New Video: BRV003

[Flack]

More work on the floor and installing swivel seat mounts. I hope this one makes a big splash!

[obliterator918]

Nice editing!

[Flack]

Aw man, thanks -- I'm glad the effort was appreciated. It literally took me about 16 hours to go from "directory full of video clips" to the video I uploaded. I'm working on streamlining my editing process -- I've got to do something to make it a little easier without losing quality.

[AArdvark]

Just doing projects by yourself is daunting enough, filming the process must be overwhelming. What happens if you miss a 'shot', do you do another take?

[Flack]

So far, I've been erring on the side of caution. In this latest video there's a 10-20 second shot of me opening the swivel seat box and removing the wood planks that were attached to them. In reality, those shots were like 15-20 minutes long. Like, opening those boxes was an ORDEAL, and then removing the wood wasn't a big deal but I had to go find the right socket size and try and few, etc. So so far, missing a shot hasn't been a real problem, but I'm sure eventually it'll happen.

In most of these van videos, people have video of them pulling into parking spaces and stuff. And when you're a once man crew you suddenly realize that to get that shot they had to park, set up their camera, leave the spot, come back to the spot, leave the car and start walking to the store, then double back and get the camera. There are tons of hiking videos with people hiking off into the sunset and now all I can think is that they had to double back and get their cameras. In this latest video there are several clips of me carrying wood past the camera. Just know that for each of those clips I had to pick up the wood, carry it to one side, carry it past the camera, set it down, go back and do it again. And when you see it from different angles, I carried the wood multiple times over the same space. MOVIE MAGIC.

[AArdvark]

I liked the part where you grabbed the boom box only to see another, smaller boom box behind it!

[Flack]

hee hee. I did a similar gag in one of the previous videos where I walked through the same door four times in a row, each time carrying something for the van. I'll never be Buster Keaton or the Three Stooges, but I like tossing a gag or two in there. I actually thought about not even calling it out, but it seemed funnier this way.

Neither of the first two boomboxes I moved work. Well, one works as a radio, and one doesn't work at all. I have a third one that didn't make the shot that is untested. The last boombox I removed that may have looked slightly smaller is the bluetooth one I got for Christmas. It has a working radio but also plays music from bluetooth, usb, and micro-sd. It's not as authentic as the others, but it's by far the best sounding, most reliable, and most convenient. It also recharges via USB and runs for up to 40 hours. No more D cell batteries.

[AArdvark]

Wow, I saw the charts showing viewship length and such. I had no idea YouTube was so minutely detailed in their metrics.

[Flack]

Like a lot of things, YouTube is very "gamified." Views and likes and subscribers are like points and high scores. Shorts get a lot of views and sometimes a few subscribers; they're kind of like a loss leader but I'll be honest, shorts seem like a young man's game. Videos, "they" say, should be between 8 and 15 minutes in length for maximum viewership. I read an article that said 50% of your time should be spent on thumbnails and titles and the other 50% should be spent on the actual videos. Last year everyone said you need an intro stinger, this year everyone says those are out. I read an article that said you should edit out all your breaths and any pauses, because every second you're not cramming content down someone's throat is an opportunity for them to escape.

The carrot being dangled is monetization, which only starts after you get 1,000 followers and have 4,000 hours of viewership. For the van channel I have 250 viewers, and like 400 hours of watch time. 250 subscribers is like how many an 8 year old can get in 15 minutes. It's a very slow moving machine -- you get the viewers, eventually, hopefully, by creating content when you have no viewers. It really is sold as a "if you build it, they will come" system.

I just did some super quick math that's probably wrong since it's 6 in the morning and I only slept for 2 hours, but if my math is correct* I believe I shot approximately 1,108 minutes (18 1/2 hours) of footage for my last video, which ended up being 18 minutes in length. Of course that's not like 18 1/2 hours of running around like a director, like I think 30 minutes is a single shot of me cutting wood with a jigsaw. But ultimately you have to dig through all that footage and find the moments. It's just really, really time consuming.

And, I do love it. I like making the videos and being creative and all the stuff that goes with it, but in a way it's like I found the one thing worse than books in regards to the viewer/readership compared to the energy required to create it all.

(*I looked at two videos -- one was 52mb and 26 seconds, and the other was 74mb and 39 seconds. I kind of rounded that to be 1/2 second per mb. I checked the directory of raw footage for the last video and it's 133GB, so figuring 133,000MB, that's how I got the number.)

[dstone]

One of my previous projects came out to something dumb like 3 hours of work per finished minute of video. I burned out on that one pretty quick. That's one of the reasons why I like live switching multicam stuff, it really reduces the amount of time I spend in editing. But the videos I'm working on for the Explorer and hearse definitely won't work for multicam shoots. Moving the TV station has really burned me out on AV work and a bunch of troubleshooting. I'm hoping once I find a new job that will help reinvigorate my personal production projects.

I need to finish up the video from last year's Halloween inflatables, those videos seem to draw a bunch of views. I think I'm up to 140 subscribers and a little over 2100 hours now. It would be nice to get the channel to make some pocket change.