Let's talk about time lapse videos... (Patreon)

Here is the explanation on the two types of time lapse videos I can make - either I film the entire puzzling process with video, or I set up an interval timer to take photos every ~15 seconds, which I then stitch together to make a video.

I'll admit, it took me an embarrassingly long time to learn that my camera has a built-in Internal Timer, so when I started my channel, I'd film the entire puzzle with video, which took up a lot more space on my hard drives, but it means I also have a real-time video of those entire puzzle solves.

A few years ago,I used to upload these to my channel as long puzzle time lapses (I'd speed them up to about an hour, but that's still a long video!). However, the problem with doing that is that a very small percentage of my audience actually wants to watch an hour-long video without any sort of commentary to break it up. YouTube tracks what percentage of each video your viewers watch, and if, say, 97% of viewers are clicking off of an hour-long video after the first 30 seconds, YouTube won't recommend that video, and that also negatively affects all the other videos on your channel.

So, those long videos weren't getting a lot of views anyway, so around late 2019, I decided to delete all of the long time lapses from my channel (not just private them, fully delete all of the videos). And wouldn't you know it, not a single person complained, and in the next few months my channel grew exponentially. Of course, I also redid a lot of my thumbnails at that point, and also the pandemic made everyone suddenly very interested in jigsaw puzzles, so I can't solely credit deleting the long videos, but I definitely think it helped.

All that being said, I think this Patreon is finally the place where those long videos can live, so that those of you who want to watch them can, but they won't drag down my main channel. There are 20 of those long time lapse videos that I made back in the day, so I'll be posting them on here over the next few months.

Now, about the time lapses I'm making now, those take up much less space on my hard drive and are much simpler for me to handle while editing, since it's just a folder of a few hundred photos, rather than 40 gigs of video. However, it means the full time lapse is only about 5 minutes long for a 4 hour puzzle. I'll still be posting those on here because I think they're very satisfying to watch, but I hope I've explained the differences well enough so that you're not expecting long time lapses of every single puzzle I make a video about.

But, if the long time lapses get enough views and you guys are really enjoying them, I can definitely make new ones exclusive to Patreon, maybe with the mic turned on so you get all of the ASMR sound effects of clicking each piece into place. Definitely let me know if that is something you would be interested in!