Clicks and Catastrophes (January Update) (Patreon)

Hello you exceptionally wonderful people!

I hope all of you are doing phenomenal and that all the Pokemon you’re going to catch this week are shiny!

The Bloodborne video is out and I’m really happy with how it turned out!
I think the video has a really nice pacing that makes it flow nicely while watching.

But, while I’m really happy with how the final video turned out, the process to get there wasn’t that delightful.

The Bloodborne video had the most difficult production of any video I’ve ever made.

Pretty much everything that can go wrong went wrong.

So I thought it might be fun to write a quick postmortem, sharing all the catastrophes that accompanied this video's birth.

The following write-up may not contain infinite wisdom, but at least it helps me bandage all the little ouches that producing this baby caused me.

The very first thing I did was to waste two entire days of work.
See, the very first thing I did when I began working on the video was to spend two days reading a dozen of Lovecraft's stories.

It’s been ages since I last read Lovecraft and I wanted to have the stories fresh in mind when recording Bloodborne, for the discussion of Lovecraftian horror in the video.
As some of you may already have noticed, we never talk about Lovecraftian horror in the video.

So what happened here?

Well, as it turns out there is a lot to talk about when it comes to Bloodborne.

As a matter of fact, so much that I ended up writing a script that would have been far over two hours long.

I do love a long video essay as much as the next guy, but over two hours just is too much.
I can’t edit over two hours of Bloodborne before going completely cray-cray.

So some things needed to be cut.

The video originally contained a long discussion about how Nintendo created “Ocarina of Times” combat system, by translating “A Link To The Past” into three dimensions.
This combat system is now the skeleton upon which Bloodborne’s combat is built which nicely fed into the conclusion of the video, because in a certain way Bloodborne’s combat system is derivative of “A Link To The Past.”

The first script contained a level design discussion, dissecting how From Software’s phenomenal level design works and how Bloodborne’s bloody world is structured.

And finally it featured a long part about Lovecraftian horror in video games and how to best pull it off.

And yeah, all those things had to go to improve the pacing of the video and to get it to an actually producible state.

That’s honestly no big deal, we will return to all those ideas in future videos and the final video is better for it - but … researching Lovecraft and the other points that didn’t make it into the video, writing all of this and then restructuring the video several times just meant that I was already about a week behind my original plan before I even started cutting the video.

It sadly also forced me to cut  all the funny and stunningly clever jokes that the video originally featured. (It didn’t.)

Next I ran into massive issues with my capture card.

My capture card is almost a decade old at this point and has been causing problems for a while now.
So I decided it’s finally time to take the plunge and to upgrade my old capture card for this project.
Which was a terrible idea!

Turns out capture card technology is evolving backwards. Who knew!

The newer capture cards by Elgato are incredibly prone to failure.
I lost tons of footage, because the capture card just bugged out, and judging from what I’ve read online about this issue I am not the only one who had this happen.
Back to using ancient capture cards for the next project!

Lesson learned.

Next the editing of the video.
So first the things that worked.

I finally upgraded my Premiere to the 2024 version.

Turns out Adobe has been improving its editor the past 7 years quite a bit!
The 2024 version gives us access to tons of new editing toys to toy around with - there’s lots of stuff going on in the video that I wouldn’t have been able to do before - so that’s pretty cool!

However the upgrade sadly also slowed me down a bit, since a lot of functions just aren’t where they used to be and I had to regularly look up where to find basic stuff again.

But that wasn’t the thing slowing me down the most.

We have to talk about harddrives for a second.
See, videos like the Bloodborne video take up ridiculous amounts of storage while working on them.
The footage of the playthrough, the effects, the audio, the graphics, the presets and whatnot - they all together need a ridiculous amount of space.

Several hundred gigabytes of storage per video.

Since this is so much storage I usually save the files distributed over several harddrives.
Which is where the fun begins.

Because midway through editing, one of the hard-drives suddenly developed a severe harddrive illness.

For whatever reason one of the hard drives suddenly had an extremely slow reading speed.

Which meant that all of a sudden editing the video became laggier than Cyberpunk at launch.

That’s not a huge deal, I just have to replace the harddrive going forward and use the others in the meantime - however - it takes forever to move all the files that the video is using from the laggy harddrive to a working one.

My file organization is a catastrophe to put it mildly.

Juggling around hundreds of files to get the video working again took up a lot of time as well.

And that is before I got disconnected from the outside.

See, there is currently construction work going on in front of my apartment.
That’s something I usually don’t mind.
But usually construction workers also do not damage my internet landline by accident.

I ended up with no internet for two whole days while editing.

Finally. Once the editing madness was finally behind, there was one final stumble.
The video managed to get a copyright claim.
So a lot of the music and effects I use in the videos are from asset subscription sites.
There are sites out there that provide tons of music and footage and graphics and whatnot for a monthly fee.
The problem is, sometimes this music is copy-right protected nonetheless.
Which is exactly what happened with the bloodborne video.

The way this is usually resolved is to generate a license and to send it to the copyright holder so that they manually remove the wrong claim - but that’s just such a hassle that I usually don’t bother and just replace the music.
Replacing the music just takes 5 minutes.

But.

After switching the music I also have to rerender the entire video and upload it back onto YouTube which ate up my entire Saturday.

To put it mildly, producing that thing was quite a ride.

To top it all off the video is now sitting at a bit over 7.000 views and I have no idea if it will even crack 10k views before it completely falls off a cliff.

The reception of the video is great, the metrics all look good, the watchtime is through the roof - I honestly have no idea what YouTube’s problem with my videos is.

I’ve been running into so many problems with YouTube’s algorithm in the past years - it’s becoming a bit of a problem.

I just can’t spend so many hours on videos that end up completely bombing.

It’s so ridiculous. All the signals that I am getting from YouTube signal to me that I should stop bothering with the videos so much and just flood the zone with low effort content.

And that is something I fundamentally do not want to do.
But I also can’t operate in complete opposition to what YouTube wants me to do.
I just have no idea how to solve this.

For now I’ll continue with the videos as planned, but will try a bit more catchy titles and reduce the scope of the projects a bit.

I hope that makes YouTube happy.

If not there are a bunch of other screws I can potentially turn to satisfy the all mighty algorithm, but it’s honestly a bit frustrating.

With that being said - judging by the feedback I got, the people that ended up watching the video seemed to really enjoy it, - and at the end of the day I create those videos for people to enjoy - so even if the video ends up dead on arrival I still think it’s kind of a success.

I did not set out to feed a big algorithmical deity meaningless content juju.
I set out to create an enjoyable video.

And, in the end, I think I managed to achieve what I set out to do.
So whatever, really.
I’m sure the video will find its audience eventually.

Next one is Wind Waker.
I’ll start working on it tomorrow!

A huge thank you again to all you wonderful people.
You are honestly currently keeping the lights on and I really can’t thank you all enough for it!

I hope all of you are doing great and best of luck to you!