Lemonade from videos?

My nickname in many places online is some variation of trainman. However, it's becoming very rare that I get opportunity to go and just watch trains. Last Saturday, dad and I got to a small town in southeast Iowa to watch trains. To document the trip, I like to make sure to get trains on video and then put it on my YouTube channel.

After lunch, we checked out a model train display from Scale Trains and could then finally record the trains we were seeing. Dad isn't very familiar with my camera, so I try to make it as easy as possible to use. Instead of going through settings to select video type, I had him hit one button that would just record from whatever was set previously. 

Dad very nicely setup his tripod and made sure to have the shots framed well to see the trains, or barges, perfectly. We caught several trains on the busy main line and even two trains that met perfectly in front of my camera. On the three-hour drive home, I looked forward to seeing what we captured and getting them put together into a long video. However, when I transferred the content from the camera to my computer, I noticed the files seemed much smaller than I expected.

When I looked at the videos, I realized they were all taken in high-speed time lapse without any sound. Therefore, instead of nearly 30 minutes of train videos, they were less than three-minutes total. Looking at them, I could see they were all perfectly framed and looked great, except in high-speed. I felt horrible that dad went to all the work to capture the videos and they wouldn't be useful. If I had him use the slow method to setup video type, it would have been fine. However, in trying to make things easier, it ended up being worse.

I thought and slept about it Saturday night and Sunday and wondered what I could do in editing. I tried slowing the videos down, but they looked jerky. Therefore, I found a music site for YouTube, put the videos together, and did a high-speed review. It wasn't what I had planned, but it still worked out. Next time though, I'll go through the slow setup method at least once.