January 7th, 2023 – Episode 1 – In this week’s edited video we catch rail action between Rahm, Indiana and Mortons Gap, Kentucky along the CSX Henderson Subdivision, mostly from the air! This week we spend a lot of time in the air, where we catch southbound M503 at Mortons Gap, Ky, B207 northbound at Mortons Gap, M648 northbound at Hanson, I026 northbound at Madisonville and I025 southbound up the viaduct at Rahm, Indiana! Enjoy!

For this week I worked on my skills of shooting footage from the ground and the air on most of my trains. If you weren’t aware, drones don’t shoot audio, because all you’d hear is the sound of the motors on the drone. You have to either lay a music track in post editing, go with no audio, record with an external digital recorder or shoot with a second camera on the ground for audio.

I go with the latter, using my iPhone 14 Pro, on a tripod, and then using Adobe Premiere Pro I edit the two together, syncing the audio on the ground video with the footage from the air. In case you aren’t aware, I fly a DJI Air 2S and I match the frame rates between the two to 4K at 24fps.

Most of my Saturday videos are about 17-22 minutes long and so when I export the video I do so in full HD and not 4K. The 4k file comes out to be around 10-12 TB in size and the HD file is about 3-4 TB, which is much more manageable. If you have any questions about the process I use, just leave them in the comments here or on the video in question! – Jim