The past few days have been “fun”… not quite as “fun” as having a root canal, but definitely more “fun” than finding out that the mayonnaise you just bought at the store and brought home is actually lowfat. And if you did not catch the little quotation marks around the word fun… in this case… fun… isn’t.
So… it all goes back to a post I made a while back about possibly trying the longplay video format. I decided to give it a whirl. So I took some footage of me running around and terraforming (I almost always have the camera running when running around the Gryphon Manor world) and I added a bunch of chill music and then I uploaded it… but I am getting a little ahead of myself. The “fun” started even before I got the video uploaded.
First off… this is the longest video I have ever put together. I was worried that my open source video editor would barf like a hyperactive toddler who ate too much cake and ice cream at a birthday party. To my eternal surprise and infinite satisfaction… it didn’t. Basically, I had three really long video clips with a bunch of music tracks… and almost no trimming or splicing… so my software handled it admirably. Then I went to export to my preferred format and framerate. That’s where the “fun” started. The export took about five hours with my poor cooling fans spinning like Sonic the Hedgehog buzzing on Mountain Dew. I dared not go outside to check my electric meter, but I am pretty sure that my poor system was responsible for a number of brownouts in the neighborhood.
Then… I uploaded the video… for… ten… freakin’… hours.
Yep. It is a big ol’ video and my viewing numbers are much closer to what kindergarteners learn to count to. In fact, my view numbers are probably not even close to what Mr. Beast spends on lunch each day. And for numbers that low, they don’t exactly roll out the red carpet. But I am not complaining about that “fun”. In a world where bandwidth and virtual processing are non-trivial operating costs… I totally understand how and why they allocate resources the way they do… and I agree with it. But just because I understand it and agree with it… does not mean that I enjoy the uploading equivalent of watching paint dry.
So… after all of that… the actual “fun” began. Here’s the thing… normally, I use a bunch of ragtime tracks in my videos. For starters, I love ragtime. However, and perhaps… more importantly, it is spot on for my Steampunk(ish)/Victorian era world. It is also makes for a happy up tempo and not too serious auditory background for whatever I am yakkin’ on and on about… so it checks all the boxes… including and perhaps especially the fact that the stuff is completely free. Most of the stuff I use is in the public domain and the licensed stuff has super easy licensing and does not trigger the copyright sniffer on YouTube. So to misquote Aladdin and Jasmine… dealing with audio copyright on YouTube for longplay videos was a whole new world.
But for these longplay videos, ragtime was not going to cut it. The paradigm is that I needed to play something soothing and relaxing. Back in the old days it was called New Age. Now it is called all sorts of stuff like Chill or Ambient. Basically it requires somebody with a PhD in music to tell the difference. I don’t have one of those, but I went out to the “free” music sites and rounded up a bunch of these tracks to use in my video. I grabbed some from Jason Shaw and his Audionautix site. His stuff is free to use, just give him credit. I also grabbed a bunch of Sascha Ende’s stuff off Filmmusic IO. Again… the stuff is free to use, just give him credit. And I got a bunch of stuff off Pixabay… which is where I get a non-trivial bit of my ragtime… but for this new genre, a lot of the artists have copyrighted their stuff… which is not a problem because when you download the track, you can also grab a copy of the license… and I will explain how that is important in a second.
So… with the video uploaded, YouTube started scanning the audio for copyrighted content… and as I fully expected, it found a bunch in my video. No problem… I had the licenses and so I started the process of lining up copyrights to licenses. But then I had two tracks that I apparently used… and yet the names that YouTube gave me for the tracks did not match any of the tracks I had on hand. After trying a couple of different ways to figure out which is which, I eventually fired up the video editor and scrolled to the relevant places in the timeline and read the file names. Basically, the artists had given new names to the tracks when they copyrighted them… or after they copyrighted them. Either way, it caused a hiccup, but I figured it out and changed the names on my side to match what YouTube called them. The hiccup was mitigated for now and into the future.
At that point, all the tracks were accounted for, but they showed up as under dispute and that it could take up to 30 days to resolve. Okay… I had not counted on that. I figured that there was some kind of automated process to validate licenses and I was worried that I would have to put off publishing the video for a month… but less than an hour later, the copyright warnings were wiped away clean. All of them… except one.
So… I figured that it might just take longer for that one, so I pushed back the scheduled release for the video by a day (it was supposed to go out just after midnight that night). The next day… it was still pending. So I moved the release out another day. And the next day it was still pending. So… I started to investigate. Eventually, I found a little line on the composer’s Pixabay profile that basically said that before he will accept any licensed use of his stuff, he needs to see the video it is attached to. Uh… excuse me?!?!?
I can understand where he is coming from. I don’t necessarily agree with it, but I do agree on his right to do what he does… but it completely breaks the licensing model and for a number of reasons, I decided to just not use his stuff. However… that meant that I had to go back to the original video in the editor, remove that track… find a track of approximately the same size and relevance (which was actually pretty easy) and then re-export and upload the whole shebang (that was easy but tedious in the same way that high school math classes are tedious… but far less enjoyable, if that is possible).
After the upload finally finished, I started getting the copyright notices again, and I matched them up with licenses as before… but this time… the new track was showing up as copyrighted… but I had no license for it. In fact, I specifically used that track because there was no specific license for it. However, I went back out to Pixabay to double and triple check that I had not missed the license somehow. Nope. I was correct in the first place. It was covered with the default generic Pixabay license… but it was flagged by YouTube as specifically copyrighted. What the…?!?!?
So… I went round and round trying to figure that one out and eventually, and probably out of frustration more than anything, I just grabbed the text from the generic Pixabay license and pasted it in there with a comment that there was no specific license for that track and I even gave the link to the track on Pixabay in case anyone wanted to look for themselves. An hour later, the video was cleared of all copyright concerns and as I write this… it will go live in a little less than two hours from now.
However… the entire experience got me thinking.
I have been doing this for a bit over a year and when it came to using other folks’ photos, graphics, or video… it all seemed pretty straightforward and clearly defined. Easy even. However, my first real venture into the world of copyrighted audio was like trying to walk through an unfamiliar room in pitch darkness… barefoot… with legos spread all over the floor. Every single step in any given direction would lead me to a hurdle with some pain involved.
So I have spent almost two days trying to figure out my alternatives for audio and music beyond the public domain stuff I normally rely on. Oh. My. God. For some reason that I can’t explain… the most confusing and complex aspect of making videos on YouTube is apparently the audio. Seriously. There seem to be an endless parade of subscription services out there to give you access to “quality” audio tracks to use on your videos… I mean “endless” as in sands of grain on the sand kind of endless. There are even some actual free options, but you really have to hunt around to find much quality content there… and when I say you have to hunt for that stuff… I don’t mean a couple of drunken New York stockbrokers out in the country hunting deer and shooting a cow because they don’t know the difference. I mean a professional bounty hunter that spots and instantly analyzes each and every possible clue no matter how tiny. Frankly… it is exhausting. The money you save in subscriptions, you need to spend on Red Bull to stay awake.
But I am really excited about the format… after all, it is one that I actually enjoy as a member of the audience… so I will continue to work my way through this learning curve. I think the worst of it is already behind me anyway. At least, I sure hope so.
But for anyone reading this, please jump out to the Worldbuilder page and look for the “Behind the Velvet Curtain” series and find the video there. Give it a watch. Leave a comment on YouTube to let me know what you think. I am really curious to see how folks will react to this one. I guess all I have to do at this point is sit back and wait to see what happens. Kind of like watching that barfing toddler at the birthday party. I don’t know what will happen next, but I guarantee that I will find it interesting and thought provoking.