(I don't expect to, this is currently "version 5" and I've watched it enough that if there's anything I've missed, I'm not ever going to find it)
under the cut: navel-gazing. getting here was a weird process and I feel like talking about it.
So, the basics: This is a nineteen-minute-long scripted piece to camera about a fairly uninteresting genre of obsolete technology wherein I discuss how and why I pretty much hate the entire concept of the things I'm talking about and how I wish I did not even need one of them, let alone four. This style of video is nothing new on YouTube (seriously, there are half a dozen large, established channels that could just as easily have made this exact video), there isn't any kind of complicated set or on-location shoot or single, weird, incredibly rare thing the video is about - it's just me talking into the camera and using a laptop, right? Simple video. You can go on YouTube and watch ten of 'em in a row if you want.
Here's the kicker: I have been trying to make this video (or this style of video, anyways) for over a year, and it has cost me at least $5,000 (and counting, since after making this video I decided I immediately needed to upgrade my microphone and B camera). That is money I frankly do not expect to ever make back from, say, a future Patreon offering - though that's not saying I won't try - and that's time I spent doing nothing instead of doing something in terms of creative output.
So, why do this? Why the entire fuck did I spend used car money on not making videos for a year when I could have done what everyone else does and just shoot whatever I could on my phone and start getting it out there? Well, I think there are a few reasons. One - probably the biggest - is that I'm a complete perfectionist when it comes to video quality. This video will be uploaded at 1920x1080 59.94 FPS (instead of 4K), the image quality on the B camera shots is not particularly good for 1080p60, and I had to significantly restrain myself from including a clip at the start of the video apologizing for both of those things as well as the poor audio quality on my cheap lav mic. I actually don't think this is a completely unreasonable position to take! The video's probably never going away, and while it's possible I could revisit the topic in the future, I suspect that would come across as barrel-scraping even if I put significantly more effort into the remake. I don't always find ideas flow readily for me, so I want to make sure I give each one at least adequate treatment, and I also believe maintaining some minimum standard of quality is necessary to properly respect the time of the people watching my videos.
Now, there's plenty of argument to be had about where the line is. I have heard that basically nobody watches YouTube videos in 4K or on a display with decent colors or decent sound or whatever else, but the problem there is that I do all of those things, and I'm going to notice if my output isn't up to the quality of the sort of stuff I watch regularly myself. See, the other thing going here is that, like, I never bought into the whole idea of YouTube as a platform where you could "just make anything with what you've got and put it out there". There was a time when Internet video at all was a neat thing, and then there was a time when people making whatever came to mind on a shoestring budget and putting it up there was a neat thing, and then I come along and start really getting into YouTube in, like, 2019 and there are loads of people making impeccably-shot hours-long video essays, and maybe unsurprisingly that's influenced my idea about what "doing it right" looks like.
When I was little, at some point I figured out I could plug my cheap digital camera into the television. I then had about thirty seconds of "oh wow I'm on TV" before I realized that, while a picture of me was in fact on the TV, I was not on the set of Last Week Tonight or whatever - there is a difference between "being on the TV" and "being on TV", and while I could make some extremely low-production-value stuff and upload it to YouTube, there would similarly be an obvious, vast gulf between that output and the stuff I watch and therefore want to emulate. From the start, I had a very clear picture in my mind of what I wanted to make, and I didn't see the point in "climbing the ladder" of production quality over time like I was in some kind of Video Production Simulator game - the cool part of society is that I can learn from other people's experiences, and I have a whole ass career going over here so it's not like I need to get something out so I can start rolling ad / Patreon revenue back into an equipment budget. In fact, part of the reason it's taken so long to get here is because I have been making worse videos, this is just the first one that finally looks like something that I would want to watch and therefore is something I'm comfortable with putting out there.
Another, far more mundane reason is that, well, it turns out that you really do get something for your money in terms of ease-of-use on the fancy studio gear. Shooting anything even halfway decent on a phone is a godawful pain in the ass and editing it with cheap software is even worse; on the other hand, with my multi-camera setup, DaVinci Resolve Studio license, dedicated studio space, teleprompter, color chart, and enormous file server, the principal work of shooting the video and making the first editing pass was smooth as butter. I turned the lights on, started the cameras rolling, sat in the chair and performed the script, and then I pulled everything into Resolve, synced up the multi-camera clip, did a mostly-automatic color grade, and then pretty much just hit play and worked like I was directing a live broadcast (which apparently comes fairly naturally to me? didn't expect that), stopping here and there to edit out bad lines. I do have a monstrously cheap video rig (not what was used here, of course), I've tried to use it for real work in the past, and I can tell that while it's possible to get good results out of it, to do so would feel like dragging my nuts through broken glass. I know there are people out there who have ideas that they're so committed to that they'll put up with that kind of thing, but for better or worse I am not one of them. I want to spend a few days writing and polishing a script, and then I want to go into the studio, read it through in one take, and have a first-draft edit done that evening. Turns out you need a whole lot of equipment to make that possible!
I guess the really good news is that the moment I set up that multi-cam clip in Resolve (okay, the moment I set up a test multi-cam clip in Resolve to make sure I had that procedure figured out before I shot the actual script) I had an immediate feeling of "oh shit this is what I have been missing - I am absolutely, 100% doing the thing I want to do now", since otherwise I'd really have wasted my money.
As far as why it's taken so long to get here, that's a more nuanced story. It's a combination of not having had a proper space to shoot in until recently, needing time to screw around and practice until I got to this point, forgetting that I did in fact have something I could press into service as a B camera, and just plain ol' I was off doing other stuff. I've had 90% of the gear involved in this production for about nine months now, it just took me this long to figure out what the hell I was doing with it.
Now, the upside of all this is that I expect to be able to go from 0 to 100 real quick. Now that I've got my workspace, equipment, and process sorted out I should be able to start producing videos basically as fast as I can research and write scripts (which is great, because I know that's an area I do absolutely need to practice on), and I will be making videos that fit my vision and the style I'm trying to produce, and I consider that alone to be a significant success. Sure, it would be nice if people actually end up watching the videos, but at some level - at least right now - I'm mostly just doing 'em for myself. I don't have any expectation of overnight success or anything, but I do feel like I'm actually on TV now.
Congratulations on making it to the end of this ramble. Happy new year!
