Is Finland becoming leader in veganism

Did you know there is only one McDonald's selling vegan meal? It is in Finland. In Tampere to be exact. At least it was first one if another one has that option now. Taco Bell opened first restaurant in Finland last week. They have pulled oats as vegan protein option. It is same stuff as in Nordic Oatballs in picture above. I am not sure if that is their first meat replacement option. When I searched Taco Bell vegan they instruct customers to replace meat with black beans. We got real meat replacement.

We also have president who has only one meat day a week. I would have prefered first openly gay president but I guess that is ok too. We seem to get new vegan restaurants and vegan foods to our stores all the time. I thought it was same everywhere. All vegan products are not Finnish. Finnish vegan and vegetarian products started to appear last year. Fuss around McDonald's and Taco Bell's vegan options made me think are we becoming some kind of vegan test laboratory because we like vegan and vegetarian options so much.

I have nothing against that. I am flexitarian myself having only two meat days a week. Other days I am vegetarian. So I am for all vegan and vegetarian options. I just thought we were coming far behind others. It was hard to find any vegan or vegetarian options two years ago. I wouldn't have even thought of vegetarian or vegan options back then. Having options have made me more and more vegetarian. I remember reading how good meat replacement options other countries had and wanting them here too.

Now we have meat replacements which are as good as if not better than the real thing. Some are so close to meat you may not even know it is not meat if you are not told. Just like I read what other countries had. Do we have it now as good as other countries if not better?  With one McDonald's and Taco Bell we seem to have it better. I am not going to Tampere to have vegan meal but I might try pulled oats in Taco Bell after lines become normal. Not sure about that. I like chicken wrappers so much I probably choose one of those.

Lux Helsinki 2016

I would be lying if I said I planned the video to look like this. I didn't know how one setting on camera worked when I shot this. It looked good enough to be published. It might look like it is planned but it wasn't. I will be doing video using same technique in near future. That time style will be planned.

Lux is my favorite event to shoot. There is always something cool looking and light installations tend to be close each others. Lux 2016 was plagued with cold weather. This video was shot last day of Lux. It wasn't much warmer than previous day but I couldn't wait any longer.

Autumn 2015

I will be publishing selected older videos to get some content to this site. If I remember correctly this was first video I shot outdoors. Original plan was to do something like videos I started to make last summer. The plan didn't work as well as I hoped. I had GoPro in my head shooting time lapse. It didn't give usable video. Time lapse was meant to show me moving from one place to another and shooting these videos. I also talked to camera but it wasn't usable either.

Video turned out to be ok. It took months to publish. I almost forgot I had this footage when original plan didn't work. This gave me idea to make this kind of short movies. Later these evolved into what I am doing now.

I moved from Vegas Pro & Hitfilm to DaVinci Resolve & Fusion

I planned to do video about this and I still might. I am not sure if I want to do videos about video editing or keep the magic on Youtube channel and talk about editing here. I mentioned about this in last post. Here I go deeper into why I made the change about two months ago. It was time when both Vegas Pro and DaVinci Resolve got new versions. I decided to give Resolve a try because Vegas Pro didn't seem to have anything new worth the upgrade price and I heard Resolve fixed issues why I hadn't made the change before. 

I have used Vegas Pro since I started to make videos to YouTube. Back then I got it cheaper since I had Sony's laptop with Sony's video editing software and it had VST support. I didn't found VST support from other software. Now other editing software have it. Resolve included. I tested Resolve earlier but stayed with Vegas Pro. Resolve used too much disc space with proxy files and it was unusable without using proxy files. That was deal-breaker. Even without it Vegas Pro more convenient and faster. New version promised to fix that.

Vegas Pro is still more convenient and faster but I moved to DaVinci Resolve. To be exact I moved from Vegas Pro and HitFilm to DaVinci Resolve and BlackMagic Fusion. HitFilm and Fusion were big reason why I made change. At the moment I am using free versions of Resolve and Fusion. I plan to go paid version of Fusion. I am not so sure about Resolve yet. Staying with Vegas Pro would have become cheaper if I buy Fusion. There was learning curve with new software but I still made the change. So what made me change the software.

Reason was quality of videos. Resolve and Fusion give more professional look than Vegas Pro and HitFilm. You can get good looking video and effects with Vegas Pro and HitFilm but Resolve and Fusion beat them in quality. Vegas Pro is easier and faster to use. Titles are also better on Vegas Pro. I miss ease of use of Vegas Pro sometimes. But having video look as it looked during color grading turn scales towards Resolve. That is not the case with Vegas Pro. Colors in video depend on what video format you use. Resolve's videos also look better on YouTube. Resolve has same or similar dials as Lightroom which I used before getting into videos. It has may important build in function which need plugins in Vegas Pro. Video stabilization being one.

Resolve is color grading software which has become video editing software. I don't think this version is quite there yet. It is close enough for me to make the move. I haven't used Fusion enough to really judge it. Based on what I have used it the interface is better than in HitFilm. Node based workflow feels so natural once you learn it. HitFilm might have something I really miss once I get deeper into Fusion and special effect. So far Fusion beats Hitfilm. I am not saying I am not losing anything I don't miss. What I would miss going back to Vegas Pro and HitFilm is the reason I am not going back.

Stranger Things season 2

This was made for kvestionmovies.com. I want to talk little bit about the video. You should check it even when thumb looks bit ugly. I am not completely happy with it. It took so long to edit this video that I was too tired to spend more time on thumb.

This is my first published video with special effects. I did test before but never published them to wider audience. I did tests with Vegas Pro & Hitfilm combo. This was done with DaVinci Resolve. I will talk about why I changed from Vegas to Resolve in future.

I think this turned out to be ok even when it was my first time doing this effect in Resolve and having too little of usable footage. I tried to use manual focus with new lens. It didn't work as well as I expected. More I shot better I got at it but I didn't get enough usable footage.

I guess I could do something with this domain

I have had this domain for couple years if not longer. I got it because I wanted to have domain based on my nick in case I want to use it in future. I guess future is now. I had simple web page on this domain which should have been updated automatically. It had stopped working at some point. I had blog at kvesti.net. It didn't have https and that made me hesitant to use it. It was also under suspicious actions from bots. I paid for both website and blog platforms. I didn't like them that much.

Couple days ago time for annual renewal was coming close. I decided to check what else was available. I found paid service which felt good and also tried Blogger on side. I built quite similar page with both ones. Blogger was quite good but it didn't give as professional and serious feel as the paid service. Lack of https for own domains was big no no. I like Blogger. I will continue to have kvestionmovies.com on it. It doesn't need as professional and serious feel as I want to have with this domain. It is serious site but it doesn't gain anything from changing it to another platform and I might lose posts or at least comments.

Paid platform just felt better. Not much but it felt better enough and it had https. Blogger version looked good but it was blog when paid version was proper website with blog. Sharing to Blogger was easier but that was almost only thing mattering better in Blogger besides the price. This is not too expensive for what it gives but free is always nice. Somethings are harder in paid version. Some of those make me think harder what I put on the site. I hope it makes site better. There will be photos or videos on each posts. At least until I get too lazy to do that. You can thank Blogger template I tested for it. The template looked better if there was video or photo on post because it used the video or photo on background too.

I don't have big plans for this domain at the moment. I am not that far into future yet. I have wanted to write other things that movies and tv. Kvesti.net was on hold for reasons I mentioned. I want to have more on here. Until I figure out what it could be blogging and sharing videos will have to do. I will have to figure out what I want to say in videos and what in blog posts.

For those who wonder what happened to all the posts on kvesti.net. I realised I should have backed them up only after I had cancelled the service. I am not sure if I could have uploaded them on anywhere else but I could have had there somewhere. I might have older backup somewhere from time when I seriously planned moving the blog to Blogger. Back then there wasn't supported way to do it. I know there is unsupported way but I wasn't confident it still worked. I had moved blog to Blogger before and it didn't work as smoothly as I would have liked. I think back then the way was supported.