Yesterday I decided to join the multimedia revolution and take all video clips rather than still images on my weekly outing. I started at Mission Peak because I know the hill by heart and hiking to the top in mid-August is definitely a worst-case scenario.

It’s easy to throw together a video montage — heck, it’s built into iPhoto — but assembling a not-sucky video of a few minutes length is deeply not-easy. Sorting through a hundred clips, throwing out the suckiest ones, paring down the dead areas in the better ones (I wouldn’t say I had any good ones), getting them all in order, adding titles, compressing, uploading and so forth is extremely time-consuming. I worked it out to an hour for each minute of finished video, and that’s after I spent four hours figuring out how Apple’s iMovie works.

Here’s the result, posted at YouTube.

After all this work you get to watch it with YouTube’s crappy-ass compression making it all pixilated … I’m going to see if Google video is any better.

For now I’m not adding a soundtrack … I don’t have any recording gear and I don’t like stealing other people’s work (tough I did have a killer track from X’s cover of Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Breathless” on an early version). I know everybody does it; well, let ’em. Copyright allows me to earn a living so I’m a little more picky about it. And adding sound is another gazillion hours of work … I see now why movies cost millions.