How to Create a Simple Travel Vlog (FAST!)

I'm all sweaty. I just got back from biking across the city, but I did that because I made sort of a vlog, like a travel vlog or a travel documentary as I like to call it. And I used this Pocket three right here. This little portable camera went out on my bike, was holding, it was narrating at certain parts. So I'm going to show you how to take all that footage and it's not much. This is going to be a simple project. But if you have like a multi day trip or just a ton of footage, the principles are the same in how I'm going to bring it in, how I'm going to sort of organize it, how I'm going to sort through it and then start putting it into my project and try to get an interesting story out of it. The very first thing I need to do is get the videos off of my camera into a Descript project. But before I do that, before I just take all the videos and just drop it into my project, I'm going to do a little bit of pre filtering. So I'm going to go through these, this is my first video and I'm going to play all of mine and just make sure that there's nothing that was, you know, just like a little two second clip where I accidentally hit record or just kind of filter it for the things that definitely aren't going to be in my video. So I'm going to go ahead and do that and then I'll meet you for the next step. And on Apple, by the way, it's going to be a little different on a Windows computer, but on Apple you can get this view and you can just click on the video name, the file name and hit this little play button and preview it so you don't have to open every single one. Okay, now I know what videos I'm going to use. This particular camera takes two files for every video it takes this MP4 and LRF. So I'm only going to select my MP4s by holding command on my keyboard and selecting all those MP4 files. Those are all the videos that I want to actually put into my project. Okay, there we go. So 26 videos are going to actually make it into this project. And then I'm going to go into descript. I'm on the web version of descript. Web. Descript.com hit new project. It's going to be a video project and I'm going to go ahead and take all those videos I have selected, just drag them all in and this is going to take a while to process. So this is 26 files. It's probably going to be several gigabytes. So I'll be back with you when these are done. And it's given me this box, this dialogue, asking me if I want to transcribe them. And I'm going to go ahead and do this just because it makes it easy to sort through and find the parts where I'm talking or saying something interesting or relevant. If you are on the free plan or the hobbyist plan and you're constrained by your transcription time in Descript, then think twice about doing this. But I'm not even close to my timeline, so I'm going to go ahead and transcribe all these. I'm not going to check the combined files. I don't want to do that. And I'm just going to hit done. And now those are all going to be uploading. It's 4.64 gigabytes in total. So this is going to take a little bit. Okay, so it's completely done with the uploading. And as you can see, the transcription is starting to come through as well and didn't take long. This, this is a super manageable project. It's only 19 minutes. I've had some documentaries that are six hours or more, you know, for like entire weekend trips. Um, this was just a quick one. So very manageable. But what I like to do is this composition with all of my RAW files. I just call this entire composition Raw. And then what I'm going to do is click on this dropdown, I'm going to make a new composition and I'm going to call it something like Final, something like whatever you want, whatever your naming convention is. And for some reason the text is cut off. But that's okay, you get the idea. So, yeah, so I have one composition called Raw, one called Final. And then I'm going to change the name of the project. I'll call this Xochimilco Bike Trip. That was where I went today. And now what I'm going to do is leave this untouched. I'm not going to make any changes to the videos in raw, but I am going to do some organization. So you can do something called Inline Notes with parentheses. And so if you just type in a parenthesis, you can type in anything you want inside of there. I typed my parentheses and now I can write Intro, for example. And then this isn't going to affect the video in any way. It's not going to go into captions. If I add them. It's purely an internal note. So I can just kind of organize my project and leave notes to myself. So I'm going to go through, I'm going to annotate any interesting parts that I find. And another thing you can do, again, this is a simple project, but let's say I had 200 files instead of 26. I could add folders by clicking on these three little dots. I could say new folder and then I could have a folder that is, for example, B roll and a folder that is. And actually I'm going to do this narration. And so then I can kind of start to keep organized and keep track of what files are what and are they going to be important or not? Okay, so I'm going to go through and just kind of look at what I have here. I'll do some rough cuts. If there's just like really bad clips that. That aren't definitely aren't going to make it into the final video, I'll cut those out just so I don't have to worry about them. But more or less I'm keeping everything intact as I go. Okay. It's Sunday afternoon, September, and I'm just kind of spot checking, just bouncing around. Very cool experience. A lot of people do it for birthday, just kind of remembering what I shot. And the other thing I can do is highlight stuff. So things that I definitely want to put into the video, I can highlight it as I go. And I'll show you how this will come into play in a moment. So I'm going to take this entire first opening scene. I'm gonna highlight all that text, I'm gonna highlight it in yellow. And then I'm gonna repeat throughout the video right here. I only want that, that second half of this clip. So I'm just gonna make a cut, just get rid of everything up to that point. And I'm just gonna resize my windows so this is gonna be a little bigger because this is getting into the more visual part where I wanna have some really good footage of me actually biking around the park so that I can show the best parts of this trip. So this part I did a hyperlapse, so that's definitely going to be some B roll. I just call that a hyperlapse like that. And that one was a time lapse of people. So I'm just making notes so that this will be clear to me. Time lapse people. Okay. And then this part's going to be my outro. And that's almost it. I had a couple Other interesting footages after that. So let me just select that and then let me just see what these last ones were. So now I've gone through everything. I've sorted it, I've organized it and kind of labeled things as much as I want. And you can go as crazy as you want with this tagging stuff, tagging the RAW files, all that type of stuff, if you want, if you need. But I'm going to move on to compiling my final project. So what I'm going to do is go to Underlord and I'm going to start typing copy. And that first one that pops up, copy highlights. I'm going to copy all highlighters. I'm going to go to my final edit. Click into the white space, command V to paste, and look at that. Pasted 12 minutes. I'm probably still gonna cut a lot more and add a few things as well. Add a few things that I might have missed, but at least you can see how this flow works. So now I'm gonna get into cutting and adding things as I go. So right off the bat, the first thing I do with almost every project is get rid of any blank space. I just grab the end of the clip and tighten it all the way to where I actually start speaking. And I'm going to even get rid of the word. Okay, let me see how this sounds. It's Sunday afternoon, Sunday afternoon, September 22nd, and I'm gonna go on a little bike ride through Mexico City. I'm gonna go to Xochi Milk, and I'm just gonna start playing through it, making cuts. And with the beginning, that first part, I'm gonna make a scene out of that and I'm gonna add a title over it. So I'm going to go to Elements, I'm going to go to Title, and I'll say biking to Sochimoko. I'm going to change the size of that text. I'm going to make it a little bit less opaque. Do like 80%, change the font, and I'm going to animate it. Go to animation in up here, Sunday afternoon, out. Okay, let's see how that looks. It's Sunday afternoon, September 22nd, and I'm going to go on a little bike ride through Mexico City. I'm going to go to Xochimilco, which is famous primarily for being the last remaining. So I like the intro, but I was missing something. I wanted to have this scene two where it's just kind of a B roll shot of my bike panning around the park that I did this opening scene in and I can't highlight words that don't have transcription on it. So that's one of the limitations of the highlight feature. So what I'm gonna have to do in this case is come back to this scene too with my B roll and I'm gonna use the range tool to find exactly what part I wanna use from this. So, so I'll probably take like this, that right there. With that selected with the range tool, I'll just hit copy, go back to my final, and I'm going to just place an empty scene at the very beginning to drop that into paste. It's Sunday afternoon, September and actually I don't like the flow of that. I'm going to move this, that particular bike scene. When I say after, I say let's do it. So that was all the way down here. So to create a blank scene, I just hit two slashes, two forward slashes in a row. And let's do it. Let's see what the day brings. Okay, and then right on that, first thing, I'm gonna start adding transitions. So if I start splitting things up by scenes, I can go to the scene property on the right side. I can hit this plus button for transitions. I can say out. And my signature is the cross zoom. I always use that one. The day brings. And that's a little slow for my taste. I want it to move a little faster. I think I'll cut the scene right there and maybe change this, this transition to a crossfade. The day brings. Ah, I don't like it. I'm gonna get rid of this bike scene altogether. The day brings. The day brings. Okay, and then at the start of this scene, I have a bunch of silent area before I start talking. That was because I was on this bridge and I was waiting for some people to pass, so I wasn't recording them. So I'm just going to cut all that out by dragging all the way to where I see the sound or the talking start. But the day brings. So that is Xochimilco.

And I rode down that freeway road right there, that three lane freeway on the inside lane when I got off the exit and so I got stuck pedestrian bridge.

So there's a lot of traffic in the background. And it sounds, it's a lot harder to hear. So I'm going to play around. I'm going to add studio sound to this clip. The first one is. Sounds pretty good. I don't have studio sound applied. And bring your own beer or whatever you want. And you just Go around, chill on the. Yeah, that sounds great without studio sound. Um, but I'm going to let it apply to this one because it's just so loud. There with all those cars going by is Xochimoko.

And I rode down that freeway road right there, that three lane freeway on the inside lane when I got off the exit and so I got stuck.

Do it. Let's see what the day brings. So that is Xochimilco.

And I rode down that freeway road right there, that three lane freeway on the inside lane when I got off the exit. And so I got stuck in this middle part and I walked way down the road, way down there, finally crossed onto the other side and oh, it's just a nightmare. I literally the ride here was probably 15 minutes.

I spent half an hour just trying.

To get out of the middle and now I'm on a pedestrian bridge which if I had been able to get on the far side of the road.

To start with, I could have just crossed.

But anyways, I'm here now and let's go to the park.

Okay, so after that little talk, it's going to go into a phase where I'm actually biking into the park. And so I'm going to play with the speed here. I might play it at like 2x speed. Definitely going to add some music and actually I might add some music over this whole thing. So I'm going to do that from the start. My video is already down to 11 minutes 48. Like this is probably going to get down to 8 minutes or something by the time I'm done, if not less. So I'm gonna go to music though, and I'm gonna find some music that I like. I'm gonna type in keywords like travel. I'm gonna add that and I'm gonna apply something called ducking, which is gonna lower the music on the parts where I'm talking and then it's gonna raise it on the parts where I'm not talking, like this biking scene. And it's gonna sound really nice for this type of effect. And I'm going to put this all the way back at the beginning. And I want this to play throughout the whole video. So right now if I go to scene with, or layer rather, with that music layer selected, it's set to play only once, but I can hit loop. And now it's going to play throughout the entire video. And if I play it as it is, Sunday afternoon, September 22nd, it's way too loud. But if I toggle this on right here, this thing that says ducking. And if I look at this, these settings, it's going to lower my music to 10% of its volume. So it's gonna be nice and soft while I'm talking. And then, like I said, when the talking goes away, that music is going to fade up and get much louder. And I'm gonna go on a little bike ride through Mexico City. I'm gonna go to Xochimilco, which is. So I'm gonna cut off just a little bit of the first part of this B roll.

And let's go to the park. And let's go to the park.

And I'm gonna make a scene there to add it, to be able to add a transition. Like, I'll have it fade into the.

And let's go to the park. And let's go to the park.

And I don't need the sound of traffic and stuff during this part. And I'm not talking. So I'm going to select that layer and just mute it.

And let's go to the park.

And I mentioned I'd play with the speed. So with this little bit selected where nothing's really happening, I'm just rolling down this ramp, just going to bump that up to 4x. And with every change I make, I always play. I always jump back with my playhead and then play it to see how it looks. That looks cool. And then I'm just going to scrub through here because I don't think I need any of that. Yeah, that's just showing the road. So I'm just gonna select all that. Delete it. So now I'm in the final scene of my video. I went through the whole thing. I added transitions where they were necessary, just cut out things, and I'm down to less than eight minutes. And this last scene was kind of unusual. I set my camera down really far away, walked like a hundred meters away, and then did this kind of outro where I was walking up to it as I was talking. So what I did in this scene was I added a custom animation where it zooms way in and then over the course of 45 seconds, it does a slow zoom out until, like, if I scrub through here, here's how it looks. So that's me walking up to the camera. I'm reading some facts about the park that I was in, and then it's zooming out until it's fully zoomed out by the time I get back to the camera. So just kind of an interesting little fun thing that I tried. And that's what this is all about. Just try different stuff with your camera, test the limits of what is possible and make. Make stuff interesting. Okay? And the last thing I'm going to add is there was this guy standing in the middle of the road right as soon as I left the park that was whistling, and he looked like he was just having a blast doing it. And I thought it was really funny. So I'm just gonna take a little bit of this and I'm just gonna have that be like a little funny little outro. And then I'm gonna do a final pass. I'm gonna go through the entire video again, doing any final edits, cleaning up any rough cuts or jump cuts, things like that. I played through the whole thing, went through with a fine tooth comb, looked for any errors, made a few little tweaks here and there. And then when I was done, and I forgot to show this on the camera, but I hit the publish button. So you go to the publish in the top right, hit publish there, and that's going to start all the rendering and processing on descript's servers. And then as soon as that's done, which it probably already is, it only takes a few minutes for a short project like this, I'm going to switch it to YouTube. I'm going to hit sign into YouTube and then I give it, I log in with my Google account and then I hit publish, and it says, your video is being published to YouTube and will be on your channel in a few minutes. That's it. This thing is, I went from start to finish, from raw videos to this finished product in less time than it's going to take me to edit this tutorial that you're watching right now. I think that was about an hour of editing, and I'm going to spend probably an hour editing this tutorial that you're watching. If you like this, subscribe to the channel and let me know in the comments if you want to see more like it.