depended heavily on annotations

[Inspired Content]

I had been in the process of scripting out a whole bunch of video ideas in two categories that relied on annotations, and was set to begin the first one in June. well they discontinued the annotation feature and it's replacement doesn't have the functionality I needed. So rushed to script up a proof of concept before the cut off deadline and recorded an audio play of the first part of it. FeyTown Noir.

The two types of content are:
You-Choose Adventures
Choose Your own adventure style stories, planned to have things like puppet shows, animation and live action video with viewers choosing the course of the story at certain points along the way.

RPV- Role Play Videos
Single player RPG games structured similar to the You-Choose Adventures but with dice roles and item/inventory/character/skill components that play into the course of the story.

With annotations I was able to have a click in screen feature that skipped to the section within the same video that continued with the path you chose, now with that gone I have to figure out how to replace that feature in some way (preferrably not with 35 independent videos linked with end cards).

So far the only thing I think that has the potential to work the way I was hoping is to use non-clickable time stamps posted on a still frame for several minutes and having the viewer click at the time along the bottom slider to the time for their choice to continue.

there are some other possible ideas but they all have drawbacks that I'm not sure work as nicely. Number key jumps, skip ahead key shortcuts, back an forth between two videos, etc.

do you think the still frame with time stamp (and possibly 'choice x' with linked time stamp in the description below) works well enough with this type of content?

 

[Stike96]

I had been in the process of scripting out a whole bunch of video ideas in two categories that relied on annotations, and was set to begin the first one in June. well they discontinued the annotation feature and it's replacement doesn't have the functionality I needed. So rushed to script up a proof of concept before the cut off deadline and recorded an audio play of the first part of it. FeyTown Noir.

The two types of content are:
You-Choose Adventures
Choose Your own adventure style stories, planned to have things like puppet shows, animation and live action video with viewers choosing the course of the story at certain points along the way.

RPV- Role Play Videos
Single player RPG games structured similar to the You-Choose Adventures but with dice roles and item/inventory/character/skill components that play into the course of the story.

With annotations I was able to have a click in screen feature that skipped to the section within the same video that continued with the path you chose, now with that gone I have to figure out how to replace that feature in some way (preferrably not with 35 independent videos linked with end cards).

So far the only thing I think that has the potential to work the way I was hoping is to use non-clickable time stamps posted on a still frame for several minutes and having the viewer click at the time along the bottom slider to the time for their choice to continue.

there are some other possible ideas but they all have drawbacks that I'm not sure work as nicely. Number key jumps, skip ahead key shortcuts, back an forth between two videos, etc.

do you think the still frame with time stamp (and possibly 'choice x' with linked time stamp in the description below) works well enough with this type of content?

Yeah it would have been great if they'd kept annotations around, but the problem is that they didn't work on mobile or other platforms. I think they saw that people were spamming them in a lot of vids so that's why they've replaced it with end screens only at the end (that's just my theory anyway). As for ideas of what you could do, why not make a series of videos instead and have links to whatever the person chose either in the description or in cards (or both). I think that would be much better than relying on timecodes.

 

[LytaneVS]

I miss annotations as well. The only two ideas I can think of is to have more story elements in your videos to flesh them out more and have the choice at the end of the video with the end cards. It would mean that the videos stay at a good length and you don't have to create a million different smaller videos with lots of end cards.
The other idea is to release your story in a different format, say on a website or blog or whatever and have the story written out with links to the different choices, some of which can lead the person to some YouTube videos but honestly this idea isn't as good as having Annotations. Damn YouTube!!

 

[CristyTango]

Noooooo! That’s stupid. I wanted to do a choose your own path type thing eventually too! That’s poop. I have no advice, but I’d like to see other’s input too!