Youtube Checking is Hell and Ruining My Life - State of Things #8

Update to the video above: The second render test that I began mid video was partially successful, with the video passing checks within 20 minutes, but the video only worked in 1080p for some people, and not others. Classic.

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Dear friends and the other 1160 of you who I don't care about unless you find a way to get rid of the one person I actually like, then I will whoever does that until it is a battle royale of bankruptcy and oh how I'll laugh,

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Today I wanted to address an ongoing problem in my life - Youtube checking. As you may have noticed with more and more frequency, videos have been delayed, late, or sometimes absent entirely while I remake them, and I wanted to prove my innocence.

For a long time now Youtube checking has been hell, and for the last month in particular, it has made daily content and uploads borderline impossible.

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So to clarify why this has become a huge pain, Youtube have added many layers of complexity to their video checking process as a way, I presume, to help creators with monetisation and copyright transparency, to questionable success.

Now whenever I upload a video, the first step is for me to fill out a short questionairre declaring levels of swearing, sexual content, violent content, drug and alcohol references, law enforcement depictions, identity discussion, politics, and much more.

When that's complete, I have to let the video finish uploading, at which point it'll begin processing, and various quality levels will be added. Only after that will checking begin, which is where an automated system will go through the video to make sure the questionnaire I submitted is accurate to a certain degree, and either approve it or demonetise it.

If a video is demonetised, I have to request a manual check from a human at Youtube who will go to whatever caused the video to be demonetised (we are NOT told which section of the video was the problem) and then if it remains demonetised we are told why. I always upload videos even if they are demonetised thanks to the Patreon.

After that, it then has to pass a copyright check as well to ensure that there isn't 5 seconds of a music piece from 70 years ago. If it fails to pass this either the video will be copyright claimed and monetised, with the copyright owner gaining all of the money, or copyright claimed and blocked, so the video can't be viewed but there are no consequences, or copyright striked, which is a much more length battle with permanent consequences include channel deletion.

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I've been waking up earlier and working longer each night just to try and get the video checking before I go to sleep, but in doing so I've been sacrificing the editing quality and my own sleep, so the content has suffered as a whole, in my opinion.

So I decided enough is enough, obviously something has changed on the platform somewhere that either makes daily content borderline impossible, or the current Youtube and Adobe advice about video export settings is outdated and no longer applies. Though it works eventually, at the rate things are going I could be down to a video every other day, and that's not good enough.

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First thing I'm testing is my own render settings for content, and ignoring Youtube's own advice on upload settings. I've created three testing presets for now, and I'm timing render, upload, processing, and checking times, then comparing the data. I'm currently midway through the third test, with mixed results so far and each test having its own problems.

My regular rendering preset gives the best audio and visual fidelity at the cost of it taking bloody ages to process. The first test checked exceptionally fast, but 1080p didn't work for everyone (this is the most recently published video) and quality was diminished. Next I'm testing a higher quality export in a different encoding preset to see if I can get the best of both worlds of quick checking but good quality.

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Now let's assume all the technical stuff fails, because there is a limited amount to what I can do, I am looking for suggestions and feedback on how to make sure the potentially 8 hours of checking completes before the video goes live.

I like to keep in touch with the community and the comments section, so I don't like recording an episode before the previous episode has gone live, so pushing the videos out later/recording earlier won't exactly help unless I delay reading comments by a day or so, but it is a possibility.

Secondly, I could record two videos back to back, and address feedback from both at the beginning of the next video session. I'd only ever be one episode behind on comments at maximum, like above, but it would give me more flexibility with editing.

The only problem I can see with that is some days it can take 5 - 6 hours just to get a lot of footage to make an episode out of, particularly in slower paced, less challenging series, and the idea of having to record for 12 hours solid doesn't seem too fun. However, this would give me the ability to take a day off if I needed to, because I would always have a one video buffer ready to go.

Now both are possible solutions, but before I change my schedule to test it I thought I'd ask here too, see if anyone has any ideas. Obviously I'll find a solution regardless, but I assume you have vested interest if you're here, so why not ask!

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In other exciting and less harrowing news, I have been in contact with a friend, who is remaining anonymous for now, who has some editing experience and the tools to do so, and might be on the cards to edit a secondary main channel series for me.

This way we can return to things like Crusader Kings, or other vanity series, as and when I feel like it, and start to move away from the homogenous Rimworld channel that the main channel is slowly morphing into.

There are still some problems to figure out, and there will definitely be some growing pains, but it could be a fantastic way to get more editing, decent quality content out, without pushing myself any further.

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As always, thank you for watching and remaining patient with this one-man channel, it still remains a massive undertaking even to this day and gets more and more complicated as time goes by, but hopefully you're enjoying the content, and that's good enough for me.

Generations II update coming later this week, just catching back up with regular stuff after my birthday weekend.

See you next time,

Sam - CEO, commentator, writer, editor, channel manager, community manager, social media admin, accountant, business coordinator, technician, sound engineer, decorator, and chef of Mr Samuel Streamer.