ADAM MAZEN YOUTUBE VLOG SERIES
Adam Mazen is a young Tik Tok star who found his rise to fame when he and his brother Mohammad Mazen decided to work together on something creative during the Jordan 2020 lockdown. When the 2020 lockdown had eased up a little and work had resumed to brief normalcy, Mohammad had approached me in regards to creating a photoshoot for his brother; part of a much larger plan. The photoshoot was so much fun and you can see it here.
A few months after the photoshoot Mohammad told me about his idea of creating a vlog series that would take place all around Jordan entitled, Adam Around Jordan. It was firstly, a way for Adam to get out of the house after the lockdown and a way for all of us to spend quality time together. The second reason was that this was indeed a great way to shine the light on the more obscure parts of the country.
Mohammad had tasked himself with the social media marketing, the account managing, and the production of the trips. I was tasked with filming and photographing the trip, media acquisition, editing and managing and organizing media for archive. We shopped at a local camera store and bought very cheap and basic gear all under 1,000 USD. All store owners had tried to upsell us to special cameras with expensive gimmicks, trying to fright us into buying expensive gear by saying none of what we had picked up would work for our intended use. I beg to differ.
Armed with a used Canon rebel 600D, two canon L series lenses of my own, a lavalier microphone, a couple of tripods and reflectors we captured some amazing shots.
Episode 1 - Ajloun
Our first trip was to Ajloun. We were too eager and ended up shooting 3 hours of content, our first cut was 20 minutes. Mohammad and I decided to cut out what was not necessary and keep it for micro content on different platforms for different days.
A beautiful Mural found in Ajloun on the way back from Ajloun Castle
Our first location on the Ajloun was a small river called Sail Al Azraq, or river of Al Azraq (the city not the color). This is a small river that leads into the King Talal Dam fertilizing and nourishing the valley on the way there.
From there we went on to the old crusader castle of Ajloun, situated high atop the mountain. There were very little tourists so we basically had the place all to ourselves.
After the Ajloun castle excursion we went to a small bed a breakfast called ‘Al-Asef House’. The small hotel had once been a family home, but situated above a river and atop a massive hidden cave, the owners renovated it into a family oriented small hotel.
Visual noise artifacts could be seen in low light situations, but the 3rd party plug in for Adobe Premier called Neat Video Noise Reduction was absolutely masterful, with advanced controls that allows you to fine tune the amount and type of visual noise you wish to remove. Unfortunately, the tradeoff is that it is an immeasurable increase in export and render time, due to the high graphics card usage of the plug in. this was one reason why I later decided to push for switching to Blackmagic Davinci Resolve Studio as everything one would need for video restoration is already included.
Episode 2 - Ma’in Hot Springs
Episode 2 was shot at the Ma’in hot springs, hidden within the depths of the mountains canyons a little ways past the Dead Sea. The hotel has undergone major changes and it looks astounding now, as opposed to what it was many years ago.
The hot springs are a natural flow of hot water that is heated by the earth’s geothermal energy. It flows freely through the hotel and the hotel is built around it rather than on top of it affecting the water flow.
The hot springs can be found in different pools and locations within the hotel. In order for us to film comfortably we chose to wake up at around 6 in the morning so we could go to the major water fall and be able to film comfortably without having many tourists around.
Episode 3 - Wadi Rum
Episode 3 was shot in Wadi Rum. I had not gone in over a year, and it seemed like this was a needed vacation. The amount of shooting stars witnessed was indeed humbling and magnificent. I always loved Wadi Rum; its large expanse is experience shattering. The night sky filled with millions of visible stars, it looks almost fake.
Adam and his family had scheduled a trip to Wadi Rum, we went in two cars, and played music throughout the whole way. Having shot multiple times in Wadi Rum there was no pressure. The camera and lenses had to be cleaned constantly to make sure no sand got on the sensor or in between the lens and the camera. Shooting with telephoto lenses (or their equivalent on a crop sensor) allowed for the compression of space in the image and gave the magnificent illusion that the sand and the rocks were all layered on top of each other.
Episode 4 - Kirbet Al Souq
I found Khirbet Al Souq 4 years ago while on my many travels across the Jordanian landscape. I was exploring where certain roads led to and i found myself traversing down a mountain side. as I kept going I found myself in the midst of large valleys where to my left was a sheer drop off into a river. Eventually on this winding road there was a fork, left to go towards the Dead Sea, and Right to go to the Al Salt governorate. I had often went left over the years and continued to discover the routes to the Dead Sea, yet one time I had taken a right instead and on my way up the hillside I had found myself near some old ruins in the street. An archeological site little known to the locals outside of Al Salt.
To get to the location one must first drive towards Wadi Shu’aib and then take the exit towards Al Salt, and it will be hard to miss on your left 10 minuets before reaching Al Salt.
Episode 5 - Madaba
Episode 5 was almost entirely created in Davinci Resolve. At the time Adobe had released a devastating software update that slowed down my high-end PC to unbearable levels. Blackmagic Davinci Resolve 16.2 was the most stable and reliable software at the time, and I was excited to get the shots of the churches into the coloring bay.
Madaba is a beautiful historic city drenched with religious and architectural significance. The echoing bells of old churches rang throughout the historic streets; withholding within many churches beautiful undying mosaic masterpieces that tell the tales of old. It seemed nearly impossible not to get beautiful looking shots of the churches.
Adam had once made a very good friend in Madaba named Yazeed, and he was featured heavily in this episode. Yazeed is a character worthy of his own vlog, as he knows nearly everyone in Madaba. Walking through the streets this 11-year-old was greeting and speaking with everyone. People called out to him to say hi and bless him well. It felt like we were with royalty. It felt humbling and comforting to know that this kind of close-knit community still exists, where as in larger cities there is little communication between people other than what is deemed necessary.
Yazeed had taken us to Saint George church and convinced the priests, nuns and guards to let us go to the top. One of the guards pulled Mohammed aside and whispered in his ear, “Don’t let him ring the bells when he gets to the top”. The views were unreal. One could see the whole of Madaba and the beginning of Amman on a clear day. The churches are kept in near pristine condition and the echoes of the hymns reverberated throughout the halls. Stained glass windows filtered the light into a beautiful kaleidoscope of colors, a pleasure to the eyes.
Our next stop was to be mount Nebo and then a small café at the outskirts of Madaba right near the Wadi Mujib Dam. This coffee house is Aldi Coffee House and it has been run by three local brothers who have tailor made it for tourists, expanding it year by year. I absolutely love it, and highly recommended that we end the vlog off there. You can read more as about the Aldi Café and the wadi Mujib damn here!
Our gracious host here was a Bedouin man named Hisham. Hisham and I had met prior before when Adam, Mohammad, and I were location scouting for this episode. He loved Adam, and he enjoyed our company as we did his; so he invited us to come the following week to film the rest of the Madaba episode at this location. He would open it up just for us.
The tea was undoubtedly delicious, and Hisham regaled us with stories of old as we drank warm tea on what seemed like the top of the world.
Adobe Premier Pro vs Blackmagic Davinci Resolve Studio
Taking episode 5 into post production I realized that Blackmagic Davinci Resolve 16 was becoming an outstanding editing software, the only thing slowing me down was learning about software optimization and keyboard shortcuts, which I easily learned along the way. After ten years of using Adobe Premier religiously, it took about a week to fully be able to switch to resolve and create a new, arguably better, workflow.
The architecture within Madaba was a huge feature for episode 5, so making sure the lines in the images were straight was an extreme necessity, and being able to have all the controls (including stabilization) all in one panel on the edit page of Davinci Resolve 16 was immensely useful. Stabilization took mere seconds for the most difficult of clips, not as advanced in regards to its settings as Adobe Premier, but definitely still as good as Premier’s Warp Stabilizer. The pitch and yaw settings allowed me to correct the lines, and to top it all off, just like in Adobe Lightroom, there was a much-needed lens distortion corrector which would remove any pin cushioning distortions with the wide lenses, and any unwanted vignetting at higher f-stops. I found it creatively freeing to be able to jump to the color page and have a fully-fledged Hollywood color suit at my fingertips to try out different grades. I definitely took advantage of the advanced color features for many of the scenes inside the beautiful churches, it would be a sin not to.
In Blackmagic Davinci Resolve 16.2 adding open effects such as dynamic light rays, then stabilizing, pitch shifting, lens correcting, color correction, noise reduction and sharpening to all the clips, along with music and sound effects, and enhancing the audio using the basic sound editor in the edit page of whole 6 minuet 1080p project exported in 4 minutes. 4 minutes. Episode 2 which was only 2 minutes longer and edited and exported in Adobe Premiere then subsequently Adobe Media Encoder took 14 hours after the dreadful November 2020 Adobe update. 14 hours. After days of talks with the Adobe team about fixing this issue and informing them that my machine was not at fault, as Avid Media Composer and Blackmagic Davinci Resolve functioned perfectly, they eventually released another update. Thankfully it fixed the unreasonable time of 11–14-hour exports into something more reasonable, an hour and a half. But now, the problem was all the footage was offline and relinking it didn’t work. This was it for me. The Adobe help page is pinned on my bookmarks bar and on my google home page because of how often I go there to request assistance. Thankfully they have great 24/7 customer service, but in contrast I’ve been using Davinci Resolve for all my coloring for the past 5 years and I only went to their help page twice. Once was when I found out my old laptop had an incompatible graphics card (despite it functioning exceedingly well with footage up to 4k) and the second time I reached out to them was to ask them on advice on what graphics cards and CPUs I need to have to run DaVinci resolve at full capacity (color, edit, visual effects, sound) without the risk of crashing.