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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Probably it just means I'm a bad photography, and this is essentially brute force approach towards it haha
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.
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
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.
The big problem with videos is that the tech is not yet there is term of consumptions. Finding the highlights can be tough, and editing videos is still a manual and painful job. However, these are problems that technology will eventually solve (and is already getting better day by day, see for example how well Google Photos search for content inside a video today in a query like "[person1] [person2] [location]").
Ever since I had kids I made it habit to default to shooting videos. Not only as an observant, but actively participating in the moment (i.e. the video becomes sort of a first person view of my experience at that moment). Now that the kids are slightly older, they gain so much joy from just swiping through the videos and experiencing their favorite moments again. I do wish there was a TikTok for private videos that would make the consumption part more seamless and fun though.