I’m not talking about makers dedicated to transferring knowledge in some form like Veritasium, but even those channels tend to get long-winded sometimes.
I was looking for a how-to video for something I was working on. Youtube is FBFW one of the go-to places for such videos. As I tried to find the info, I noticed that there appears to be an inverse relationship between the production quality and the ability to concisely transfer the needed info.
Say you’re trying to change a part on a car…
Higher quality video: spends inordinate amount of time talking about themselves and their videos. Lots of time spent talking about what they’re gonna do. Lots of time talking about all the things related to the thing they’re gonna do, but they’re not gonna do them on this project. If there’s two or more people working on the video, plenty of time taking about things tangential to the job, telling jokes, talking about other jobs they’re doing, other videos they’ve done. We’re 60-70% of the way into the video now. They show up where the work is to be done, and now they introduce guy #3 who will do the work while they bullshit and ask a couple semi-intelligent questions. The camera is far back and showing them poking around the thing, then zooming in briefly on the thing being done, then back out to show them. Now we’re done, and reverse the order of how we got to the work part - other videos, joking, tangential stuff, things they didn’t do…etc etc like and subscribe. Hope you caught the info you needed.
All the while the camera is operated skillfully to keep the shot right, well lit, keep the people in frame, good sound, etc.
25 minute video for 3 minutes of barely showing how the job is done.
Poor production quality video:
Some guy recording using a cellphone in one hand with a hand held shop light. You walk with him into a messy garage with poor lighting. He’s trying to maneuver both to show the viewer what needs to be seen. Hear the guy breathing. Camera swings around a lot. Dude’s pointing with a screwdriver at the places you need to access, what bolts need to be undone, and watch out for the thing you might break if you aren’t careful. He has to set the phone down to work on the thing, and he’s doing the work and picking up the phone to show the viewer what’s done. That’s it. Hope this helps. Thanks for watching.
Takes five to ten minutes, you’re probably screen sick from the cam moving so much, but you could successfully do the same job yourself.
By the way veritasium isn’t really good. I have some issues with the ways he oversimplifies but at some point you gotta and I respect that, but much worse is his inability to actually cover truth, instead choosing to only parrot what the company “graciously” hosting him told him.
I agree, they’re not perfect. It was more the format than the material. Veritasium is supposed to be informative\educational in format. Yes, there is some license taken with these channels to be entertaining and engaging, but I just wanted to separate that style out of just looking for “how to” videos - things that one would hope would be informative and concise, but more often are blathering and unfocused.
“Why make a good product if you can put your effort into making it just seem like your product is good? This way you can pivot around more flexibly. Instead of having to possess a wide array of hard-earned skills you can make specific content about, you can simply learn the skills of marketing, branding and style, and now you can bullshit your way through anything you want.”
-many modern business practices
One reason is that YouTube needs to be certain minimum length to qualify for monetisation or to enter trending.
Absolutely correct. YT/Google rewards ad space, longer videos offer more ad space, more ads push longer videos to the top via the algorithm that rewards ads, therefore creators make longer videos full of garbage instead of content so they get the most views and paid more.
It’s so dumb, too. It really didn’t take long for TikTok to start skyrocketing after they made that change. But of course, they don’t realize their fuckup and roll it back, no no, short videos are a completely different offering. So, instead they glue YouTube Shorts onto the side and I guess, to convince themselves that it’s different, they restrict videos to 60 seconds.
Now you’ve got videos that are less than a minute long, which basically don’t ever contain useful infirmation, because they’re so short.
And you’ve got the 5+ minute videos, which try to insert enough padding to make it movie-length, so you essentially won’t find useful information in them either.
On the flip side a lot of super informational videos do a poor job at conveying that information. That’s arguably as bad.
That’s true, and why I sorta carved out space for programs like Veritasium. They can be informational, but they’re also entertainment. The type of information they convey is different, too…concepts, history, whatever, vs a highly specific question.
Anyway, yeah. There’s definitely overlap and gray area.
