Allow me to gaze upon your channel...
- Thread starter Klink
- Start date
- Status
Klink
I've Got It
@TheTNGMen
Of course. I'll keep going as long as people keep asking for advice/critique. Thank you for the kind words. Also, it's great to see you and your channel continuing to improve with every passing day!
Of course. I'll keep going as long as people keep asking for advice/critique. Thank you for the kind words. Also, it's great to see you and your channel continuing to improve with every passing day!
Jehoshaphat Christian Ray
I've Got It
Please do me
really apreciated it
ur awesome
really apreciated it
ur awesome
Winger94
Super Poster
Hi all! It's always good hear the ringing of some new bells so I want to catch this chance, because I really need some honest global feedback. Basically my channel will be Let's Play based, maybe in the future (if I will ever gather a fanbase) also vlogs for creating a deep bond with all the people who will eventually decide to follow me. Thanks in advance my friend!
Klink
I've Got It
@JustCraze
Starting with your content, you need to save up and invest in a high quality condenser microphone. Your headset mic, as good as you think it is, is extroadinarily low quality compared to a professional condenser microphone. More than that, judging by your 'Setup Tour: JustCrazy 2016' video, you have a portable air conditioner pointed straight at you. Never, EVER do this for future videos. I can hear your air conditioner blowing into your mic throughout a majority of your videos which is extremely distracting and annoying to listen to.
When recording you need to shut off any fans or air conditioners you have running to try and keep the room as quiet as possible. This applies to any unneccessary equipment in the room too. Anything that can potentially make a noise (with the exception of your computer of course) you need to shut off immediately. If you watch certain videos of Markipliers' (forgot which ones from memory), you'll notice in some of them he sweats profusely. It's part of the reason he has extremely good audio quality, on top of having a high quality microphone. It's unfortunate but if you truly want the best, cleanest possible audio from your recordings you'll have to suffer slightly for it.
In your 'It Happened so fast!: CSGO Moments 6' video, I'm noticing a bit of desyncronisation between your audio and visuals. The text you've added for comedic effect appears at least a second before the audio matches what the text is conveying. That can come down to a variety of factors, from the settings you've applied when rendering your video to YouTube's own processing codec doing what it does best (ie messing up your videos completely).
Branding wise there's nothing really consistent; your avatar, channel header and thumbnails are all treated in different colours, styles and use different typefaces. The closest visual aspect you have in terms of consistency is with the thumbnails for videos 'Yo Mama Jokes so funny: CSGO Moments 2' to 'The Dunes: CSGO Moments 6' and videos 'SAO- Kirito - SpeedArt' to 'Infinite Stratos - SpeedArt.' Even then, the colours used for the text is all over the place with no real regard for how they stand out from the background colour. For example, in the thumbnail for 'Yo Mama Jokes so funny,' the 'Yo' is treated in a dark purple/violet on a relatively dark blue/cyan background, causing the 'Yo' to blend in well enough that it's difficult to see. Yes, you can still see it but not as clearly as it could be.
You need to recreate your entire brand from scratch. Using beautifully drawn Anime art on heavily Photoshopped backgrounds won't cut it as it's not original and doesn't make your channel stand out at all. Think about colours, typefaces and visual styles that not only you enjoy but feel represent you best and build your brand around that.
One final point - steer clear of copy written music. While you tend to use Japanese produced music (mostly used in Anime) and can get away with it for the most part, it won't take long for copyright strikes to be sent your way. It's not a question of 'if' but a question of 'when' so to be on the safe side for future videos, use royalty free music provided by YouTube itself, from services such as Audio Jungle or Music Bed or better yet, scout out musical artists on SoundCloud or YouTube and ask if you can use their tracks. They get their music out there for more people to listen to and you get to use music that most people have probable never heard of.
Good luck with your channel!
@Jehoshaphat Christian Ray
Let's start with your brand. 8 of your latest videos are all very consistent in terms of font/typeface used, the way you've styled the text and the overal position of all the visual assets. That consistency is absolutely solid. Well done!
The problem of course is that none of the consistency carries over into your avatar and channel header. Your avatar doesn't match with your channel header and both don't match with the visual style used for your thumbnails. Your channel is all about you so having photos of yourself makes perfect sense. Use that as the basis of your branding and apply it to your channel header and avatar.
Content wise, you need to save up and invest in a high quality condenser microphone and pop filter. It'll give you a cleaner audio signal and do more to remove background noise within the room you're recording in and stop those plosives creeping through (Ps, Bs, Ds, any hard consonant).
It's a good start to your channel. Work on the issues I've pointed out, keep a regular upload schedule and you'll do well. Good luck!
@Winger94
It's obvious that you take a lot of inspiration from Let's Play channels like Markiplier and PewDiePie. From that inspiration, do you best not only to match them but exceed them completely.
As a Let's Play channel that uses a face cam, you'll need to save up and invest in 2 major items - a high quality condenser microphone and at the very least, a high quality 720p or 1080p webcam. You are using an external microphone which is a big plus but it looks like a simple omnidirectional microphone. Omnidirectional means that it picks up audio from all around it which means it also increases the amount of background noise it captures (your computer fans for instance). It's also not that high quality; compare it to the audio quality from your heroes and inspirations and you'll notice your audio isn't as clean or clear.
A condenser microphone has a cardioid pickup pattern instead of an omnidirectional pattern. What this means is that it pickps up audio directly in front of it but not from behind. Here's an image I've pulled from Pro Sound Web to show what each pickup pattern looks like:
From this, it should be clear why you should save up some cash and invest in a high quality condenser microphone. If placed in front of you, it'll only pick up your voice and knock out as much background noise as possible while also giving your vocals the cleanest, clearest signal possible. Additionally, it's also a good idea to invest in a pop filter for your microphone, as at the moment a lot of plosives are creeping into your recordings.
The high quality 720p or 1080p webcam is used to increase the quality of the video captured for your face cam. At the moment what you have is incredibly low quality; you can tell because of the visual trails left behind when you move around. The higher quality video capture will also give you more room to play with when cropping it for your videos.
Branding wise you need to work on everything. As the channel is all about you, you should use photos of yourself as the basis of your brand, instead of using promotional art for games with text slapped on. Again, look at your heroes to see how they do their thumbnails. You are consistent, I'll give you that but there's nothing unique about your thumbnails at all. On top of using photos of yourself as you brand, consider using the 'W' from 'Winger94' as another base for your brand; a logo perhaps? You can then apply that to your avatar, channel header and thumbnails for that added consistency.
One final point - your heroes and inspirations tend to overact in their videos which is great for a younger demographic but not for an older one. My personal recommendation is do your best to act natural; be yourself. The more you try to force comedy or force an act, the more fake it ends up becoming and the more you'll annoy your viewers. YouTube is all about the cult of personality. Viewers are far more interested in seeing the real you as opposed to the implied persona of you.
It's a decent start to your channel. Good luck and have fun doing this!
Starting with your content, you need to save up and invest in a high quality condenser microphone. Your headset mic, as good as you think it is, is extroadinarily low quality compared to a professional condenser microphone. More than that, judging by your 'Setup Tour: JustCrazy 2016' video, you have a portable air conditioner pointed straight at you. Never, EVER do this for future videos. I can hear your air conditioner blowing into your mic throughout a majority of your videos which is extremely distracting and annoying to listen to.
When recording you need to shut off any fans or air conditioners you have running to try and keep the room as quiet as possible. This applies to any unneccessary equipment in the room too. Anything that can potentially make a noise (with the exception of your computer of course) you need to shut off immediately. If you watch certain videos of Markipliers' (forgot which ones from memory), you'll notice in some of them he sweats profusely. It's part of the reason he has extremely good audio quality, on top of having a high quality microphone. It's unfortunate but if you truly want the best, cleanest possible audio from your recordings you'll have to suffer slightly for it.
In your 'It Happened so fast!: CSGO Moments 6' video, I'm noticing a bit of desyncronisation between your audio and visuals. The text you've added for comedic effect appears at least a second before the audio matches what the text is conveying. That can come down to a variety of factors, from the settings you've applied when rendering your video to YouTube's own processing codec doing what it does best (ie messing up your videos completely).
Branding wise there's nothing really consistent; your avatar, channel header and thumbnails are all treated in different colours, styles and use different typefaces. The closest visual aspect you have in terms of consistency is with the thumbnails for videos 'Yo Mama Jokes so funny: CSGO Moments 2' to 'The Dunes: CSGO Moments 6' and videos 'SAO- Kirito - SpeedArt' to 'Infinite Stratos - SpeedArt.' Even then, the colours used for the text is all over the place with no real regard for how they stand out from the background colour. For example, in the thumbnail for 'Yo Mama Jokes so funny,' the 'Yo' is treated in a dark purple/violet on a relatively dark blue/cyan background, causing the 'Yo' to blend in well enough that it's difficult to see. Yes, you can still see it but not as clearly as it could be.
You need to recreate your entire brand from scratch. Using beautifully drawn Anime art on heavily Photoshopped backgrounds won't cut it as it's not original and doesn't make your channel stand out at all. Think about colours, typefaces and visual styles that not only you enjoy but feel represent you best and build your brand around that.
One final point - steer clear of copy written music. While you tend to use Japanese produced music (mostly used in Anime) and can get away with it for the most part, it won't take long for copyright strikes to be sent your way. It's not a question of 'if' but a question of 'when' so to be on the safe side for future videos, use royalty free music provided by YouTube itself, from services such as Audio Jungle or Music Bed or better yet, scout out musical artists on SoundCloud or YouTube and ask if you can use their tracks. They get their music out there for more people to listen to and you get to use music that most people have probable never heard of.
Good luck with your channel!
@Jehoshaphat Christian Ray
Let's start with your brand. 8 of your latest videos are all very consistent in terms of font/typeface used, the way you've styled the text and the overal position of all the visual assets. That consistency is absolutely solid. Well done!
The problem of course is that none of the consistency carries over into your avatar and channel header. Your avatar doesn't match with your channel header and both don't match with the visual style used for your thumbnails. Your channel is all about you so having photos of yourself makes perfect sense. Use that as the basis of your branding and apply it to your channel header and avatar.
Content wise, you need to save up and invest in a high quality condenser microphone and pop filter. It'll give you a cleaner audio signal and do more to remove background noise within the room you're recording in and stop those plosives creeping through (Ps, Bs, Ds, any hard consonant).
It's a good start to your channel. Work on the issues I've pointed out, keep a regular upload schedule and you'll do well. Good luck!
@Winger94
It's obvious that you take a lot of inspiration from Let's Play channels like Markiplier and PewDiePie. From that inspiration, do you best not only to match them but exceed them completely.
As a Let's Play channel that uses a face cam, you'll need to save up and invest in 2 major items - a high quality condenser microphone and at the very least, a high quality 720p or 1080p webcam. You are using an external microphone which is a big plus but it looks like a simple omnidirectional microphone. Omnidirectional means that it picks up audio from all around it which means it also increases the amount of background noise it captures (your computer fans for instance). It's also not that high quality; compare it to the audio quality from your heroes and inspirations and you'll notice your audio isn't as clean or clear.
A condenser microphone has a cardioid pickup pattern instead of an omnidirectional pattern. What this means is that it pickps up audio directly in front of it but not from behind. Here's an image I've pulled from Pro Sound Web to show what each pickup pattern looks like:
From this, it should be clear why you should save up some cash and invest in a high quality condenser microphone. If placed in front of you, it'll only pick up your voice and knock out as much background noise as possible while also giving your vocals the cleanest, clearest signal possible. Additionally, it's also a good idea to invest in a pop filter for your microphone, as at the moment a lot of plosives are creeping into your recordings.
The high quality 720p or 1080p webcam is used to increase the quality of the video captured for your face cam. At the moment what you have is incredibly low quality; you can tell because of the visual trails left behind when you move around. The higher quality video capture will also give you more room to play with when cropping it for your videos.
Branding wise you need to work on everything. As the channel is all about you, you should use photos of yourself as the basis of your brand, instead of using promotional art for games with text slapped on. Again, look at your heroes to see how they do their thumbnails. You are consistent, I'll give you that but there's nothing unique about your thumbnails at all. On top of using photos of yourself as you brand, consider using the 'W' from 'Winger94' as another base for your brand; a logo perhaps? You can then apply that to your avatar, channel header and thumbnails for that added consistency.
One final point - your heroes and inspirations tend to overact in their videos which is great for a younger demographic but not for an older one. My personal recommendation is do your best to act natural; be yourself. The more you try to force comedy or force an act, the more fake it ends up becoming and the more you'll annoy your viewers. YouTube is all about the cult of personality. Viewers are far more interested in seeing the real you as opposed to the implied persona of you.
It's a decent start to your channel. Good luck and have fun doing this!
Winger94
Super Poster
Finally some brutal and serious feedback. I know that the mic is not one of the best, also I use audacity for clearing up the sound from as much noise as I can but everything has his own limit I guess, so yeah I should pick a new one (even though this is relatively new). For the webcam it's weird because I'm using the logitech C920, that can effectively record at 1080p so I don't know why you say it's low quality (maybe I need to fix something with sony vegas). For the branding yeah I know that the thumbnails are not unique and I'm working on that (I'm still learning how to use photoshop in the right way). I noticed that you didn't say anything about video quality so I assume that at least that is good. In the end I'm acting naturally, maybe I'm still a little bit nervous in front of the camera (also speaking in a non native language has his difficulties). This is only the beginning and even if I will never be able to surpass pewd or especially mark I'll work as hard as i can to improve. Thanks again!
Klink
I've Got It
@Winger94
Your video quality probably has to do with the settings you use to render. I say it's low quality because you look at the frame rate and you can tell it's running at sub-30 frames per second, most likely closer to 15-20. It creates that 'trail' effect - pick a video, watch your extreme movements and watch how there's a lot of blur and jitteriness. 25-30 frames (for that 'cinematic look') or 60 frames per second is ideal for face cam footage. Anything less just looks poor. A proper lighting setup will also help knock out any of the visual noise present in the video recordings. If a location is too dark then your webcam will automatically adjust its' ISO setting. The higher it goes, the more noise it introduces. Just keep these things in mind and experiment with it to understand what I'm referring to.
As for acting naturally, it's something you need to get used to. Everyone gets nervous in front of a camera. You have no idea how many times I've talked with people, prepped people to be in front of a camera, having all the confidence in the world and then just shutting down completely once the cameras are rolling. Indy, the host of our show 'Experience' is no exception. He gets better with every video but there's still a lot of tension and nervousness when standing/sitting in front of a camera. It happens to everyone, even your heroes. The more you do this the better you'll get until one day it won't become a problem anymore.
I've already mentioned this but what you have now is a good start. I can tell you're taking this very seriously and you'll no doubt do everything you can to make your channel work and be successful. Keep practicing, keep recording and you'll improve naturally.
Your video quality probably has to do with the settings you use to render. I say it's low quality because you look at the frame rate and you can tell it's running at sub-30 frames per second, most likely closer to 15-20. It creates that 'trail' effect - pick a video, watch your extreme movements and watch how there's a lot of blur and jitteriness. 25-30 frames (for that 'cinematic look') or 60 frames per second is ideal for face cam footage. Anything less just looks poor. A proper lighting setup will also help knock out any of the visual noise present in the video recordings. If a location is too dark then your webcam will automatically adjust its' ISO setting. The higher it goes, the more noise it introduces. Just keep these things in mind and experiment with it to understand what I'm referring to.
As for acting naturally, it's something you need to get used to. Everyone gets nervous in front of a camera. You have no idea how many times I've talked with people, prepped people to be in front of a camera, having all the confidence in the world and then just shutting down completely once the cameras are rolling. Indy, the host of our show 'Experience' is no exception. He gets better with every video but there's still a lot of tension and nervousness when standing/sitting in front of a camera. It happens to everyone, even your heroes. The more you do this the better you'll get until one day it won't become a problem anymore.
I've already mentioned this but what you have now is a good start. I can tell you're taking this very seriously and you'll no doubt do everything you can to make your channel work and be successful. Keep practicing, keep recording and you'll improve naturally.
Winger94
Super Poster
You are right in fact when I put the recorded file of the facecam in sony vegas it states that the facecam fps is 15fps progressive and I really don't know why. Maybe it's because I record the facecam with the logitech software so I should try to search for another program for facecam recording. Thanks again for spending your time doing this!
JustCraze
Member
Thank you for the feedback, I have been working on getting an audio technica coming with a pop filter. I barely use my air conditioner not that it is winter in Australia and moved it to my cupboard. My setup has re-arranged a bit. As for the editing I was using Camtasia studio, but recently got the money to get premiere so I have been learning for that. My friend said I need to work on my thumbnails so I have, although there is still some unorganized crap in it that needs to be fixed.
For the banner and profile picture, I like the idea of the lighter Profile picture and more noticeable. My branded logo is the JustCraze text in bignoodletiding font. I do get a fair bit of copyright strikes which I have won every one. I do not make money off YouTube so I let them take all the money from the video.
Once I blend everything in with the CSGO Thumbnails and the Speedarts all have there thumbnails I think I will be good.
Thanks for the feedback and I realized all this all the more and will continue working on my YouTube Channel!
For the banner and profile picture, I like the idea of the lighter Profile picture and more noticeable. My branded logo is the JustCraze text in bignoodletiding font. I do get a fair bit of copyright strikes which I have won every one. I do not make money off YouTube so I let them take all the money from the video.
Once I blend everything in with the CSGO Thumbnails and the Speedarts all have there thumbnails I think I will be good.
Thanks for the feedback and I realized all this all the more and will continue working on my YouTube Channel!
- Status