Tag Archives: videos

Another Clouds Time-Lapse

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With clouds in the valley before dawn, I set up a time-lapse camera to capture the cloud movement throughout the morning.

I don’t know about you, but I absolutely love time-lapse movies. They make it possible for us to see movement that is normally too slow to perceive.

On October 31, 2024, there were thick clouds in the valley below my home. I know from experience that our winter thermal inversions can put on a good cloud show and those inversions are happening earlier and earlier every year. I set up a GoPro in Hyperlapse mode and let it run all day. Here’s the first few hours of the cloud show, sped up with the hyperlapse as well as a 400% increase in speed in video editing. The result is a smooth, high-speed look at what the clouds did that morning.

Enjoy!

Why There are So Many Ads on YouTube

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It’s a money grab, plain and simple, and YouTube encourages creators to maximize the number of ads per video.

I’ve been a YouTube content creator for about 15 years now, starting my channels as a way to share videos of things going on in my not-quite-average life. I had the good fortune to create a video that went viral — 12.5 million views so far — and has not only earned me thousands of dollars since I put it on YouTube, but was the driving force to get my subscriber count on the FlyingMAir YouTube channel up to nearly 80,000.

My History as a Content Creator

It’s nice to earn money on content you create or, technically, intellectual property (IP). From 1990, when I left my last full-time job to become a freelance writer and computer consultant, to around 2012, I earned the vast majority of my income as what I insist on calling a content creator. (For some reason, many creators are opposed to that term. I’m not sure why.) I wrote books and articles and made videos for various publishers. I even did a little self publishing of books. I created the content that people wanted to consume. What else would you call that?

During that time, I was able to not only fund the training and asset acquisition for my next career as a helicopter pilot, but I also socked away enough money to retire* at age 62.

My YouTube channels — including the one for Flying M Air which I no longer create videos for — continue to earn me money with a direct deposit into my checking account every month. How is that money earned? Through advertising.

YouTube Ad Revenue

Love YouTube but don’t like ads?

Do what I did: become a YouTube Premium subscriber. (Sign up on the Web and not through your Apple device and you can save $5/month.) Although I was skeptical until I got a free trial, I’m now convinced that it’s worth every single penny. You’ll still have to fast-forward through the sponsorship crap, though.

If you watch YouTube, you know how annoying the ads can be. There are pre-roll ads and post-roll ads and mid-roll ads. You can skip some of them after a few seconds but are forced to sit through others. Most of them are short, but when you have three or four in a row, they take up (too much) time.

For a new channel that cannot be monetized by its creator, the creator has absolutely no control over the ads and doesn’t make a single penny from them. So if you’re watching videos on a channel with 567 subscribers, remember that 100% of the revenue for the ads you see go right to Google. (If that channel creator has a tip jar of any sort and you like the videos, consider sending a few dollars their way to motivate/reward them for hard work.)

Once a channel can be monetized through a share of advertising revenue, creators get a tiny portion — literally just pennies sometimes — on every thousand views. So yeah: unless a video has a lot of views and a lot of ads, you’re not going to make very much. I could go on and on about how some creators game the system to fool people into clicking on their content with misleading titles and thumbnails, but I’ll save that for another day. This post is about the ad revenue.

If you can’t control the number of views a video gets — and new channels usually have a steep hill to climb to get regular viewers — you can still control the number of ads that appear with your content. Again, there are three types: pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll. Google isn’t shy about letting you know that the more kinds of ads you allow in your content, the more likely they are to push your content out on viewer Home pages.

Mid-Roll Ad Idea
Google does what it can to get you to maximize shared revenue.

And that brings me to what triggered today’s posts: the “idea” that appeared on my YouTube Studio dashboard for my MariaLanger channel, which just reached the point where I can monetize ads. When I set up ads for my existing videos, I specified pre-roll and post-roll ads, but turned off mid-roll ads. Why? Well, the main reason is that I hate them and I don’t want to torture my viewers by forcing them to watch them. I try to make my content smooth and continuous and breaking it up with tacky, annoying ads in the middle of it is, well, tacky and annoying. I respect my viewers.

(That’s not to say I might not change my mind in the future. On very long videos, I can specify exactly where a mid-roll ad can appear, so I can place it in a way to make it less obnoxious. I’d rather not, but I’m also not creating video for charity. I want revenue from my work and the tip jar isn’t working yet for me. Want to support my content creation efforts? Buy me a coffee.)

The reason so many people allow mid-roll ads is because they see “ideas” like this in their Studio dashboard. They want to make money and they are seduced by the possibilities. It’s the same reason they set up memberships or Patreon accounts. Even if they started their YouTube channel for fun, once they get to the point where they’re making money, they want to make more.

The Trap for Creators

YouTube Content Creation as a Job

Please don’t think I’m discouraging content creators from making YouTube content creation their full time jobs. There are many creators on YouTube who do just that. They have teams of writers — many of whom lean too heavily on Wikipedia — and video editors and they appear as talking heads reading off a teleprompter with a script while stock images that vaguely apply to what they’re saying appear onscreen. They have multiple channels and they come out with new content every day. These folks are making shit-tons of money while they pay a staff to do much of the work. It’s a business for them.

There are a folks with more modest setups that do much of their own research, writing, and video work. Some of them are really good; I subscribe to more than a few. But the ones who are most successful have YouTube content creation as a full-time job. You see, once you stop feeding the beast, the beast looks elsewhere for its next meal.

So unless you’re lucky enough to have a viral video after you’ve already become part of the Partner Program with a share of advertising revenue, you can expect to do a lot of work to build a YouTube channel to the point where it actually makes real money for you. Good luck.

I definitely get it. My FlyingMAir YouTube channel was earning, for a while, $500+ per month. One month, I took in $1200. That’s some real, bill-paying money!

Of course I had mid-roll ads and of course I set up a membership program and even a Patreon account. Do you know what that did for me? It turned content creation back into a job, something I had to do all the time to keep members and patrons and Google happy. I woke up to this realization when I was spending more time editing video than actually flying and watched revenues drop as the Google algorithm favored other creators more than me. I had fallen into a trap and I needed to get out.

Eventually, I sold the helicopter and could no longer create new content for the channel. I killed the membership and Patreon programs so I wouldn’t owe anyone anything. It was a huge weight off my chest.

A New Channel

So here I am, facing a new trap with my MariaLanger channel. This channel is older than FlyingMAir and actually still has a bunch of the helicopter videos I created before I spun off the helicopter channel. But it never had a good subscriber base until recently. I have just 1852 subscribers as I type this and am getting new subscribers at the modest rate of about 90 per month. I qualified for the partner program back in August and just qualified for advertising revenue in October. I’ve earned a whopping $9.03 so far this month.

I should mention here why I suddenly picked up so many new subscribers. It’s the boating videos I was creating while I traveled the Great Loop. And I have at least 40 more to come over the next year or so. The video has been shot; it’s just a matter of editing it into something worth watching. And yes, I’ll be getting back to that, probably this week. Editing video is no fun on a laptop, but I suspect the 27″ monitor I just bought will make it less tedious. That $9.03 will go toward the purchase. (Did I mention how much camera and lighting and audio and computer hardware you’ll need to buy to succeed as a YouTube content creator? That’s something no one tells you.)

And That’s Why

So that’s why there are so many ads on YouTube. Creators want to make money and Google does everything in its power to convince creators to include as many ads as possible in their channel content.

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*My retirement is not a “stop working” retirement. I could never stop working and I don’t think anyone else should, either. Now I do the work I want to do when I want to do it — and take a shit-ton of time off.

Why It Takes Me So Long to Edit Video

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Simply said: I’m a perfectionist.

Back on May 6, I captured some footage to make a new video for the FlyingMAir YouTube channel. Although I sat down once to get it ready for publication, that didn’t happen that day. Instead, it took me until June 2 to get the job done. I began writing this that day as the files I’d put on YouTube were rendering.

Why does it take me so long? Why do I hate editing video so much?

A note about those video and audio sources…

I primarily use GoPro cameras, which are horrible in terms of reliability. If you’ve watched enough of my videos, you’ve likely seen ones where the audio or video cut out, usually because one camera just decided to stop working. External power is a must — battery life on those cameras is pitiful. I cannot monitor the cameras in flight — I got into enough trouble with distracted flying a few years ago to have learned my lesson. So I check before takeoff, keep my fingers mentally crossed throughout the flight, and check again on landing. And then hope the picture was in focus, the camera was pointed correctly, and the audio worked. I’ve been having so much trouble with my Hero 8 cameras recording cockpit audio lately that I actually record all cockpit audio on one of my old Hero 7s.

Of course, to get all of these cameras to give me useful video, they need to be mounted in a way that’s safe, secure, and doesn’t violate any FAA rules and regulations. It has taken me years to come up with the right solutions and I’m extremely protective of some of them. If you don’t see a specific camera setup in one of my videos, please don’t expect me to tell you about it.

The short answer is that I want to do the best job I possibly can. To that end, I often set up multiple cameras — I set up all four today — and audio sources. When I use those in a video together, they need to be synchronized. That means I’m usually working with at least 2 video tracks and 2 audio tracks.

Progress Dialog
With four cameras collecting footage, I have to copy data from four micro SD cards.

But before I can get those tracks into my video editing software, I have to get it off the cameras. I copy them from their micro SD cards directly to a hard disk where I store and archive video for the year. Each year’s hard disk is synchronized to a backup disk every time the master disk is modified. For a four-camera setup covering 30 to 60 minutes of flight time, that takes at least an hour. That’s when I start writing blog posts like this or doing other computer tasks. It’s pretty dull to just sit and watch progress dialogs.

Then I launch my video editing software, create a brand new document with the proper settings, and import the video files into it. I organize them into folders. Sometimes I change the file names. Then I start laying out the video and audio tracks and work on my least favorite task: synchronization. I know my software can do this for me, but I haven’t been able to figure out how. And, at this point, I’m getting pretty good at doing it manually.

I lay out all the video and audio tracks.

Sometimes I get fancy and I zoom in or out on certain video tracks. Or hide and display tracks.

I add titles and title music. I also add comments about what’s onscreen or what I just said.

I modify audio volume levels. When I remember to do it — and how to do it — I turn the single-channel cockpit audio track into a mono track so it doesn’t just play in one ear. (You’d be amazed how many people notice and complain about that.)

Resolve Editing Screen
Here’s the DaVinci Resolve interface showing my most recently completed video. There’s a ton of power in this free software; I recommend it if you’re serious about video editing but have a budget.

I do the best job I can with the footage I have. I am a perfectionist and achieving perfection is both tedious and time-consuming.

And did I mention that I make two versions of every new video I create? There’s the standard 1080p version for channel viewers (including regular subscribers) and the 4k version, often with additional footage, for channel members and Patreon patrons — the folks who generously contribute real money to the channel to help make it a tiny bit more affordable to make additional flights (and videos) when I don’t have a client picking up the tab.

When I make these videos, I use DaVinci Resolve video editing software, which is literally powerful enough to edit for television and the movies. I do that on a 5 year old — already! — 27 inch MacBook Pro with a second monitor to prevent the need to switch from one app to another on a single screen. It’s complex software and it won’t run on my MacBook Air so the only way I can get the kind of finished product I need — being a perfectionist — is to do my editing in my home office. And that computer is slow. So slow that I’m starting to think I need a new computer just to save my sanity.

During my flying season — which is basically the summer — I try to do this every week. I don’t usually succeed. This year I’m doing pretty well — so far.

I’m motivated by viewer responses to my videos. Thumbs up, comments, new subscribers, new channel member and Patreon patrons. The better a video does, the more motivated I am to make the next one. This season I’ll be collecting a lot of video; the helicopter is leased and I’m required to fly at least 10 hours a month. While I could hope and dream about doing that over cherry trees — where I’m compensated for flying — I’m not fooling myself. I’ll be doing a lot of solo sightseeing tours to gather new footage for my channel.

Let’s see how I do for the rest of the season. If I skip a Sunday release — well, you’ll know why.