Two Million Views On YouTube

Today, my YouTube channel passed two million views (or 4 million eyeballs). How the heck did that happen?

I created a YouTube account back in June and uploaded a couple of dozen time-lapse clips over the summer. At that time I had a only few thousand views. Then in September I uploaded the Reno Ballon Races video and things took off. What made it take off was getting "featured" (Who decides what is featured on YouTube is a mystery to me).

When a video is featured, a thumbnail imagage and link show up on the YouTube home page, so everyone on YouTube sees it. Hot air balloons must be some kind of primal subject that is of wide interest. While it was being featured, that video was getting about 50,000 views per day.

After a couple of weeks, the activity slowed down. But then in late October, it suddenly shot up again. It turns out that a rotting pumpkin video by someone else was being featured (as a Halloween gimmick) and my rotting fruit videos were showing up as being related (probably because they shared the same tag words). So as a side effect of another clip's popularity, some of my other clips were getting a lot of views.

Here's a table of the number of views for each of my videos.
-------Video------ ----Views---
Reno Balloon Races..... 878,722 44.0%
Rotting Watermelon..... 322,771 16.2%
Rotting Bananas........ 256,532 12.8%
Rotting Pumpkin........ 121,083 6.1%
Ant Farm ............... 73,558 3.7%
Candle Race............. 54,966 2.8%
Cat Nap................. 42,061 2.1%
Golden Gate Moonrise.... 36,046 1.8%
Chia Homer.............. 32,612 1.6%
Mt Shasta Moonrise...... 30,723 1.5%
A San Francisco Minute.. 24,386 1.2%
Lilies.................. 21,575 1.1%
Chinese Food............ 20,562 1.0%
Rocklin Thunder Cell.... 11,406 0.6%
Folsom Lake............. 11,116 0.6%
London Timelapse........ 10,421 0.5%
Country Wedding......... 9,282 0.5%
Hood Canal Sunset....... 9,185 0.5%
747 Takeoff............. 4,786 0.2%
Ohare Gate C10.......... 4,484 0.2%
Equipment B............. 3,928 0.2%
Equipment B............. 3,313 0.2%
Cheerleaders............ 3,098 0.2%
Sign and sunset......... 2,314 0.1%
Del Webb Scrapers....... 2,177 0.1%
High School Band........ 1,991 0.1%
Del Webb Paving......... 1,410 0.1%
Camporee Reveille....... 1,070 0.1%
Glorious Sunset.......... 803 0.0%

I guess you can say that the more unusual the subject, the more views it can get. Duh! Oh, and get featured or be associated in some way with a featured video.

Stop Motion Animation

Gem is a GBTimelapse user in Taiwan who makes really cool short films. His latest effort is called "Goner" and has just been posted on YouTube. I think you'll agree that it's a remarkable effort. Check it out and give him a good rating...

Lincoln Sunset Time-lapse

I've been thinking about filming a sunset from this particular vantage point for quite a while and finally went there Wednesday. I had been watching the sky all day thinking that conditions were right for a really good show. I hauled out the gear, headed over there and then spent about two hours capturing this. It's always a surprise to me how the clouds actuallly move. I make my guesses and then just wait and see. This one turned out pretty spectacular I think.



I used my Canon PowerShot S3 camera and GBTimelapse. To get reallly wide, I attached a 0.7x wide angle converter to the camera.

I mounted the camera on my Directed Perception pan/tilt head to add another element of movement. Oh, and I used a compass to plan my pan after calculating where and when the sun would go down. I've written some prototype software to control the head. It gets the job done, but needs to be streamlined to become a product.