YouTube 2020

fractal surface

I recently made a video about Madelbulber2 fractal surface animations and had to deal with the YouTube user interface for the first time since last year. I don't really remember how the old YouTube interface used to work, but I feel that they have really tried to silo everything related to video creation in a separate domain that is well-isolated from the interface for viewing videos. Looking for a way to delete a video that I had uploaded to YouTube, I clicked on the "Your videos" tab in the left side navigation panel:

Note: due to a bug in the "new" Blogger, the blue "YOUTUBE STUDIO" button is cut off
near the upper right corner of the above image.

As shown above, this is a list of my uploaded videos, the most recent first. In this era in which user controls are routinely hidden from users, you have to hover over a video to see the user controls (see image to the right). 

 

weird icons

In this case, all you get three little meaningless icons. The first (an analog clock) might not even be recognized by some people in this digital age. It "obviously" means "watch later". The second icon I imagine is meant to be a list. It is to "add to queue". How that differs from "watch later" I have no idea. I've never used either of these "controls" for my videos. The third hidden control is the ubiquitous three dots vertical ellipsis which means "more of the same". What might that mean in this context?  ...watch later, add to queue, remind me to watch, I'll watch in my second life, bucket list of unwatched videos... no, just kidding.

 

Actually, in this case, I fantasized that there might be an "edit video" or "delete this video" option for each of my videos. Silly me. The popup list of "additional" options includes the two that are already displayed just above on your screen plus ONE additional new option, "Save to playlist". We all ask: why didn't they just show the "Save to playlist" icon in the first place? Answer: because users always want to have to click twice when they could have clicked just once. 🤷

My search for a delete option continued. I'll shorten the story because I did not know to click on the blue "YOUTUBE STUDIO" button. However, I now know that if you click on that button then you get a whole "new" set of tabs along the left side of your screen. The default is "Dashboard" which fills your screen with all kinds of useless information. However there are other tabs including one for "Videos". {... but I was just in the page for my videos... ???? No, silly human, you were in one of your pages for your videos, not the RIGHT ONE!}

 

If you click on the "Videos" tab then you get yet another list of your videos! (see below)

fail-safe delete

Then if you know to click in one of the little check boxes, more hidden controls appear (the black bar appears with choices "Edit", "Add to playlist" and "Other actions".) If, in desperation, you use the "Other actions" drop-down then you finally get to see "Delete forever" as an option. No less than six mouse clicks through a series of hidden controls in order to reach what I think must be one of the most commonly used features of YouTube. Well played, YouTube, well played.

Play Time

Google doodle March 21, 2019

Back in 2013, I was trying to adjust to the new YouTube and the fact that Google was pushing us all to use their Google+ service. Here we are, six years later and Google+ is being shut down.

iMovie 9
I've been learning to use iMovie 9 (yes, I am 6 years out of date). I also wanted to try Quicktime Player for screen casting. Today when I noticed the Google doodle for March 21, 2019 I decided to use it as practice for making a video (Bach Harmony).

iMovie version 9.0.4

Voiceover
My iMovie project for this video is 627.6 MB on my computer's hard drive, but I exported the video as a 238 MB .mov file for upload to YouTube.

iMovie 9 "event" folders

Jargon. In the jargon used by the iMovie 9 programmers, your existing video clips that you edit and include in a new video are called "events". You cut "clips" out of your events files for inclusion in your newly crafted videos. The videos that you make with iMovie are called your "projects". Gah. 😝

File management
Be careful about where you keep your files while developing an iMovie project. For the "event" library, there is an option for making copies of video clips that are used by iMovie. There seems to be no such system for audio tracks that are added to a project. Shown in the image to the right is what happened when an audio track was moved into a sub-folder of its original folder.

warning

The iMovie software could no longer find the file and a yellow warning icon was displayed on the audio track.

YouTube update

I finally went through the latest "update" of my YouTube channel and got the mandatory Google+ page.

Now I have to figure out how to use the new interface/controls for my YouTube channel. Oh, joy.

Even after all these years YouTube couldn't provide a simple interface for uploading and managing files. It is ironic to be batting the crappy channel manager's interface of YouTube while they proudly proclaim that it is "geek week". Using the channel art editing tool triggers a cross-site scripting warning from my browser (see below)....

 ....and magically brings up a useless Google Docs file search dialog window.

The folks at YouTube gave us the ability to upload a 2560 x 1440 pixel splash image for our YouTube channels, but at the same time they put a 2Mbyte limit on the size of the image file. If you upload a file that is over that size limit, you get no message saying that you are over the limit...YouTube simply refuses to display your image. For months now this has been driving channel managers crazy and they've sought help from Google/YouTube's crappy online help system and, of course, the geeks at YouTube have never fixed the problem.

The tools for controlling which videos from a channel get displayed to people and in what order remain primitive and annoying.

Popular
The image to the right shows other YouTube channels that the brilliant software of YouTube suspects I might be interested in. I suppose that since I have a playlist for animations their software algorithm will direct me towards...whatever these channels are. Ew.

Just Does Not Work
The image above shows how YouTube is supposed to display the profile image from Google+ on the YouTube Channel banner. The image below (lower left) shows that YouTube sometimes fails to retrieve and display the profile image.

I specified a video to be shown to new people who visit my YouTube channel and tested how it looks (see image above, right). It was funny...the audio could be heard playing but there was no video!

Quote: "Oh, go f*** yourself, Google."

Thanks for the update, YouTube!

Google is not evil, it only feels that way

2012 update on YouTube audio problems.

I tried to add a link to the update from the original post on this blog, but I got this amusing error message:

Wiki Drama

I've been experimenting with GoAnimate as a way to make video animations.

"Biographies of Living People" is the first in a series of videos about Wikipedia and Wikiversity.



GoAnimate uses Flash and like many video "applications" it is a hardware beast: I suggest using the latest version of Flash, a fast processor and plenty of memory. GoAnimate runs on "the cloud" and was off-line for a day recently when the cloud dried up.

After playing around with the free version of GoAnimate for a week, I got an email offer of a one month trial account for GoPlus. The trial GoPlus account allows you to get around their restriction on access to the GoAnimate voice-to-text feature. Also the trial GoPlus account gave me the ability to make a video that was longer than 2 minutes. This one is my longest, so far. In my experience, when a video starts getting to about 2 minutes and it has a large number of elements, then the whole GoAnimate video editing interface can start to slow down. I've had several crashes and once I lost about 20 minutes of video editing when I got a message saying that the save function had failed.

The best thing about the one month trial account for GoPlus is that it allows for converting your GoAnimate videos to Youtube videos. The second best "feature" is the ability to mix together characters from different GoAnimate character sets ("channels"). For example, when starting a video in the Star Trek channel you also get access to some characters from 11 other "channels". The third best thing about the one month trial account for GoPlus is that it allows for image uploads.

Bad Audio

I noticed that some of my old YouTube videos now have corrupted audio.

New version of Embryos from Earth:


I replaced the audio of the Old version:


An example of a video with corrupted audio:

Xtranormal video

Wiki technology began as a tool that facilitates collaborative authoring of webpages. We can go beyond text and add images and sounds to our webpages. I just created a short video for some dialog from the story Cellular Civilization. I used the xtranormal website to make the video clip. You can arrange to have your video creations uploaded to YouTube.

The Xtranormal video making system is still being developed, but it is easy to use and fun. There are some problems with their test-to-speech, but it is not too bad for the price (free). Since it is hard to understand some of the spoken words, I used the YouTube feature for adding captions. This is easy to do using a word processor, saving the captions as a text file and using the .sub file format (see the online instructions).

In this scene, Dexamene Gregores and Charles Parker are chatting. Dexamene is on a secret mission and Charlie is baffled by Dex and is trying hard to figure out who Dexamene is and what she us up to.

Related link: fiction wikia media project

YouTube and copyright

When I go to
http://www.youtube.com/my_account
I get a message saying:

"You have videos that may contain copyrighted material. Please resolve this."

When I follow the link for "resolve this" there is a button that says
"Copyright Info". When I click on that, I get to a page that says:

You have the following options:

1. Do Nothing

Your video will continue to play uninterrupted everywhere.

This seems odd. Am I missing something?

This has to do with a video that I ran through YouTube's system for adding audio to videos. Apparently YouTube is now giving users copyright warnings for having used audio provided by YouTube. Duh.



I tried to send YouTube support an email about this but I could not even find their current email address. Customer service with a smile.....you know they are laughing at you. I still do not understand the YouTube $$$ model, but while trying to send my email yo YouTube while using gmail I saw this ad:

Free Farting Video - AmazingFartVideos.com - 10 Fart Videos That Changed The World. Watch Free Instantly!

Previous related blog post(the origin of the video/audio remix that is now causing trouble) .

Editing Tutorial

I made a "3D screencast" about how to edit a wiki webpage. This new version replaces the old version that is still available at the Internet Archive. I have been comparing the Internet Archive's Embed Video Format of the new video to the YouTube Embed Video Format.

The YouTube version is not bad. The 640 x 480 pixel OGG video format version at Wikiversity is better.

---

Test of the Internet Archive embed flash video player:

3D Screencasting

The 1.7 version of DAZ|Studio came out and I have been learning how the use the new features such as D-Formers. I also made a short tutorial for lighting.

I've started experimenting with ways to insert animated 3D characters into screencasts. The goal is to make screencasts that are used for Wikiversity tutorials more interesting, essentially replacing a simple mouse cursor with an animated human figure.

Embryo Culture

I replaced the earlier "In the Lab" video with "Embryo Culture". Somehow I had messed up the "In the Lab" video file.

In the Laboratory

I uploaded to YouTube a new version of the teaser for "The Nanoepitaxy of Susanne Marie". The new version includes a scene in the Laboratory of Archology Base when the new embryos from Earth arrive.

I'm still having trouble with what YouTube does to the uploaded file when there has been some digital processing done prior to upload. I tried to use iMovie to slightly darken the earlier "greeting" scene that was over-exposed. I my have made it worse by adjusting the contrast. Also, in the new scene, my digitally-synthesized voices came out even worse than last time.

DAZ Studio tutorials

I have started to assemble a group of tutorials for how to create computer-generated animations.

Rendering models of living organisms - using DAZ Studio for rendering and animation of human figures and other similar 3D models.

Props and models for DAZ Studio - how to download and use polygon mesh models with DAZ Studio.

Animation with DAZ Studio - how to make computer-generated animations using DAZ Studio.

A nice DAZ Studio video:

YouTube status blog

I just found the YouTube status blog. This is a good place to check before reporting bugs.

Funny YouTube help video:

Embryos from Earth

I extended my "video teaser" for "The Nanoepitaxy of Susanne Marie". The version called "Embryos from Earth" includes some animated characters. YouTube now allows you to select among the three automatically-generated thumbnail images to pick the one that is used for each video.

I'm not happy with the way YouTube processed either the video or the audio for the part of "Embryos from Earth" that includes the animated characters.

Character Animation

I made a short video using DAZ Studio. This uses the "fairy" model that comes with DAZ Studio. I'm not sure which is sillier, putting wings on the fairy so she can fly or letting her fly by getting on the dragonfly.

Space Flight

I started experimenting with Bryce and made some computer animation scenes for a trip from Earth to a distant star system. A nice feature of Bryce is that multiple computers on a local network can be used to render an animation.

The worm hole was designed to have a series of 4 rings blast out as the ship entered. I need to go back and look at the motion paths in detail because rather than blast out in single file, the rings crashed into each other and bounced around.

Computer Generated Animation

I started experimenting with computer-generated animation. The short (50 seconds) video call "Planet Fall" at YouTube is a teaser for the story ""The Nanoepitaxy of Susanne Marie". I found Vue to be fairly easy to use with a good introductory tutorial and a big users manual. In contrast, Xface seems to have limited documentation.

Video Not Available

video removed for copyright while similar videos were not?
"we are likely either not aware of them or do not have reason to believe they are infringing"

Well, right, but it is all still mysterious. After three weeks of seeing what items from my video blog become "unavailable", it seems like there must be some people who have the job of requesting take downs of videos...but many of these videos are up for months before they are taken down. Does that mean that the people making the take-down requests do not know how to search YouTube or that the search function is so over-loaded that they cannot find videos until they work their way up in the rankings or can it take months to get YouTube to remove a video?

I've also seen some videos where comments are not allowed (but not many). I might be wrong and not remembering exactly what happened, but I had been looking closely at the two Cat Stevens videos that were in my video log. I had noticed that one had comments blocked, then the next day I found that it was removed from YouTube. Why that one? It would sure be interesting to know what goes on "behind the scenes" of YouTube.

Science Fiction Collaborations

I started a YouTube group as an experimental work group for collaboration on science fiction-related videos (see). I find it frustrating that YouTube has a 500 character limit on "comments", but I guess the logical approach is to have serious text-based work at Wikiversity.

One of the largest YouTube surprises for me has been the "lego video":