Folks, I'm currently busy annotating TR2016. That is, linking to source material on-screen when public citations can be provided.
While I do that, I've got 2 release candidates I'd like people to evaluate strictly for audio sync.
Release Candidate A - https://youtu.be/0BybPPIMuQQ
Release Candidate B - https://youtu.be/ouBt4x4Szjg
...because this is the first-ever video I've had to compress twice to get PPro MP4 onto YouTube (that crazy Premiere Pro MP4 vs YouTube issue), I'm worried the audio-video may be falling out of sync.
I have a very hard time determining if audio/video is in perfect sync, even when doing a personal A/B test. This is only 1/30th of a second I'm talking about here... playback devices matter. It may be there's both equally imperfect but differently imperfect? I can't tell which is better.
If there's any consensus over whether A or B is in better sync, that's what I'll go with. Please skip around both videos... maybe the sync is different at the start then at the end? If you have a sense one is better sync than the other, please let me know, and be sure to include how you watched it. (Phone or computer? Browser? HDTV device?)
2011 vs 2016 YouTube Tools
A few things have changed since 2011... one of which is the existence of tools for dealing with YouTube Annotations. If you work with YouTube check out these 2 things...
http://www.nikse.dk/subtitleedit/
https://stefansundin.github.io/youtube-copy-annotations/
...in particular YouTube Copy Annotations is something that did not exist in 2011, and it is helping me make these annotations portable between videos. Which is a big deal as creating the annotations is taking me days (using a finicky online editor).
The most important annotation of all is the link to Pandora's Promise in iTunes.
Pandora's Promise
I've tried to coordinate with Robert Stone on propagating Pandora's Promise as meme. He simply can not do certain things because of the distributor. My last attempt to promote PP largely failed as it was based on Robert Stone's own TEAC7 which was sorta wonky in nature... it wasn't a narrative piece. I mean I liked his talk, but that's because I'm already curious about communicating nuclear.
But it was a good exercise in taking content the director wants propagated (Pandora's Promise) and working around a distributor which is done promoting it.
So with TR2016 maybe as a small side-effect of TR2016 (hopefully) being popular on YouTube, Pandora's Promise will draw some fresh eyeballs that would not have otherwise heard of it.
This is what an annotated video looks like (as far as I've gotten): https://youtu.be/Eup6DX8QsOM
If that's distracting, they can be disabled in your YouTube controls. They ONLY appear on YouTube itself, not in embeds on other sites, and not on HDTV or phones. But most people watch on computers, so most people will see them.
(Oddly, COSMOS 1980 is no longer available on iTunes, only COSMO 2014 is. It used to be on iTunes, and was removed in 2014, and never made a return. I bought a copy of 1980 myself but now no one else can. So I'm linking to the Carl Sagan book instead of the show. Anyone know what is up with that?)
Translations
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1polwEZy7i86irlLTbtt7McCwXSYzG4NrS73po0u2Yx8/edit
...Danish and Norwegian have been started. Please feel free to jump in if you want to help. Likely TR2016 being popular will help this out as TR2011 did... most of TR2011 was translated after public release. Captions are great in that they can be perpetually updated and improved.
Here's what captions presently look like: https://youtu.be/ZJjA1nJwAcM
...yes everything is spread across different videos. I'll consolidate it all into the choosen final release... captions and annotations.
If anyone is rich and wants to throw money at a particular language, there's YouTube tools to do that with human translation. Just private message me ( or email me gordonmcdowell@gmail.com ) and I'll make sure you have all the assets to hire someone yourself. (Sorry, I don't want to middle-man money stuff. All I want is the captioning data.)
TR2016, in its entirety, is a pretty big video. I still have a lot of work to do.
I'd like to have a public TR2016 part-one collecting viewer metrics while I work on part-two. Changes needed to part-one can be addressed should I iterate part-one with the release of part-two.
For example, the single biggest comment I've gotten in public and private is the jarring intro... it is like I'm cutting in mid-sentence to "...bottle of water".
It is deliberate. Might be a dumb decision, is just my gut decision. I'll try some A/B testing on that (which requires a public video to do so!) and see if I was wrong. Certainly easy to iterate if I was wrong. What makes for the best viewer experience isn't always what makes for best viewer retention, and if jarring works better I can try explain why I think it did.
Data-based decision making can only happen with a public video. So I look forward to beginning TR2016 viewer data acquisition on Friday.
Friday Morning
I don't need the first week of data to be genuine... it will be mostly people immersed in this topic and so biased. The data I need is what comes AFTER that... people new to the subject of nuclear and how long do they watch. (And when do they stop watching.)
But for the first week, in particular for the first day, it would be helpful if people allowed their YouTube client to play the video in full.
It only matters if you do this ONCE. But it DOES matter that the video is watched to 90% of its duration, on the first day of release.
And of course, upvoting, sharing, and leaving a comment will help.
But you've probably already watched it and so might not want to sit through it again on Friday. So I must specifically ask that you consider letting your computer do the watching for you. It matters to YouTube analytic in a big way, and makes YouTube more likely to recommend the video to others automatically.
Thanks for all your support. Talk to you Friday.