Video categorization, thumbnail, and title improvements

I made a video a bit back in which I talked about potentially doing snippets from time to time, which would essentially be lower-context videos of something neat from a session that didn’t necessarily warrant a fully-produced video, but was potentially interesting regardless.

As part of this, the key element was being able to make it work not just for my workflow, but for viewers as well. I wanted to do something that would clearly set expectations from the title or thumbnail, where one could easily skim through my channel and know exactly what they’d be watching with minimal investigation. I didn’t look too much further into it due to being preoccupied with other tasks, but over the last few days I think I’ve come up with a solution for it and some other things that bug me about my Youtube presentation.

I’ve just completed a basic but workable system for improved categorization, visualized by the video thumbnails. So far I’ve come up with a few different categories to describe videos, which I’ll note here and expound on.

• Typical. This is a standard video the likes of which you commonly see – the thumbnails for these will be the normal ones you’re accustomed to. These are typical gameplay videos and range in duration from a few minutes to an hour or more.
• Cinematic perspective. These are videos where I’m observing the scenario play out through a cinematic camera, generally because I died at some point in the mission previously. These are indicated by a blue stripe on the left side of the video which says “CINEMATIC”.
• Highlight. This is something I’ve wanted to do, but not without a clearly-visualized method for doing so. A highlight video is something pulled from a larger video, but which stands alone as an interesting clip. My intent is to post highlight videos immediately after posting the video that they’re from – the idea being that anyone who wants the full experience can watch the main video, while those that just want to see a highlight can watch it instead. These are indicated by a yellow stripe on the left side of the video which says “HIGHLIGHT”.
• Snippet. A snippet is a clip that may not have much context, but I thought was worth sharing in some capacity. They may be complementary perspectives to someone else’s video, or they may just be a quick and interesting clip from a mission. These have a violet stripe that says “SNIPPET”.
• Commentary. Videos where I’m talking about whatever happened in a mission, in a retrospective manner. These will have a red stripe with the word “COMMENTARY” on it.
• Training. While I have Art of Flight and Video Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures titles already, the “Training” tag may be used in the future to indicate a video that will help improve your gameplay or understanding of something – instructional content, in short. This will be represented by a green stripe with the word “TRAINING” on it.

Here are a few examples of these new-style thumbnails:

In addition to that, I’ve adopted a new naming scheme for my videos, inspired by a change chkilroy recently made. Video titles will now be the name of the video, followed by the game, and a few-word summary of the basic content in it. This should help to give a better at-a-glance understanding of what the video will be featuring, and should make it easier to pick from a large list of videos when time’s limited. I’ve retroactively applied this to my 2015 video list and time permitting may go back to apply it to older videos in the future.

Hopefully these changes help you better visualize the content I’m putting out, as well as help me to more confidently create highlight and snippet footage, knowing that people’s expectations for such will be appropriate from the start.

As long as you’re here, you’ll notice that… well, you’re here, at my site! I’ve reorganized my presentation a bit to facilitate more bloggish content in the future – you’ll see that the top-bar has a “Thoughts on…” menu that now includes subcategories for various things I might write about. I can’t promise I’ll use this tremendously frequently, but it does give me a nice, organized place to write if the need strikes, as it has here.

Anyhow – that’s all for now. Have a good one!