In my last piece I mentioned that I was doing video editing. The video I was creating was a film version of my Rangz of the Kangz critique. It has since been finished and uploaded to YouTube and Odysee.
I promised to make more original video content months ago, and I feel this is necessary for any serious political ambitions. My school board election stunt has hammered this home, with me running into the quite serious roadblock of not having enough people know who I am. It’s clear that all avenues to growing the Daily Rake, including using the sewers of the internet like Instagram and TikTok, must be persued. While I still have a YouTube account, I might as well make use of it, and we can always throw Odysee a little love.
But I didn’t want to start with making political content. I feel my writing has improved with time, and I think it’s natural to expect a similar logarithmic improvement curve with video production. In fact I can already see a large improvement in my videos from my somewhat embarrassing very first ones, made in the summer of 2020, and more recent content.
Since I have to get back into the groove of things, I felt it was best to crank out some 6/10 video content rehashing much of my criticism for Rangz of the Kangz. Politics requires a certain amount of seriousness, and while I’m not about to get a lavish production team anytime soon, I’d like to cut out as much of any amateurish feel as possible, and it’s best to get the bugs out doing semi-political content. Besides that, I feel that I have a lot to say on Hollywood garbage, and there’s an off chance of going semi-viral with this kind of content and getting a flood of new views.
I won’t bore anyone with many of the tedious details, but there are a lot of time consuming technical problems and issues to overcome. As one example, I have a dual core CPU, and the original video I was editing was 2160p. This caused my computer to hitch and chug like it was 1997 again whenever that video was being previewed. Eventually I figured that I might as well transcode the original file to a 720p version, only to find out that this took over an hour, despite using 100% of my CPU.
That’s honestly a great deal less annoying and tedious than the actual process of editing, which I fully admit that I’m not particularly good at. I would estimate that to produce this eight minute video took about six hours. That’s a 45:1 work->runtime ratio, although it includes the hour spent doing the above. In addition to improving quality, I’m trying to vastly improve the speed of production, hopefully to hit a ratio of around 10:1. Since I made a lot of easy to fix errors, such as not having enough script written ahead of time, I think big improvements should come quickly.
I’ll see what kind of views I get for this to decide whether I’m going to continue with this series. There are more important things to focus my attention on.
