Monday, April 4, 2022

Where Is the N00b? He's Trapped In the Editing Booth!

Just a quick update:

The Thrifty Rocketeer asked me if I had any updates on things, as I haven't written in a while.

Well, my hospital stay is well over, and I'm mostly recovered, minus the occasional twinge.

My friend in Kenya succeeded in getting life-saving surgery for his son. The fundraiser fell short of the full amount, but he was able to put up the initial payment and take out a loan for the rest. Ochieng' is also recovering nicely.

I have been working on upgrading my YouTube channel, and while I've got some things in the works, I've also had some frustrations. I've been working on a video I think will be really useful to beginners getting into the hobby, as well as parents looking for info for their kids. I actually scripted and planned something out, rather than just throwing together some cool launch footage.

But I had to re-shoot it four times until I decided the video and sound were good enough. Now I'm editing. I only kind of know what I'm doing, so it's slow-going, but coming along. I was hoping to publish this video two weeks ago, but I think it will be done some time later this week.

I recently tried an experiment with YouTube Shorts. If you don't know what this is, YT Shorts are vertical videos of no more than one minute in length. I think they're kind of YouTube's response to TikTok.

I don't really understand TikTok, and I don't fully get YouTube Shorts either, but a lot of channels I follow on content creation for YouTube seem to suggest that they can add value to a channel and bring in views and subscribers. It feels like a really disposable form of content to me, but I figured it couldn't hurt to give it a try.

So I put together a quick short. This video (click here to watch it) is only four static shots of video I took when I taught model rocket camp a few years ago. I added a drum track I made myself, and a black end screen, and then posted it.

The video is only 12 seconds long.

Friends, let me tell you how shocked I am - in its first week, this little short video got over 2,600 views and brought in 9 new subscribers! A 12-second video outperformed every other video I've ever published during its entire lifetime, in six days.

Let's just say, I'm intrigued. And maybe I can publish something that will be useful to someone. We'll see.

In the meantime, back to work on this longer form video. 

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1 comment:

  1. Congrats and striking gold with your first video effort! (My impression is that TicTok is mindless video clips, and obviously, people got the buzz for your brief effort! Keep it up!)

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