techmoan
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Polaroid Snap Touch Review & Outro changes
🕑 Added 2017-04-18 15:51:10 +0000 UTC I’ve been focusing on retro tech for a while, so it seemed like it was time to mix things up with a camera review. This video looks a bit different to some of the more recent ones I’ve done as it’s not bookended with spoken sections to camera. Adding these would have delayed the video a day, plus they didn't seem essential on this one and I've spent that time working on something else...much needed changes to the outro.I explained recently that youtube are discontinuing annotations and therefore the part of my old outro that stated “Click here to subscribe” would no longer function. You may have noticed that this part of the video has been looking a bit tired for a while and that's because I accidentally deleted the original files a while ago, so the version included on the videos is an old 1080p render copied from an earlier video.
Youtube's changes forced my hand to finally update things…so I’ve spent the Easter weekend creating a new outro with footage collated from some of my more recent videos. The idea behind running these clips is to show new viewers that there is an extensive back catalogue of videos on the channel..and possibly encourage some of them into becoming subscribers.
You may have seen that whenever I make a video where my LaMetric clock is visible in the background, dozens of people ask me about it in the comments. I made a full review video about this device in November, but a significant proportion of the viewers don't seem to know that there are more than a couple of videos on the channel, so I hope adding clips of older videos might encourage them to explore.
However once I’d created an early version of the new outro and tested it out…I realised that playing this at the end of every video made the runout too long. I kept trimming it for length, but after a lot of trial and error, I hit on the idea of running the Patreon roll of honour text over the top of these video clips. This gave the clips more of a purpose..and I think it provides interest to subscribers and non-subscribers alike. I plan to swap out some of the video clips played during this section over time to keep things fresh.
Now for the scrolling text I tried the existing Star Wars type crawl, but it just didn’t look right without a star field to disappear into, so I’ve switched to a more traditional credits roll. iMovie only has two scrolling credit options and the maximum text size on this is a tad smaller than I would have liked…but until I get the opportunity to re-train myself in another editing package it’s the best option I have available to me.
After this section, right at the very end of the video I’ve added a 15 second ‘end screen’ onto which youtube automatically overlays subscription details and playlists. These can be seen by viewers on mobile as well as desktop devices and this is why youtube discontinued annotations, as these only worked on desktop devices but viewership is shifting towards mobile.
I’ll keep working on tweaking things over the coming videos, and I know that few people like change, so hopefully these ones won't have caused any distress. I think it looks good - it's nice to have a 4K/UHD outro at last.
In other news, I'm about two videos away from starting fresh on a project that I can document as I make it...so the behind the scenes making-of video will be along soon.
As always, thanks for your continued support.
