Tag: vlog

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Why I no longer recommend GoPro (cw swears)

Cos they sucked me into a free trial and charged my card a year later without my realising. I didn’t even know I was subscribed.

Further, as an Australian there’s no way to contact them because they work on US business hours. So I was up at 2AM the other night hanging off a chat box where Vincent was apologetic, but kept pasting prefabricated blocks of text telling me to get fucked.

It’s enshittification at its best. They’re beholden to investors, and have to invent junk services to get that sweet recurring revenue. And their policy is no refunds, ever. So it’s obviously deliberate.

So basically, fuck em.

Insta360 and DJI both have excellent products in this space that may have their own ideological foibles, but at least won’t brazenly steal money from your card.

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DaVinci Resolve 18 render-cached clips show “Media Offline”

Just a quick one because when I tried searching for the solution I couldn’t find it. DaVinci Resolve is my favourite professional, free video editor.

A DaVinci Resolve timeline showing a half-completed render cache over a clip of me riding a bike.

For a while though I haven’t been able to get render caching working. This weird Resolve bug would churn up my GPU, the red line above the clip would turn blue to indicate it had been render-cached, but any render cached clips were showing up as “media offline”.

Some people online mentioned this can happen if your disk is full and the files can’t be written, but I have lots of space remaining.

I tried changing the render cache directory to a custom folder to no effect. However, when I browsed to the render cache folder manually, it had no video files in it. Just a bunch of empty folders.

After some further googling, I found switching from ProRes to DNxHR HQ (High Quality [8-bit 4:2:2]) fixed it. It seems to be choking on ProRes for some reason. Some folks mentioned it was specifically ProRes 422 HQ, but I didn’t test the theory since I was in a rush.

Changing the format and hitting save was enough to trigger all my “offline” render-cache clips to rerender in the new format and start working again.

Optimised media & render cache settings. I've chosen ormat DNxHR HQ and checked all the caching boxes.

This was on an M1 mac running MacOS Ventura, using Resolve version 18.1.4. But I understand from Stack Overflow that it also happens on other v18 version as well. Given Linux and Windows don’t support ProRes I’m not sure if this tip applies there.

Hope this helps you out, traveller. If you want, chuck me a follow on Youtube. <3

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Isolating vlog speech using Krisp AI

On a steam train ride with my mum, she starts telling a story of the trains when she was young. So thinking quickly I whip out my phone, press record, and get her to hold it so I can actually record her voice over the background noise.

It comes out distorted to ever loving shit.

A shot of DaVinci Resolve 17, video editor, with a video and audio track

So this sucks. I have to go back to the original onboard camera mic but it’s SO loud with all the engine noise, cabin chatter, and clanking in the background. Even tweaking all the knobs, you can barely hear mum at all.

Are there any AI tools to isolate voice? I remembered I’ve been using Krisp at work to cut down on the construction noise from next door. Maybe if I run the audio through that…

So I set the sound output from my video editor to go through Krisp, plug in my recorder, and play it through. It’s tinny, it’s dropped some quieter bits, but it’s totally legible! Holy cow.

Now I’ve got an audio track of mum’s voice isolated from the carriage noise. I can mix it back together with the original to boost the voice portion and quieten down the rest. This is kinda a game changer for shitty vlog audio.

This is a pretty convoluted workflow, so it’s really only useful for emergencies like this. But I’m really happy that it managed to recover a happy little memory. And I hope one day Krisp (or someone else, I don’t mind) release either a standalone audio tool or a plugin for DaVinci Resolve.

As an aside, the Google Recorder app is officially off my christmas list. Any recommendations for a better one?