This does bring up a slightly OT question. I was taking with a friend about your (and other) videos, and she made the comment that making one was pretty easy, just sit in front of the camera for an hour. I strongly disagreed, pointing out the research and planning you must have to do beforehand, actually shooting the thing (probably with multiple takes), editing, conversions, etc. I guessed that it probably takes 5 to 6 hours work to produce a 1 hour video.
So, just out of curiosity, take your "Select a DC-DC boost Converter" video. It's just a hair over an hour long. How much time does it actually take to produce a video like that?
I find this all the time, people just don't realise how much work is involved in even the simplest videos.
It's actually hard to know an exact figure for any given episode.
It really comes down to 2 aspects:
1) How many segments there is
and
2) How much physical or behind the scenes prep work is involved.
The easiest is say a live show or a drive time rant, as these are recorded as a single video file.
They require very little prep time, maybe 10minutes to set up gear ready to shoot.
Then it's just a matter of popping the video into the edit timeline and trimming the start and end, and add the intro/ending then let it render. Then I have to convert into Youtube and Podcast versions, then upload to Youtube and the server and then post the blog content.
So that's a bare minimum effort to produce one video.
All up that would take, I'm guessing, at least 1 hour of overhead just to do that stuff, not including filming time or time to watch a preview version. It actually takes longer, but I can do other things while video is rendered and converted (that actually can take hours).
That DC-DC video is an example of an almost zero prep-work video (#2 above), but much editing work, because it's not shot as a single video, there would be maybe 50 video segments to edit for that. Each one of those 50 clips I have to edit the start and edit points, and usually watch them all the way through to make sure it's a good take and makes sense and whether or not to include or leave out. That can take many hours. In this case I'd estimate say 3-4 hours editing minimum.
Add on the 1 hour minimum overhead, plus extra time for faffing around and your 5-6 hour estimate for that video is pretty close to spot on. And I've got my system pretty much down pat after all this time.
The extreme would probably be one of those meter shootout videos. I think one of them almost topped 200 video segments, not to mention the time it takes to actually set up and actually do each experiment. Plus re-takes, and occasionally playing back some footage to make sure I said something correctly (the joys of no script)
I wouldn't want to do the math on an episode like that.
And if you see me change camera angles during the video, that's actually done in sequence, so I have to move and replace my camera setup for every one of those shots.
I've found that shooting in sequence like that might take more time and fussing when shooting, but it saves a ton of time later during editing because all the videos are already in sequence, you don't have to sit down and figure out what needs to go where. That also almost entirely reduces the chance of edit mistakes too.
So I hope that gives people some idea of how much work is involved, and why it sometimes takes a lot of enthusiasm for me to get started doing one, because you know up front how much work is involved in that one episode.
Then of course comes the countless emails, comments and other misc work that goes into managing the show.
Guess how long Jeri spends on her new 5 minute A-Z videos? the answer will shock you!
That's why I have great respect for anyone who produces content.
Dave.
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