6 things only YouTube Creators understand...

So, making YouTube videos is an art.  Something for a natural creator to undertake. But there are experiences that all video makers will share, whatever their video style, regardless of whether they make short hardhitting films, music, or perhaps just videos of a monkey riding a vibrating pig.

Oink.

6) Recording the video will be unreasonably difficult.

I have a variety of equipment to record with.  None of my equipment is top of the range, but it includes an HD webcam, a camcorder, and my smartphone.

The webcam is basically the cheapest 1080 one that I could get, and although it works, it isn't great.  In my computer room it inevitably gives an image too dark, unless I select the "Low Light Compensation" option.

Which solves the problem brilliantly!

Except that this option then makes the speech go out of sync, so you look like a poorly dubbed french film.

If I had a live stream from my webcam, it would look like this.  I haven't had that beard for months.  And I haven't even used that headset since I first got it dancing like a night elf.

Next up is the camcorder.  The camcorder isn't HD, and what's worse records in 4:3 aspect ratio, which probably means nothing to you unless you make videos on YouTube - basically it means that, for it to fit in YouTube nicely, you lose a chunk of either your head or your gut out of the video.

Meanwhile the smartphone is actually the best piece of kit, except for one odd feature.  If you have a modern smartphone, you'll know that the display rotates to whatever way you are holding the smartphone. Got it upside down?  Not a problem, the display will flip round.

However, the camera records a certain way up, and even though the display may look fine, if the smartphone records the "wrong way up" (which isn't obvious as you generally record YouTube videos with your phone on its side) it'll record your video upside down.

Which makes editing REALLY easy.

I hate technology.

Of course, I don't have the best kit to record with, but even if you do...

5) Your video will have a tiny, but critical, mistake in it that means after waiting four hours for it to render, it will be absolutely dreadful and will need amending.

Seriously, this happens far too often.  If you aren't a video creator, you might be forgiven for thinking that actually, percentage-wise, a large chunk of the video makers time is spent recording the video.

No.

Although you might spent a bit of time recording re-takes, and rerecording certain scenes, the vast majority of time is spent mucking about with the video on the computer afterwards.  As an example, I made a ten-minute video talking about video games, as a sort of audition for a gaming channel.  I really enjoyed doing it, but for the two hours I spent recording stuff, I spent about twenty editing the video.

And it still turned out bad.

But there will be some setting in the video editing software that you'll forget to change.  As a result your speech will be out of sync with the video, or the video will end up with black banners around it, or just be plain bad.

Yes YouTube, that's what I wanted. Some big black frames around my video, just to give it that "condolence card" look.

Oh. My. God.  That's the professional quality that has attracted an entire thirty two subscribers to me.

But rendering a video takes an age.  And if you do anything with your PC, it'll slow down and take even longer.  So, as a result, you'll have to wait at least half an hour, watch the video, discover what you did wrong, and repeat.

But eventually, you'll get the video rendered, it looks fine, and you'll start uploading it to YouTube.  Which takes hours if you're uploading a decent quality video, so you'll probably use your PC for other stuff in the meantime.  And you may well do the next one.

4) You will log out of Google in one of your browser windows, whilst your video is uploading in another window.  This will mean that you have to start the upload process again.

Yep.

Next!

3) Any time that you tell YouTube to publish a video, there will be a problem in that video, meaning that a shedload of tweets, Facebook statuses, and Google+ notifications go out, with a link to a video that you don't want people to see.

YouTube tries to be helpful.  It tries to automate the social media promotion stuff that you do, but it will either not work, and make you do it anyway (particularly when trying to post to Facebook), or when it works, about ten minutes later you'll realise that there's a problem with your video, and have to take it down, and restart the whole process.  And when the new video goes up, and is promoted, everyone will think that you're just spam posting about your video and hate you.

Obviously a joke - who could hate a chin like that?  Covered in cuddly grey spikes.

Finally, your video is live.  It looks okay, it has a custom thumbnail, it has annotations, you've done hours of promotion, you've done all the things you're supposed to do.  This one is bound to go viral, right?

And yet...

2) After publishing your video, for about the next six hours you grab your phone every time it vibrates in the hope that it is a nice comment about your video, or perhaps even a new subscriber.  Every time it will be an update from Candy Crush Saga.

NO I DON'T WANT TO SEND ANY OF MY FRIENDS AN EXTRA LIFE

After a few days, you decide to check out the videos statistics, and see if there's anything there that will help soothe your battered ego.

What do you see?  A dislike.

1) You pretend to be okay when a video gets a dislike, but inside you want to kill.

WHY?!?!?!?

Of course not everyone in the world will like your video, you tell yourself.  Of course they can't.  Psy's Gangnam Style has around a million dislikes. You have just one.

Plus, you've got more likes than dislikes, so on balance it's all good.

It doesn't matter. Someone disliked your video.

Time to go hunting.

You can't beat a wooden sword for revenge.  Splinters hurt, boy!

All's said and done, I still love making videos.  If you do want to watch any of my videos, which contain a lot of eating and a significant amount of vibrating pigs, they're over at www.youtube.com/ravenswingthog - thanks for reading!