Sometimes I find it fascinating to think about how I get drawn off into a tangent, and just how far I’m willing to go once I’ve caught the scent.
I’ve been contemplating what I plan to do with my time in Taiwan. And while I don’t think — for the most part — that there’s anything I’m doing here and now that I cannot do there, but I feel like there are new opportunities, and I should be thinking about it.
I have another post (coming soon) that discusses that, but, I decided that I need to “re-visit” my memories of Taiwan over the years. Two things are certainly true: Taiwan has changed a lot since 1998, and things that shocked/amused/delighted/bewildred/disgusted me on earlier visits have become “ordinary” to me with familiarization. (Travel broadens the mind, doesn’t it?) Again, that’s for the other post, but I decided to look back at my journals/posts/videos ands perhaps use those memories to give me ideas for later.
I also have some regrets. I’d been doing a public access TV show for several years when I first went to Taiwan, but that was a very different animal than travel videography, but I had my camera and I wanted to record memories.
When I came home, I found myself telling the same stories, and I decided I’d try to do something with the video footage. I put together a 20-some minute travelogue that I think conveyed… well, not just Taiwan, but more importantly my reaction to it. In some ways, it’s more about me than Taiwan, but in 1998, Taiwan had pretty much zero mindshare with the people I knew, so everything presented was basically new to the intended audience: my friends and family.
Even looking back, there are bits that make me cringe, but they are more about changes in me than anything else. Even the name, “Made in Taiwan” which seemed so fucking clever at the time, feels trite now. At the time though, I was pretty damned happy with the video, and it played well with the intended audience. It even later went on to play on local TV.
There were many instances in original where I’m talking about something that I don’t have footage to cover, or that I don’t have Chu-Wan or myself in the footage to give a sense of narrative, and there are things that I left out because I just didn’t have suitable footage. My written narrative, An American Pizzahound in Taiwan, tells a different story, both true, but in writing I chose a different narrative path.
But… the ol’ ego gets going and I started thinking, “Next time I’m going to do video so much better! Next time I’m going to cover it all!”
…and I did, I shot tons of footage on the next trip where were did a huan dao (??) of the island, which I thought would be a perfect way to highlight Taiwan.1
When I came home, I realized that what I’d shot was not just inadequate to the task I had set for myself, it wasn’t even as good as the footage I shot on my first trip.
This put me off the whole, “Hey, I should do a video travelogue” on subsequent trips, although I did shoot footage on all my trips and have pushed out a few bits here and there. On our trip in 2015 for my brother-in-law’s wedding, and our 2019 trip, I vlogged the journeys, and those remain my most comprehensively covered visits to date.
Here are three more things that are true: I have tons of footage from Taiwan, my skills as an editor have improved, and the technology I have available is vastly superior to what I had back then.
I decided I would inventory my footage. I would see what I have, what its condition is, and what I’ve used previously and how, and then decide if I can salvage anything as part of a retrospective of my relationship with Taiwan. That relationship which has led me to moving to Taiwan this coming summer.
…and then appeared the rabbit hole from Hell.
I decided my first step should be to review Made in Taiwan and the source footage.
And this is where it gets ugly. I cannot find the original final edit.
Now, I mentioned that it had aired on local TV. I used it as an episode of the Fusion Patrol TV show back in 1999, I believe. And to do that, I made a new copy with Fusion Patrol branding and different music. The original version, never intended for public airing, used copyright music.
I have a copy of the Fusion Patrol version, but it is of lower quality than the original, and I hate the music selection I chose for the TV version.
What I do have in my possession are the original 8mm video tapes from the trip, which I have digitized but, like all videotape of that era are technically lower quality than SD television.
It just so happens that, several months back, I was experimenting with that digitized copy. I was building shell scripts to use ffmpeg to scan the single file produced by digitizing the tape, and splitting it into individual files for each “scene” without re-encodoing it.
I was doing that to make it possible to use Topaz Video to see if it was possible to upscale and clean up the original clips. Video upscaling relies on the quality of the source material, and, after a certain point, it simply cannot upscale low quality footage. My footage topped out at 720P. Most of the 720P footage looks “OK” without too many bizarre artifacts.
So, I had a directory with all the individual clips from that trip, upscaled to 720P. I got an idea.
If I loaded the TV version into Final Cut Pro, inside a 720P project, I could use the upscaled footage to create a clip-by-clip, frame accurate re-edit of the original. I’d just have to find each clip, find a synchronization point and line up the new footage like B-roll right over the top of the original. I would be re-creating the original faithfully with higher resolution video.
Piece of cake! Right?
Yes, but, no.
That process would obscure any titles or graphics. Titles wouldn’t be a problem (I thought) but some of the graphics I created — I don’t even remember how I created them — would be too low-quality to use, so I had to set about recreating them.
The most difficult was making traveling maps showing a moving progress around the island. Luckily, Apple Motion had me covered on that. With a royalty-free Taiwan map image, a bezier path, and a “write on” behavior, I was able to trace my train journeys on screen. They don’t look the same, but they convey the same concept.
When I originally edited Made in Taiwan, I was using a PC. I had a no-name video capture card that came with a knock-off of Adobe Premiere. I don’t even remember it’s name, but it came with inbuilt titles, and I chose one that, upon reflection, I hate.
I used lower thirds, and the titles flies in diagonally from the top to land at the bottom, then a bar of negativity slides in front of it inverting it to negative space.
Oddly enough, Final Cut Pro doesn’t have that, nor do any of my title plugin packs. I had to choose a different one. In keeping with the spirit of the original, I chose one that’s way too elaborate, but not quite as awful.
I faithfully went though the footage, I used cuts when there were cuts, and crossfades when there were crossfades — although for the life of me, I can’t figure out what the hell I was thinking when I made some of those choices. The titles and overlays cover the exact same duration on screen.
But, I had to make some compromises. There’s one scene in the original where a pond full of koi are churning the surface as people above toss them food. There’s also a kid framed in the shot that’s a little close to the fish. In the narration, I commented that the fish would probably be just as happy if the kid fell in.
I could not find that scene, neither in the upscales nor the original scenes. It seems that a glitch in the video tape caused that scene to be unsuitable for slicing up. I had another scene from a different angle which I just substituted, athough it does make the comment about the child falling in less meaningful.
My technique for synchronizing the clips was to locate a precise frame in the aired version — for example, when a passing power pole first enters a scene. I would mark it, find the exact same spot on the new footage, mark that, then align the marks.
About three times I found that glitches in the video caused the scenes to cut out early, and I was forced to “slip” the synchronization one way or the other a few frames to fit in the same time window. In one case, it was a whole second.
And then there was the narration. Because this was a finished product, the narration, the music, and the background noises (because I chose not to remove them back in the day) are all on one track.
Well, not problem, I thought. First, I can use my podcasting tools, in this case Auphonic, to take the audio track, strip out the music and the background noises, and enhance the quality of my narration.
It did an OK job of it, but, parts failed miserably and would be unusable.
That was a bit of a relief, really, because one of the “cringe” things I told you about was the narration. Somehow, simultaneously, I was trying to channel both my inner Michael Palin and David Attenborough. And failing at both.
The upscaled footage still has the original audio, so I could include that in the new mix, but perhaps balance it a bit better. I transcribed a script of the video and recorded new narration in my natural voice.
I did make three minor changes in the script. At one point I referred to a mudskipper as a “mutant.” This was unfair to the mudskipper, and I’m sure he was genetically sound for his species, so I changed that to “monster” in accordance with my reaction at seeing one of these beasties for the first time.
I also noticed that, rather bizarrely, I had mixed between the use of metric and imperial measurements in the narration. In two places, I standardized the script on metric measurements as part of my personal policy of “Fuck You, Imperial Measurements!”
All that was left was the music. I remember where I got the music, and, indeed, when I hear those songs in my music library, I can see in my mind where I used them in the video. I could have recreated that, but, it was wrong to use the music back then, and it’s wrong to use it now.
I also could have reassembled the alternate music, but as I said, I hate it. It was a compromise that I didn’t want to make at the time, and it didn’t convey the “feel” that I was going for.
Once again, 28 years later, I have more resources. Personally, I subscribe to Envanto, mostly for licensed stock footage, but they also have a collection of music tracks that can be cleared.
The original music did lean heavily on (arguably cliched) traditionally-Asian-sounding tracks, but they were moody. Keeping with that creative choice I ploughed through dozens of tracks on Envato until a found a few that were of a similar style and feel.
And having buttoned all the pieces together, I realized that I needed subtitles, so I did that.
I had Perplexity analyze the subtitles and generate chapter markers, summaries, and SEO-optimized A/B titles. And finally, I gave Nano Banana a few photos from the trip and had it generate a “YouTube Thumbnail optimized for clicks” (And who but the Google AI would know what the Google YouTube algorithm thinks is clickable?)
They’re definitely both a bit bullshit, but they amuse me at how “Bullshit YouTube” they look and feel.
I should produce Chinese subtitles because conventional wisdom is Taiwanese like to watch foreigners in Taiwan more than foreigners like watching videos about Taiwan. Chinese subtitles help with that.
On the flip side, I don’t eat anything in this video, and that, as any YouTuber in Taiwan can tell you, is the kiss of death for a video in Taiwan.
Maybe on the weekend, I’ll run the English subtitles through a translator, then get Chu-Wan to proofread them. I can always add them later.
…and that is how I fell into and climbed back out of the rabbit hole.
Links mentioned in this video:
- An American Pizza Hound in Taiwan
- 2015 Vlog Journey to Taiwan
- 2019 Vlog Journey to Taiwan
- Auphonic
- Envato
- Perplexity
- Nano Banana
- A “huan dao (??)” means a “round the island trip” and it’s something you hear people talking about, although I don’t know if there’s any cultural significance to the idea ↩︎