Visiting Funchal's famous Mercado dos Lavradores Fish Market

I have been busy editing my videos from our recent Funchal trip and have plenty more to go through! I was also thinking of the conversation that I was having with @orestistrips about how to manage video files whilst on the move, especially given their monumental sizes these days - I'll cover this later :-)

Anyway first of all, why not watch the video and then read on after that!

We start off at Funchal's famous fish market that occupies the ground floor of the Mercado dos Lavradores, which translates from Portuguese to English as "Farmers Market". It is a noisy hive of activity and utterly fascinating, so many different fish, from scabbard to swordfish. Some might ask, was it smelly? No it wasn't at all, they keep it incredibly clean, surfaces are hosed down constantly.

We walked through the rest of the market and then back out into Funchal, walking through the old town a little bit before heading for the city centre.

You can fid out more about the Mercado dos Lavradoreshere here.

The market covers a couple of large floors, fish, fruit, flowers and a load of cork products can be purchased there. It gets extremely busy too as you'll see in the video.

Technical notes

The Insta360 X3 that I shot this video with is a truly amazing piece of kit and I have found it easy to learn how to use it but I am a techie, some might struggle with it, so if any of you out there own one and want some help, please let me know. I can do some more techie videos on it if you like?

I decided not to worry too much about editing whilst we were away, so took with me my iPad, leaving the MacBook at home, a handful of microSD cards (which turned out to be a wise move) that I could swap over when I filled them up and my LAcie external drive. I can hook up the Lacie to the iPad but in the end, I didn't need to use it.

Installed on both of my mobile devices, iPhone and iPad, was the Insta360 app, that you can use to connect the camera to either device and edit the videos. Let me elaborate.

When editing 360 degree videos, there is a kind of two stage process. One to edit the 360 sources to export as video files and the second to import those files into your favourite video editing tool, such as Final Cut etc. You can in fact skip stage two, as I did for doing some quick shares of my videos, such as Instagram reels for example.

Using the camera is easy, as you just press record and walk around with it on it's stick, although you could clip it to yourself in various ways if you prefer. You can change the camera angles later in post production, it takes a bit of getting used to, again this might be better explained in video!

In the endI kept the files on the microSD cards until I got home. I then copied them all to an external drive and from there used Insta360 Studio 2023 to do some final edits and export at 4k for YouTube.

The mobile apps can only export up to 1080HD and to export any higher, then you need to use the desktop app.However you can edit the files on the mobile device to set the camera view waypoints, to speed up this later process when you get "back to the studio"!