Video Quality Assurance

Last week I spent 3 days backcountry skiing with my two sons and one of my oldest son's friends. As I am trying to put out a YouTube video every week, I quickly assembled the footage, wrote a narrative, added some background music and posted the resulting video. In the first viewing, I immediately noticed 3 different errors. One would think I didn't do any error checking of the video while I assembled it but that would be wrong. I had gone through it over a dozen times.

One issue I had is that I had to go back and rerecord the initial narration clip. For some reason it is not as loud as the others and so I had to bump the sound level so that it matches the rest of the video. That is easy to do and by itself would not warrant redoing the video.

The second issue I found is that I have one movie clip where I have my thumb in the lower right. It is not large and easy to remove with a bit of editing. The sad thing is that one of my checks is to specifically look for my thumb as my action camera makes it easy to include that particular digit. Only after posting the video to YouTube did I finally see the problem. Again, that would not cause me to fix the issue and repost a new version.

The real problem came in the closing credits. I like using free background music from Bensound as all I need to do is identify the song and give the URL to the website.  As I created the credits, I hadn't decided which song to actually use. Rather than leave the section blank, I put the word "Something." Unfortunately that really did need to be fixed even though I put the correct information in the video description. I had to go in and delete the old video and re-upload the corrected one. Fortunately that didn't take too long.

It never fails. I think I have done an excellent job reviewing the quality of my latest video. Then I upload it to YouTube and I notice all sorts of problems. Fortunately I caught these 3 issues before anyone other than myself had the chance to view the video. Otherwise I would have lost several video views. Those that post frequently know how important they can be. Especially as one tries to grow his or her audience.

A YouTube Experiment

In my last post I mentioned I published a new video on YouTube about the Top 5 Steepest Ski Areas in North America. Today I published a follow-up video about the Top 5 Powder Ski Areas in North America. My experiment is to see if publishing content more closely spaced together leads to a wider audience. So far I have to say it has been somewhat of a disappointment. 

I published my "Steep" video and then broadcast it on LinkedIn and here on my blog. There are not a lot of regular readers to the blog and so I know it doesn't generate too much traffic. I do have over 500 contacts on LinkedIn and so I did get a lot of people watching the video. Some of those contacts shared the video with others and I managed to pick up about a dozen new subscribers. My hope is that those subscribers will continue to remain engaged and share the channel with others.

I published my "Powder" video a few hours ago and have not seen any traffic other than my own viewing to make sure it uploaded correctly. Perhaps I am not giving it enough time and people need to get notified that I put up the new video. I will give it a few days and then do some promoting and see if that helps. I don't want to rely on my LinkedIn network though and will have to come up with some creative ways to spread the news. If anyone has any ideas. Please feel free to send me a comment.

Top 5 Steepest Ski Areas in North America

Last night I was putting the finishing touches on my latest video, the Top 5 Steepest Ski Areas in North America when I realized that I needed one more picture for the video. I mentioned High Rustler at Alta but didn't have any pictures of the iconic ski run. I had already shown pictures of the trail map and knew that a quality photo taken from the road would convey the right message.

My daughter is a ski instructor at Alta and I asked her if she had any pictures of High Rustler. She didn't but did have today off and so we drove up to the resort together. Before getting to the parking lot, I pulled off to the side of the road and she took a beautiful picture with my camera. We then spent the morning skiing on our World Cup GS race skis carving high-speed turns on the beautifully groomed runs. A few hours later, we headed home.

Dropping the photo into iMovie was easy and it made for a dramatic scene in the video. High Rustler is really one of those steep runs that even advanced skiers have nightmares about. When I first started skiing it in college, I would have to force any fear out of my mind or it would paralyze me at the top. Today's photo captured that. If you are interested in seeing it, just watch the link at the top of the post.

Creating My Next YouTube Video

For the past several years I have been working on a single YouTube video and it is almost completed. This video has been rather difficult in that I have done things out of order. Normally I create a script and then go find content. This time I have a bunch of content from years of skiing at a number of different resorts. I created a script that matches my message and now I am trying to pull videos and images from my content to match the script.

While I do have some flexibility to go and gather new content because I ski every day, some of the footage needs to be from ski areas that are not near my home. I don't want to use photos or videos from others as that runs the risk of copyright issues. Instead I find myself filling in parts of the video with closeups of trail maps. It works most of the time but sometimes there is no substitute for viewing the beauty of the actual resort and not someplace similar.

I am looking forward to releasing my next video as it will be somewhat controversial. Unfortunately that is one of the best ways to get a lot of views. So far I haven't received a single dislike for any of my videos. That will change with this one. I am pretty sure I will have to deal with a lot of negative comments as people disagree with my recommendations. We'll see how it goes. Wish me luck.