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.