Author: Zebulan

Over 2 ¹⁄₂ years ago, the 3rd video on the SuperGeniusZeb channel was released. It was also the 3rd episode of SuperGeniusZeb Plays Minecraft, because that was the only series on the channel back then.

And back then, I was trying to release an episode approximately every week. I managed to keep up this pace for a while, but pushing out episodes at that rate while also trying to make them decent quality isn’t easy, and so these days the episodes are pretty spread out.

Like many of the early episodes, “The Creepy Cave” is kind of boring… not that much happens. Also like the first 2 episodes, I recently decided to do a re-edit of this episode to cut out a lot of the pointless, redundant, or particularly boring footage.

Upon watching the episode while preparing for the re-edit, however, I was pleasantly surprised to see that I had already improved a great deal from the previous 2 episodes. It was still far from great, but it was a step in the right direction.

For example, I had already learned to try and keep talking while recording, which along with my increasing use of cuts, helped to cut down on the amount of “quiet time”. I also didn’t have nearly as many goof-ups in my sentences, though I still made mistakes and sometimes trailed off or paused awkwardly during statements.

This episode also features my first “clever/funny” intro. What does that mean? Well, having seen how some Minecraft YouTubers would often start episodes of their let’s play series with interesting situations and/or entertaining dialogue, I was inspired to do something similar. So, after I died after falling from a tree, I decided to make that the start of my episode, and integrate it into what was an early version of the greeting I now use in the start of all SGZ Plays Minecraft episodes.

And speaking of intros, let’s talk about outros. Starting with episode 2, I decided to try and end every episode with music and a To be continued text overlay. this episode continues that plan. I ended up getting tired of doing that, though, so these days I just end most episodes with a hard cut… no fade out or music.

One nice improvement from episode 2 is that the timelapses in this episode are shorter and aren’t long for the sake of playing nice music for a longer period of time. But as I said concerning the previous episode, I probably wouldn’t show the mining at all if I made this episode today. I was also still mistakenly calling the timelapses “montages” in this episodes, though I was already aware my terminology was probably wrong, so I was also calling them “sped-up segments” since I hadn’t figured out that the proper name was “timelapses” yet.

In terms of content, this episode was again ahead of the previous 2, having more interesting content in less time (episode 3 was the shortest yet), such as game progression in the form of achievements and crafting my first armor, as well as some cave exploration.

There was still a lot of footage that probably should have been cut, though. Collecting my items at the start of the episode should have had several cuts or been left out entirely, and keeping the footage of me going to the ravine was probably a mistake, since I ended up deciding not to explore it in that episode. As stated before, the timelapses were also pretty pointless, though in my opinion, they weren’t as boring as the ones in the previous episode.

Overall, I think this episode turned out better than episode 2, which itself was better than episode 1. It’s nice to see that so far the quality of episodes has only increased so far. But knowing that episode 5, an episode with “Laggy” in the title, is coming up soon gives me doubt that this trend will continue indefinitely.

If I remember correctly, extreme lag and the drops in framerate that came with it were some of the most persistent problems in the next several episodes up until episode 16, during which I finally figured out how to fix. But I’ll talk more about that when I get around to the re-edit of episode 5.

And having mentioned re-edits, let’s talk about the re-edit of episode 3. This re-edit required the least amount of edits yet. There was a lot less yellow text thrown in, and I don’t think I had to make as many cuts in this one. I think this is partially due to the episode simply being better than the previous two.

As for what I did cut out, I ended up removing both timelapses, and cut out most footage of me talking about information that was either redundant because I mention it in a previous episode, or unimportant and did nothing but eat up time.

I would have cut out the entire clip of me being at the ravine, but I left some of it in because there’s some somewhat important exposition in there about how turning down my graphics settings helped reduce lag, and it also explains why I didn’t explore the ravine. (If I had made this episode today, I would have explained that while already at my house and starting to mine there. Actually, if I made this episode today, I probably would have actually explored the ravine, rather than back off from it.)

Something interesting I noticed while editing this episode (and to a lesser extent, episode 2), was that because I had learned to keep talking during recording, it was harder to cut out footage. Often, the stuff I was doing on-screen wouldn’t be important or interesting, but I would be mentioning something that would be important later on, such as my plans for going to the ravine or underneath my house and stuff like that. Other times I would have difficulty cutting out some unneeded footage because I would jump into another sentence right after finishing the previous one, which is fine for getting information out, but made it difficult to make cuts that didn’t feel too abrupt.

In the re-edit of episode 2, I ended up using a neat trick at the start of the episode where I cut at a clip of me turning around clockwise, and then cut to another clip later on of me turning around clockwise in order to skip ahead a bit to get to me explaining the plan for the episode quicker. It wasn’t a perfect cut, but I think it turned out pretty well. I actually missed it the first time I saw during a quick viewing of the intro while writing this blog post.

I bring that up because I ended up doing another neat cut in the re-edit of episode 3. After collecting my first 3 iron ore blocks, I travel up the ladder from the mine to my house and talk about how I’ve now found 3 iron ore which is exactly the amount I need for a bucket… About 1 ¹⁄₂ minutes later, I end up crafting the bucket while saying …I have enough of this iron to make a bucket. The stuff that happens in between is kind of boring and not really important, so in the re-edit, I cut the footage so that the first one is cut off and the episode cuts to the end of the second one, so it forms a complete sentence that it goes like this: I’ve now found 3 iron ore which is exactly the amount I need to make a bucket. I was really pleased with how this turned out… I think it actually feels like the cut was always planned if you haven’t seen the original version of the episode.

The duration of the original version of the episode was 27:52, and the re-edit ended up being just 15:31. That’s a total decrease in length of 12:21. In comparison, episode 2 went from 30:20 to 19:02, which is a difference of 11:18, and episode 1 went from 46:30 to 28:33, which is a difference of 17:57. More was cut out of episode 3 than episode 2, but I feel like I had to do more editing work on the latter. And episode 1 required the most editing work of all.

I’m curious to see how much time I will end up cutting from the next several episodes and how difficult it will be to re-edit those. I haven’t watched any of the early episodes since I first made them, so I don’t really remember exactly what happens in most of them. Doing these re-edits has given me an opportunity to go back and watch these early videos and see the progression of my video production skills over time. Because it’s been so long since I first made and released them, I don’t know how many of these episodes will warrant a re-edit, but I hope to finish and release re-edits of all the ones that do.

As stated before, I think the original version of episode 3 was the best episode yet at the time, and I think that the re-edited version is the best of the re-edits so far. I look forward to working on the re-edit of episode 4, as well as the next entry in this blog post series. I hope you all have been enjoying the re-edits and these blog posts as much as I have enjoyed making them! Until next time, this has been SuperGeniusZeb, and I thank you all for reading.

Watch the original version of “The Creepy Cave” on YouTube and LBRY!

Watch the re-edited version on YouTube and LBRY!

Yep, this is now officially a blog post series. (Click here to see the first entry.)

I could have done better with the title of this episode. I could have called it “Spider Ambush”, “The Mine”, “Mine Own Mine”, or even “Wandering with Half a Heart”. But instead I called it “Obsessive Torch-Placement Disorder”, a name which I thought was a funny joke based off of an odd moment near the end of the episode where I was being picky about where I placed torches on my newly-constructed fence around my crops.

Looking back, however, the torch scene isn’t quite as funny, dramatic, or even as long as I remember it being, and I feel like the title is therefore not really very descriptive of this episode, and it also doesn’t really work that well as a joke.

But title aside, episode 2 of SuperGeniusZeb Plays Minecraft is definitely an improvement over the last one… which was also the first one. (I guess the first became last and the last became first. 😋) This episode has my first timelapses (which I mistakenly kept calling “montages” in the episodes and their descriptions), which cut down on the length of the episode considerably. This, combined with me accomplishing a lot more in less time compared to the first episode, makes episode 2 a lot more enjoyable to watch.

But a lot more enjoyable is a relative term that refers to episode 1. Can episode 2 stand on its own merits? I’d say that in its original form… no, not really. There’s still a lot of problems with this episode, though it’s definitely better than the one that came before it.

The timelapses, while better than no editing whatsoever, are not as well-edited as they could have been, and sometimes they drag on for too long with too little happening to keep the viewer’s interest. The Kevin MacLeod music is probably the best part about them, but I made the mistake of limiting the speed of the timelapses so that more of the music would play, which was partially to blame for the aforementioned problem of the timelapses going on for too long.

The lack of interesting things happening in the timelapses also contributed to the problem. It’s okay to have a timelapse with repetitive actions, but the timelapse has to be short so the viewer doesn’t lose interest. If your timelapse is long, there needs to be variety in the stuff happening on-screen. You can’t just mine a couple blocks, run up a ladder, craft some stuff, run down a ladder, and then do that same process over and over again and expect a timelapse to make it more interesting. The timelapse may greatly reduce the amount of time that the activity takes up in the video, but it won’t automatically make the activity twice as interesting or anything like that.

If I had made this episode today, I probably wouldn’t have even used timelapses for the mining segments, unless I was going to do something special with Replay Mod, which doesn’t exist for Minecraft 1.5.2. Quick and simple timelapses for mundane actions are okay, but often you don’t even need them at all. Cutting to the end of a simple and repetitive action is often both the best move and the easiest move. If you’re going to do a timelapse or sped-up segment, it needs to either have a variety of things happen in it, or be pretty short.

You can also try and do what I’ve seen Etho do in a lot of his videos: use a quick montage (as in an actual montage, not a timelapse) to show a series of key moments in a series of related tasks/actions, but don’t show the “empty” time or spend too much time on any particular action. Here’s an example of what I mean. It’s a great way to give the viewer a taste of what you’re doing, without lingering on it too long and eating up time in the episode, and also does it in a way that can be a lot more fun to watch. I’ve been trying to implement some of this quick montage style stuff into my recent videos, including the re-edits of my old videos.

And speaking of re-edits, I have uploaded the re-edited version of SGZ Plays Minecraft episode 2 to LBRY and YouTube, so make sure to check it out if you’ve been wanting to watch through the entirety of SuperGeniusZeb Plays Minecraft but don’t want to waste a lot of time watching all the boring parts… or if re-edited versions of old videos just happen to interest you.

Side note: with the episode 2 re-edit, I made sure to set the project framerate in Kdenlive to 60 fps, so this re-edit is the same framerate as the original, unlike the episode 1 re-edit, which had a framerate of 29.97 fps. No, I can’t just change the framerate in the project settings and re-export the episode 1 re-edit. Unfortunately Kdenlive doesn’t handle project framerate changes very well, and all the titles, effects, and transitions got messed up.

This re-edit trims the time down from about 30 minutes to around 20… it’s not as much of a length reduction as episode 1 got in its re-edit, but that’s because episode 2 didn’t have as much dead time, and it was also shorter than episode 1 in the first place. I could have saved a bit more time if I had cut out some of the timelapses, but since not much else happens in the episode, and since they were the first timelapses I ever did, I decided to keep them and go the route of adding yellow commentary text to the longest and most boring one.

One of the things I noticed while rewatching and re-editing this and the first episode was that I used to be a lot more dramatic in expressing my frustration at certain things. Situations, which, in hindsight, weren’t really that annoying. These days I would probably just laugh at something annoying, and maybe take a deep breath and sigh or something. But in these early videos, I seemed to get almost angry at the situation. I was actually surprised by how loud and frustrated I sounded during a couple parts of episode 2.

In the re-edit, I decided to cut out some of these moments, because they sounded kind of whiny and annoying, and most of them were from unimportant parts of the episode that probably would have been cut out anyway.

I’m not sure whether I was really as frustrated as I sounded, or if it was just part of the way I talked during recordings back then. I know I tried to speak louder than usual during recordings so my voice could be heard, so maybe that was part of the issue. Whatever the case, these moments definitely weren’t very enjoyable parts of the episode for me, and I doubt other people would want to listen to them.

In addition to trying to reduce the amount of annoying moments in the episode, I also tried to add in a bit of humor in the re-edit using the yellow commentary text, as well as using the magic of video editing to make a certain silly moment even sillier. I think it turned out quite well.

Looking back, I’ve realized that the main premise of this episode would probably only take up about 2 minutes in a modern episode of SGZ Plays Minecraft, and that alone says a lot about how different my new videos are compared to my old ones. I can also see how I was already trying to improve upon the shortcomings of the first episode, as well as how much more I still needed to improve.

And I still have much to improve upon even to this day. You’re never done learning, and I’ve learned that making good videos takes practice, an understanding of what is interesting, what isn’t, and also how to use editing to shape your footage into something that is enjoyable to watch. My old videos served as practice that helped me to make better ones later, and watching my own videos and those of others helped me to learn more about the art of video editing and knowing when to stop recording. And now my latest videos will serve as practice for the ones that come after them, and I hope to continue learning more about making videos, so that my content will continue to improve.

I hope this blog post series will be interesting and/or helpful to anyone reading it. Perhaps if you are just starting out with making videos then these posts will help you avoid some of the mistakes I made. I certainly hope so. Until next time, this has been SuperGeniusZeb, and I thank you for reading.

So this might end up being a series of posts on my blog where I talk about various videos that I have made. Or it could just be a one-off thing. Who knows? I sure don’t right now. I just started writing this initially as an updated description for the video on YouTube and a certain other site that you’ll hear about soon… but anyway, here’s my thoughts on “The Demo World”, the first episode of my main Minecraft let’s play series.

Ah, the first episode of SuperGeniusZeb Plays Minecraft. This was the first video I ever uploaded to the SuperGeniusZeb channel on YouTube, and my first time doing a let’s play of a game in which I spoke. Back then, I had basically no experience doing this sort of video. All I had ever done before in terms of gaming videos were silent recordings (not even text/caption overlays) of LEGO Legends of Chima Online & LEGO Minifigures Online, which in hindsight weren’t very interesting at all, except as historical footage of those games, both of which have been shutdown. This was my first real attempt at a traditional let’s play.

And being a first attempt, it wasn’t really that good. I mean, it could have been worse… but it also could have been much better. Since making this first episode, I’ve learned a lot about making gaming videos.

For one, I’ve learned that if you aren’t talking at the moment, you better be doing something interesting or using timelapses and cuts. This episode has a lot of moments where I’m not talking, and all I’m doing is walking around and placing/breaking a couple blocks.

Another thing I learned was to close the door to my room when recording, in order to reduce the chance of background noise from other people in the building ending up in the audio of my recording. Telling everyone you’re about to record is also very important and something I really wish I had done when making this episode.

In terms of editing, this first episode has almost none. There’s the episode title overlaid on top of the end of the intro, the cross-fade of both of those into the first recording, a messed-up clock wipe to the second recording, the To be continued… text and fade-out at the end… and that’s it. I didn’t bother to edit out anything, and because of that, this episode is both full of boring moments and much longer than it should be.

I’m currently working on a sort of “special edition” of this episode – I’m basically cutting out all the really boring stuff, turning some parts into timelapses, and adding some text overlays for the purpose of correcting some incorrect info I said, adding some fun bits of trivia, and introducing a bit more humor into the episode. The original version will remain on YouTube, of course. I intend to do this for most if not all of the early episodes of SuperGeniusZeb Plays Minecraft, with the goal of trying to make these earlier episodes more enjoyable to watch, and closer to the same level of quality as the later episodes. Of course, I can’t fix everything about them, but at the very least I can try to make them better than before.

On another note, it’s kind of fun to notice just how much I was planning ahead in this initial episode. I had not yet come up with the specific idea of the Update-o-Matic, but I did know that I wanted to make version updates big and intentionally over-dramatic events. I also had plans for some other things as well, some of which have yet to come to fruition even now. You know that weird moment where I rhetorically ask what kind of series this would be and then answer with “everything”? That was a bit of a weird way of saying that I wanted the series to be both a normal let’s play (like most of it has been for the past couple of years) and also have story elements and stuff that you would expect to see in a series like Zisteau Plays Minecraft… which was actually one of the series that inspired me to make this one, along with Etho Plays Minecraft and Stampy’s Lovely World. So far, the closest thing to story elements in SGZ Plays Minecraft has been the Update-o-Matic shenanigans, but I’ve been planning a lot more than just that… there’s been some subtle hints in a couple of the episodes to one of these other things, but I won’t spoil just what. You’ll just have to wait and see…

In case you were wondering what tools I used to make this first episode, I used Fraps to record the video and VSDC Free Video Editor to edit it.

I probably wouldn’t recommend using Fraps today since it costs money and OBS, a free (libre) and open-source app for both livestreaming and recording, can do the same job for free and it runs on Linux and macOS as well as Windows. Windows 10 also has the Xbox Game DVR feature built-in, so you can use that to easily record stuff as well. Both OBS and Xbox Game DVR can record UWP apps and record the entire screen, whereas Fraps is limited to stuff rendered using DirectX or OpenGL that isn’t run in a sandbox like UWP.

I also wouldn’t recommend VSDC Free Video Editor. It’s been a long time since I last used it, but when I was using it, it would crash constantly, and I was always saving my project every couple of minutes in case of a crash. (Actually, maybe the constant crashing was part of the reason why the earlier episodes didn’t have as much editing done on them as the later ones.) It was also pretty limited in what it could do. These days, I use Kdenlive, a free (libre) and open-source app that is a lot more stable, has a lot more features, and runs on not just Windows, but also macOS and Linux.

Looking back, I wish I could have done better with this first video. But I also understand that making this video and the ones that followed were the practice that I needed in order to get better. I was able to look back on the episodes, figure out what I did wrong, and try to do better on the next one. To me, this episode serves as a reminder of just how far the series has come, and also how far I’ve come. I’m definitely not as good at video production as I wish I was, but I’m a lot closer than I was when I made this first episode, and I hope I will continue to learn and get better as time goes on.

I don’t know how many people watch SGZ Plays Minecraft. There might not even be any. But for now, I will keep the series going regardless, in the hopes that it will entertain people. To all those who have watched the series, or any of my videos for that matter, and to all those who have provided feedback, whether it be a detailed comment or just a simple like/dislike… thank you.

This has been SuperGeniusZeb, and I will talk to you again in the next video… or blog post. 😉