase the equipment needed to increase the audio and editing capabilities. I’m sure this won’t fix my looks or the stumbling and mumbling I do on camera… but we can hope!
Thank you very much for taking the time to join me. If you have not seen Woodshop Confessions before than I encourage you to swing by and check out some of the videos I have posted. There are links to all my social media sites on www.merzkecustomwoodworking.com.