Martin lorton needs a hand

[coppice]

I had a video conference with the head of Youtube asia pacific a few months back and he confirmed one of the biggest problems is people don't know how to set up email notification. Hence my video at the time explaining how.

I wonder why YT don't either make this the default, or show a pop-up to set the option when you subscribe.

Wouldn't making it the default be a little spammy?

[VK5RC]

I have seen quite a few of Lorton's videos and for me they didn't 'click' ,  but as I haven't paid anything I don't think I can complain, they are a lot better than I could ever produce.
Even if I had paid, I think  you vote with your feet.  Bit sad it didn't fly for him but hopefully he had a bit of fun in the process.
Dave's technical (F Friday!) have me pausing from time to time,  Mike's and Shariar's as well.
Thanks to the all producers of content,  I have found YT  a great resource not just for electronics.

[EEVblog]

How about a new feature for privatised videos called subtitles so both non english viewers and viewers who arent great at english (or if the presenter can hardly be understood) could be a way to get more viewers?

Sadly, no, subtitles won't bring in a substantial new viewer base.
And it's actually very expensive and tedious to get subtitles for long technical videos. It would cost more to get the subtitles done than you'd get in ad revenue.

[meeder]

While I did enjoy a lot of his videos I sometimes got the impression that he didn't finish what he started. He was doing a very interesting comparison on a bunch of calculators but he abandoned that project.

[EEVblog]

You realize Dave sells a lot of the stuff people send him, after doing a tear down of it, right? He already has a space issue as it is, plus the money helps him to keep doing what he's doing.

Err, no I don't. The stuff just accumulates, gets tossed out, or given away.
I think the only exception to that was when I sold some stuff for charity.

[EEVblog]

They sent it to him, he made videos of them, he's free to sell them. If you think someone can make ends meet on nothing but YouTube ads and Patreon, well, that's not how the real world works. Sorry. :-/

For those curious, it's not a secret how much Youtubers make from ads, it's about $1-$2 average per 1000 views. If a video gets 100,000 views, you get about $100 or so.

[tszaboo]

And you should delete this before google sees it and cuts you off from adsense for violation the terms.

[EEVblog]

In Martin's defence, like me, he has a young family, a life, and a wife with a career. Posting "more videos" is an option that is often not possible.

I am sorry but this is a lame excuse.

It is not an "excuse", it's just an explanation of a practical reality.

This is the creator's problem, not his subscribers'. If the creator is not able to keep up with work (this applies to any type of work) he should not be doing it as this would be disrespectful to the family.

Who are you to tell someone they should not do something they enjoy?, not to mention how they should do it and how often?

[EEVblog]

And you should delete this before google sees it and cuts you off from adsense for violation the terms.

Actually, I do believe you are now allowed to:
a) State exact overall earning figures
b) Give rough indications of CPM's

May of the big Youtubers have done videos stating typical CPMs

[EEVblog]

entire point[/i] of mailbag!), or a live show comment or whatever.

Because you insist in going through every thing in the letters in detail and then ranting on them.  For example you could have covered the typed letter in seconds and given a link for those who are interested in reading every word in detail.

What's the point in doing a mailbag if I don't talk about the contents?   
In this case the letter was the only contents.

Better still would be to cut them out, as you are now attracting an escalating response from the nutter brigrade.

It's down in the noise.

[george graves]

If people want to listen to religion they will seek out and watch Dawkins or the opposite.

I have not done a single video on religion. I only mention it when it's mentioned in a mailbag (which is the entire point of mailbag!), or a live show comment or whatever. Why people get so uptight about that I don't know. Actually, I do, because, religion is special 

Come on Dave - religion and opinions aside, you LOVE it when you get those letters. You go above and beyond to make your personal opinion know.  Let's just call a spade a spade. And that's fine. You rock on with your bad self. It's your channel, and you can do what you want.

But if I send you a porno, are you going to watch it and review it on air as well?   

As far as Martin - he seems like a nice guy, but back when he was starting, I soon noticed little things that if Dave had a pointer he used in his videos, Martin would soon have the same pointer.  Dave used a white board, so would martin.  Dave would tear down a multi-meter, and so would Martin. It became almost awkward.

The most face palm moments was him after his basement was flooded. He'd cut back dry wall, and pant a tiny portion of it with paint - "water proofing paint" on the INSIDE of the wall, and vents to "let the wall breathe"  - Urrrrrrrrrrr -  When it's clear he needs a french drain.  It's really painful to watch as a home owner.

[EEVblog]

Come on Dave - religion and opinions aside, you LOVE it when you get those letters. You go above and beyond to make your personal opinion know. 

Actually, no. The clip of me opening the letter had me rolling my eyes and saying something like "I won't read it out, I'll just post a picture of it and you can read it yourself."
But when I shot the detail videos on the bench I decided to somewhat reluctantly read it and comment, being only fair because he went to some trouble to type it. So I edited that remark out of my talking head shot.
I can prove it if you like.

[george graves]

Ha!  I'm sure you did!  And the typed letter did give me some chills. More electrons, less of that. 

[nctnico]

Actually, worse than the typical reverberation is low frequency resonances, which are complicated and expensive to tame (you need bass traps).

Also, you need proper voice processing and dynamics processors have a learning curve.

IMHO you need to filter anything below 200Hz when dealing with speech. Most of the speech energy is in the 200Hz to 500Hz region. At the high end you can cut off at 10kHz or even less.

[borjam]

Actually, worse than the typical reverberation is low frequency resonances, which are complicated and expensive to tame (you need bass traps).

Also, you need proper voice processing and dynamics processors have a learning curve.

IMHO you need to filter anything below 200Hz when dealing with speech. Most of the speech energy is in the 200Hz to 500Hz region. At the high end you can cut off at 10kHz or even less.

Generalised recipes are very hard, because it depends a lot on the individual's voice, how he/she speaks or sings, the microphone itself and the room acoustics.

That said, cutting below 150 - 200 Hz is most useful in order to avoid the proximity effect when close miking with a directional microphone (the most widely used mikes are cardioid, hence directional) unless you use a specially designed one like this (in or dear friends's terms) puppies: An ElectroVoice RE-20, but it's completely unsuited for video, although just briliant for podcasts

But you don't do close miking on video, except when using lavaliers. And these are omnidirectional. Of course you need some low frequency filtering to reduce pops, but that's another issue

A slight increase around 5 KHz, known as the "presence peak" will make the voice sound a bit punchier (actually many microphones designed for voice already have a slight 5 KHz increase by design). A dip around 400 - 500 Hz will make the voice sound a bit less nasal, which increases
intelligibility.

The more complicated part is dynamics. Using a noise gate and a compressor properly (and when using a compressor I can't recommend the "parallel compression" technique highly enough) is the real difference between a horrible and a great sound. That done, a tiny bit of carefully applied reverberation(*), mostly early reflections, will help the voice to sound "more present".

Part of the difficulty is, you need someone else to adjust this for you unless you do it in post production. And you still need a decent enough set of monitors, doing it properly on headphones is harder.

(*) I've had famous arguments with a friend who is an outstanding sax player. He loves reverb, I don´t. Well, I do but in the right dose and character. Whenever I've recorded him he always missed more reverb. To the point that sometimes I call him "Reverbniczak" (He's Polish, just replacing a couple of syllabes)

[EEVblog]

I had a video conference with the head of Youtube asia pacific a few months back and he confirmed one of the biggest problems is people don't know how to set up email notification. Hence my video at the time explaining how.

I wonder why YT don't either make this the default, or show a pop-up to set the option when you subscribe.

Wouldn't making it the default be a little spammy?

Yes, but the option right there would be nice, rather than just the Subscribe button that doesn't display anything.
But changing anything on youtube is like turning an oil tanker. And if they do make changes, it's usually shipwreck!

[coppice]

But you don't do close miking on video, except when using lavaliers. And these are omnidirectional. Of course you need some low frequency filtering to reduce pops, but that's another issue

That depends on the kind of videos you make. If you make Big Clive style videos, where you only see his hands and not his face, close micing is a very realistic option. Especially if you use a headset mic, so it stays a nice constant distance from your mouth as you work.

[borjam]

That depends on the kind of videos you make. If you make Big Clive style videos, where you only see his hands and not his face, close micing is a very realistic option. Especially if you use a headset mic, so it stays a nice constant distance from your mouth as you work.

True, wasn't thinking on that, sorry I had Dave's videos in mind.

[Mechatrommer]

i'm from the school of high information per minute rate, MJLorton is not one of it. If the pace is too quick i can move backward a bit and get a feel of high paced english in the process, but if the pace is too slow, i tend to move forward but hesitated due to the risk of missing an information, but without doing so risk of time wastage as well, so slow paced video is a bit hard on the decision hence i tend to stay away where i can. local storage is another thing, i only save locally those who are only worthy my HDD space. but MJLorton's video are among those who add the spice to the world of global net informations, for example he is the only rare person who made the worthiest review of the Uni-T UT81B DMM / portable scope hybrid, i believe it will continually popped out in google and viewed by interested parties from time to time. i'm not sure if adsense can still accumulate and give the $1-$2 incentive per 1000 views in the span of a long time say 10 years? i hope so, for the good sake of information providers. if only i'm a fluent english speaker... 

[Falkra]

I never found his videos very interesting either.
An excellent example of someone who makes lonnnnnnnggggggg videos entertaining is Mr. Carlson's Lab! 

Yes, they are great to watch, even if some last more than 2 hours. 

English is not my native language (ok you already noticed that) but I really enjoy watching Dave's videos, and Martin's non-solar & non-thermal vids (I have no interest in these).
True that as said before, the five first seconds, still pictures and music are boring (IMO)...  but the real problem is - IMO - to be financially dependent on YT videos. This forces to make a lot of  concessions, whereas a real hobbyist will have less viewers but with no negative impact, they don't integrate a system. Well. Less.

+1 about Clive, we don't need 7 digits (and a half) precision multimeters and sci-fi-ready spectrum analyzers to produce interesting videos.

This is my viewing pact : I subscribed to around 20 channels similar to EEvblog. I don't watch everything, I skip a bit, and if a channel doesn't produce stuff that interest me, I'll end unsubscribing, because I don't really care about a particular channel, I'll go to another one. I think Martin Lorton is victim of his own choices. I hope he will manage to resolve the problems, but as a viewer, I'm not involved in financial stuff, Patreon and Paypal and all the videos about his website... well I got used not to watch his latest videos.

Also, it's really boring when some channels post endless videos about patreon and paypal... people know they can donate if they want, there's no need to teel them frequently.

Sorry for language errors...

[et328]

+1 about Clive, we don't need 7 digits (and a half) precision multimeters and sci-fi-ready spectrum analyzers to produce interesting videos.

First Clive video I saw was "Japanese Fanny Flambeaux doll"... 

[madires]

I've been told by many German viewers that for some reason they can understand fast paced Australian just fine (hence my very large German viewership), but fast paced Queens English they have real problems understanding 

Really? I'm a STEM guy, not a linguistic expert, but I understand Mike fine. If someone thinks Mike is talking too fast he should meet a former colleague of mine. He's talking two notches faster and like a waterfall. It's hard to follow him for more than a few minutes.

[dexters_lab]

i've been subbed to Martin's channel for a long time

it was all about solar power to begin with, but now for someone who does it full time he doesn't make that many videos and has drifted off topic somewhat. Like why the reviews of 2-way radios and thermal cameras?

i hope it works out for him whatever he does.

[SteveyG]

i've been subbed to Martin's channel for a long time

it was all about solar power to begin with, but now for someone who does it full time he doesn't make that many videos and has drifted off topic somewhat. Like why the reviews of 2-way radios and thermal cameras?

i hope it works out for him whatever he does.

I think the radio videos give an indication of why he's going for a part time gig. He was sent a couple of radios, but bought a whole load so he could do a comparison. It seems he'd struggle to make his money back and also turn a profit. I do enjoy Martin's videos though, I tend to listen to them while driving rather than watch them - it suits my commute to work nicely

[EEVblog]

But you don't do close miking on video, except when using lavaliers. And these are omnidirectional. Of course you need some low frequency filtering to reduce pops, but that's another issue

That depends on the kind of videos you make. If you make Big Clive style videos, where you only see his hands and not his face, close micing is a very realistic option. Especially if you use a headset mic, so it stays a nice constant distance from your mouth as you work.

All my behind the camera work is done with the internal mic on the Canon HF G30, manual level setting, no filters. As long as you are within half a meter of the internal mic, it gives great results.