CREATING A YOUTUBE TRAVEL SERIES // Behind The Scenes of Kombi Life

Back in 2011 when I first started filming for this channel there was no such thing as 4k video. There was no such thing as drones. I didn't even own a laptop of my own to be able to make the video. Everything was borrowed. Fast forward to 2020 and now we do have the gear needed for nomadic filmmaking and we make our videos in this 1973 Volkswagen bus in beautiful places like this in the Pyrenees. Totally blessed. But to make our production happen there's one piece of kit which is absolutely vital and we almost never touch it. It's a piece of kit that you might have in your small business or even in your home and if you don't have it now you might have it at some point in the future. We were asked to test out this piece of kit and tell you guys about it but rather than just focus on that I thought it would be good to check out our entire process of how we bring our production together and do a whole behind the scenes video. So let's jump into that. We're going to break down our nomadic filmmaking process from the planning stages of pre-production through to the filming and editing process. As you'll see there's a lot more to it than meets the eye. Okay as far as pre-production goes we don't really like to plan too much. One of the best things about this lifestyle is that we can go wherever we want and so we aim to share stories from our journey as we travel across the world without really planning too much. We do like to go and film interesting things and also do interesting things so we do have an interactive map which our Combi crew and the channel members put ideas and places to go that we can film and we also meet up with them too. So that is a really fun way to get to sit no people and no places. Yeah that's about as much planning as we like to do though right? Yeah. So when we're heading out to film we generally take a day bag with us. This is basically something that we can keep all of our stuff in for the day and our camera gear is well protected. We take a variety of camera gear with us to capture the scenes depending on where we're going what we're doing. This all fits into this bag nicely and enables us to capture the scenes that we are wanting to share in our videos. We are shooting right now on an a7iii which is our primary camera. Our backup camera is an a6500 and we need two cameras because one's always breaking. We actually started the show on something like this a sony a5000. This is not a good quality camera but our sony gear breaks all of the time so we need to always be cycling one through repairs which is rather frustrating. We do our best to use all of the different cameras to tell the story in the most engaging possible way to have different angles so it's not boring to watch. It's very important to us that our episodes are entertaining and so we capture a lot of b-roll and all of that results in a lot of files which we'll talk about later. The process from here is that we download all of our content from our sd cards onto our computer every single day where we make backups and begin the process of making proxies. Behind door number two our computer is running all night turning the footage we capture during the daytime into proxies which are basically smaller versions of the same file so that we can actually edit on our laptops because we don't have the luxury of a huge desktop power station to do our editing we have to edit on the laptops because our studio is mobile. Once Ben has given me the footage and the proxies i do a first cut of all the footage to see what we have and put it on the timeline just to see how the video is going to look. So once Leah has all the content on the timeline we basically have our first look at the episode. We then take all of the structure in the different scenes and we map it out in a diagram so we can see exactly how that story flows and what pieces we have. Once we can see all the pieces of the story on the timeline we then write the narration that ties it all together and then Leah and I will sit down somewhere quiet and try to record the narration in one take. We don't always succeed and that gets us to the beginning of the editing process. So at this point it probably takes about two to three days depending on the video to finish editing the video. I've got the building blocks now so I've got the narration and everything to create this video. The most important thing I think for me to edit the videos is the music so the music really sets the tone of the scene it creates pacing as well. To find the music we use Epidemic Sound which has an array of music and it's really easy to find the certain mood of music that I want. It categorizes music really well which allows me to easily find music for the mood of the scene. If you wanted to try that if you're interested in Epidemic Sound they do have a free trial so we'll link the link below so you can go check that out. As well as music adding to the the scene I also use sound effects just to recreate them just in case our camera didn't pick them up as clearly. So I'll go through and try and find sound effects to really add to the scene. Personally I think with music and with sound effects it really adds in helping for us to portray how we were actually feeling in that scene so making sure we get the best music to suit that mood that we're in and sound effects to bring out our surroundings to make you guys feel like you're with us. I think that's the most important thing with this editing. It's now January. We didn't really expect to still be here. We had planned to arrive a month ago to but alas here we are. We rented a workspace on the edge of town and every day we rode here working from sun up to sun down. The last part is the finishing touches of the video which sometimes takes the longest. It's the color and the sound so we make sure that all the sound levels are okay and we kind of match the colors with the different the different video cameras that we use. We don't do it perfectly because we just don't have enough time but we do it the best way we can. We also have production elements in there which is the texts and all the the bumps and stuff and also subtitles as well so for foreign interviews we use subtitles. At this point we have to render out the video which means take all of the individual clips and make a movie that we can upload to YouTube. That ties up our computer one of them for about six hours so we'll try to do that overnight if we can. We do a copy for YouTube, a master copy which is the highest quality for our own archiving purposes and we do a copy for the combi crew which doesn't have any ads in it so that the people that are supporting our content can enjoy without being interrupted by ads. There's a bee in here. Oh no! Emergency! Cut! Self-defense mode. I'm ready. We've got 3G on our phone right now and 4G on our hotspot. Upload can take anywhere between 20 minutes and three days depending on how far off grid we are. We upload a couple of copies, one to the combi crew for early viewing that doesn't have any ads in it along with any bonus content, deleted scenes, stuff like that and behind the scenes. Wow! I had to score that one. Tourists. Seriously this is like, this is literally a foot away from my body on a super wide lens and someone still walked into it. Failed. Camera failed. And then we upload the public version to YouTube and then we jump into the combi on our upload day. We log on to YouTube and engage with a community of viewers so we can answer questions like, why don't you guys get a job? Marketing. Then we do all the boring bits like sharing the video across multiple platforms, doing all the email and admin, writing blog posts, all of that jazz. Before we jump back in the combi, go hunt for another awesome place to share with you guys and begin the whole process all over again. All of this results in a lot of files. We have anywhere between a hundred and thousands of clips in each of our videos and we store this on external hard drives but external hard drives can and do fail so we keep a copy of all of the content that we create on backup hard drives. But what if something was to happen to the combi? We cannot afford to lose all of this stuff. We have spent years creating this series and capturing this footage. That is why we need to have an off-site copy of our data but in order to explain the cool tech that makes that possible we need to go about a thousand miles that way. Come with me. So previously we would just take our hard drives and we would send them home and we would just stockpile these at home and it gets quite expensive when you're sending these home pretty much every single month. So we have invested in a future proof storage solution. This magic black box here is the Synology DS1618 plus and it really is magic. If you're anything like us you've probably experienced filling up a phone or a computer and not having anywhere to store it. Now you could store it in the cloud. When you have the kind of data that we have, multiple terabytes of information, it gets really expensive cloud solutions up to literally multiple thousands of dollars per year. So that is why we have a NAS. It's why a lot of small businesses have NASs and also these NASs are starting to appear in people's homes. So let me quickly explain why this black box is so awesome and why we're starting to see it in people's homes. It is basically a really powerful and really smart storage array. Inside each of these slots is a hard drive. This one is 10 terabytes so you could have potentially 60 terabytes of information here and actually you can have much more than that as well and you can stack other ones up so it scales with your growth which is just perfect for what we need. The great thing about this device compared to these individual hard drives is that it can be configured with redundancy. So basically out of these six bays two hard drives can fail before we lose our information which is just brilliant because hard drives do fail. If it hasn't happened to you yet unfortunately it probably will happen to you at some point in your life. It's why backups are so important. As frustrating and dull as they are, they are essential. So two of these drives can fail. This one has actually failed on us so that is why I'm back here in Jersey now to change this out. It would be a case of just putting in a new drive, slotting it in and the storage array will write the information that is safely stored across the other five bays that we have currently active and it will rebuild the storage array. We won't lose any information. If that happened with our previous system of just backing up on these hard drives we literally would have lost months of footage. Despite how awesome this hardware is, it's actually the Synology software that makes it so useful. For example we can host our website on it and we can give people email accounts. We can even use it as a MediaPlex server all of which saves us a lot in subscriptions. So believe it or not I can remote into this hard drive from anywhere in the world if it is connected to the internet here in Jersey HQ. It's my mum's house. So normally when I'm on the road what I would do is I would send multiple hard drives back to Jersey and I'd have my highly qualified and very talented and beautiful assistant plug these drives into the Synology box and basically I would remote in and complete the backup job. All up the Synology has blown me away. Very very pleased we invested in it. Very pleased that we have got this piece of kit. Wouldn't be without it now to be perfectly honest with you. Full disclosure this video is not sponsored but Synology did provide us with the equipment so thank you very much to them for helping us make our content. So that's pretty much our filmmaking process. As you can see there's quite a lot that goes into it but we are really passionate about creating this docu-series and also sharing it with the YouTube audience you guys and getting you to come along with us and driving around the world and experiencing positive interesting things. Yeah we aim to share positivity and I hope you guys can get out there and explore too. If you're a regular viewer of Combi Life please do consider joining the Combi crew. It is how we as independent creators are able to make this with the support of you guys watching. So high five to the Combi crew. We will see you in the next adventure. Thanks for watching.