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There's a self-propelled army of "FPS" video walkers, documenting some of the more interesting and popular places around the world as if you were there yourself wandering quietly through these places. I really hope that the trove of videos that exist on YouTube remain intact even after the company itself disappears, because it's a catalogue like no other.

I regularly watch train rides or walks through suburbs of places I've never been, and at 2k resolution and high quality audio, it can really transport you for the moment you're watching. During the pandemic lockdowns here, a bit of people watching while wandering through other countries was worth it's weight in gold.

Any favourites?

I quite like these channels:

Rambalac for walks around Japan https://www.youtube.com/c/Rambalac

HKSAMA for train rides in Japan https://www.youtube.com/c/HKASAMA

Nomadic Ambience for walking in quite a few places around the world: https://www.youtube.com/c/NomadicAmbience

And Sound Traveler for binaural walks around the world: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheSoundTraveler/videos

Destin from Smarter Every Day has been getting a bit of attention on Hacker News lately, so it might be interesting to know that Sound Traveler is his project!

https://www.youtube.com/c/ProWalks is good for Europe

Your comment reminded me of this video: "2:30am at 7-11 near Disney World - 1987" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYbe-35_BaA

It's definitely the kind of thing that stills can't beat.

I find it very hard to take videos of personal events, I'm too much of a nervous wreck. Pointing a camera at anybody, even or especially friends and family, I can hardly do it, though I wish would get over it and film more.

Video is simply a different medium to express with.

I take a lot of random photographs: I really like it when I find a pretty weed against a building, a nice reflection in a broken car window (junkyard picture). Abandoned houses are full of gems. I find this stuff just walking around the city and being out in the countryside. I rarely take pictures of people. If I want to document a memory, I document the pretty things I see (in general).

But I'll take a video of a partially frozen creek that is flanked with snow: It captures the creek in a different way than the still pictures I took. A combination of stillness and the sounds of flowing water and the sun gleaming off of different sparkling and shining surfaces - I just cannot capture that in film the same way, not all at once. (Don't get me wrong, the stills were pretty wonderful). I take video of the fireworks out my window on new years. It is pretty spectacular sometimes (not to mention easier to capture on a cell phone). Yet a video of Northern Lights isn't always more beautiful unless you are seeing them dance in the sky.

Of course, maybe I just use these differently than most folks - outside of the hundreds of pet photos I take.

I love making little vlogs when I go somewhere with my friends.

But you have to pick one - it's either photos or videos. If you try to do both, you'll playing with your camera nonstop.

It's also good to have that one crazy person who will keep talking on the video. And if you spend some time editing, you'll create some amazing memories.

My pixel 4 has an 'export frame from video' option, and on my last hike I took lots of photos and videos, but actually by far all my best 'photos' that I send to my friends, are stills from a video. From now on I'm basically always just going to film everything.

Probably it just means I'm a bad photography, and this is essentially brute force approach towards it haha

Yeah, I capture like 5+ hours a week on my GoPro. Editing it is a chore, and if not done immediately it will never be done.

Like from a ski trip, I each evening extracted 2-3 minutes of video from the day, remembering the highlights made it quick. Then later stitched that to a short video I shared with the others, that I like to rewatch.

One other time, however, I just dumped all files to a HD thinking I'll do it later. That's 200 GB of footage from that trip I've never even looked at, it's too much to go through.

At least one nice feature of gopros is you can press the power button while recording, that adds some metadata marking that timestamp as a highlight, makes it easier to jump to the good parts later.

> Think about the experience of seeing a photo of your young self (or your child at a young age) vs a video, it just doesn't compare.

this works mostly only for kids though because they change a lot, once you are adult in finalized stage the videos are much less interesting because you will see same yourself just years ago, so only the place is interesting, not really the person

but yeah, take a tons of videos of kids, it will be very valuable to them, I've never had such opportunity since during my childhood videocams were very expensive for regular families to own, so oldest video of me is me in 20s I guess

with X265 even few seconds long video takes only a bit of space and it's worth gold compared to photos

For the past 6 years or so I've been using an app to record 1 second long video every day, and then create a montage of a week/month/year/whatever using those seconds. And it's amazing, you feel like nothing much is changing in life, and then you get a montage of the last year and it shows how fast everything is actually changing. And the format is perfect too, it's not boring, just a second a day, you don't have to do it every single day, and it still is enough to bring back memories.

I’ve done the same, also for the past six years! Though I still haven’t figured out how to ask people to feature in my daily 1 Second without feeling awkward about it…

Would you mind sharing what app(s) you are using?

Not the original poster, but I use 1 Second Everyday, which is the original app that eventually spawned a bunch of copycats. It’s a little buggy from update to update, and I think they’ve added a yearly payment (I’m grandfathered into the free plan), but it’s likely the best you’ll see out there. It’s never lost a video for me in six years.

Spherical photos or videos are my favorite. Yes you have to put on Google cardboard or whatever to really experience it, but it brings the VR experience brings me back to the moment, mentally, in a way that pictures can't.

We had the old essential phone, with the spherical camera attachment, and used the hell out of it. I still go back and watch those old videos. Venice in the snow was absolutely amazing.

I need to get another spherical camera ASAP, now that traveling is possible again.

As a workaround for the private TikTok, I use PeerTube. It's not as nice and seamless but it kind of does the trick and it safes a lot of metadata so you can search for hashtags, titles, etc.

iOS's "live photo" feature is great for this. It captures just a second or so before and after the photo which really brings the image to life. It's very powerful to look back on a photo of my son when he was 2 and catch that little bit of extra context.