Category: Looking Back

The title, the thumbnail, and the lag

“A Laggy Boat Ride” was a laggy mess. At least in its original form, anyway.

I’ll start with the title. It isn’t exactly a title that entices you to watch the episode. If anything, it deters you from watching it. It mentions the worst part of the entire video, and says nothing about the parts that are at least somewhat interesting. There isn’t even a pun in the title making fun of the lag, so it just ends up being a rather bland and generic title that tells you why you shouldn’t watch the episode, but not why you should.

Then there’s the thumbnail. I forgot to mention that episode 4 was the first episode that I made a thumbnail for. That first thumbnail was pretty basic, lacking a screenshot from the actual episode, and having nothing but some images and text copy-pasted onto a white background.

I wanted to have a consistent style for the thumbnails, but I ended up changing the style for episode 5 because I realized that white backgrounds were kind of boring. The thumbnail for episode 5 was made using the same project file, and so the logo and cropped image of my player skin were in the exact same position, but the rest of the thumbnail was changed quite a bit.

But the inconsistency or relatively cheap look of the thumbnail doesn’t bother me nearly as much as the fact that the thumbnail, like the episode title, also spotlights the lag in the episode. I thought that since the episode had so much lag in it, I might as well advertise it as a “feature” of the episode or something, but in hindsight that was a bad idea. Pointing out your flaws doesn’t fix them or make them less bad.

If I was smarter back then, I probably would have edited out the lag and used a title mentioning something about exploration, snow biomes, and/or the wolves. But for whatever reason, I didn’t edit the lag out. Perhaps it was because my current video editor at the time (VSDC Free Video Editor) crashed constantly, or because I was lazy, or because I was inexperienced, or perhaps all of the above.

As for what caused the lag in the first place, I think it was a combination of my hard drive being almost entirely full and my recording software (Fraps) being very resource-intensive. My hypothesis is that because my hard drive was so close to being full and fragmented, the free space was scattered in small pieces throughout the drive, and so recording a video meant the hard drive had to keep jumping from place to place to keep up. And it wasn’t just small video files… Fraps made large AVI files, and even though I turned down the quality settings when I recorded the episode, the files were still pretty big. At the same time, when I would load in some chunks of the world or generate new ones, that would require reading from another part of the hard drive, so Fraps and Minecraft were battling for both CPU and hard drive usage.

These days, I’ve cleaned out a lot of space on my hard drive by moving my videos onto external drives and cloud storage. I have also discovered that recording video onto an external hard drive seems to help by freeing up the internal drive to be used by the game. Additionally, when recording on Windows 10, I currently use the built-in Xbox Game DVR to record videos, which seems to be far less resource-heavy, in part due to the fact that it outputs compressed MP4 files whereas Fraps made near-lossless AVI files.

(As a side note, I really wouldn’t recommend using either Fraps or VSDC Free Video Editor if you want to make videos. OBS Studio is better for recording and is also libre and cross-platform. The Windows 10 Xbox Game DVR also works well as a simple solution. And as for editing, I would recommend Kdenlive. I don’t know if VSDC still crashes as much as it used to, but Kdenlive has more features and has the bonus of also being libre and cross-platform, unlike VSDC.)

The episode itself

So far, I’ve only talked about the lag and title and thumbnail that advertised it. But what about the rest of the episode? Is there some good content left if you take out all the lag?

Unfortunately, even without the lag, the episode is still pretty boring. The entire segment in the caves feels kind of pointless and takes up far too much time. Messing around outside with the endermen is kind of fun to watch, and getting my first ender pearl is kind of significant, but it’s still a segment where not much happens. The boat ride really should have been sped-up or I should have at least been talking about something interesting during it.

The part of the episode where I find the snow biome is probably the most interesting part of the entire episode. It has me exploring a new area unlike anything seen before in the series, and I find my first sugar cane and my first wolves there. I even get the “Cow Tipper” achievement. Actually, that might have been my first cow, but I haven’t checked the previous episodes so I’m not sure.

Unfortunately, the best part of the episode is followed by the worst part: the boat ride back home that inspired the title. I really should have cut this part out. Since I already showed my trip to the snowy region, I didn’t have to show my trip back especially after the footage turned out to be so frustrating and boring to watch. If I had just cut out this one segment or ended the episode while I was at the snowy region, then the episode would have a different title and would have finished on a high note.

Overall, episode 5 lacks in the area of interesting content, with most of the episode just being stuff that’s already been done in a previous episode. I already did cave exploration in the previous episodes, and this episode spends a long time underground and hardly shows anything new. I already fought mobs in previous episodes, and this episode just shows me doing that again, but with endermen. When I finally do something new in the form of riding a boat and exploring, I don’t utilize the time spent in that activity as well as I could, and then I waste time with pointless footage of riding back home, only this time with high amounts of lag.

Ironically, there’s an apology for the audio quality in the episode at the end of the intro, and yet upon rewatch, I think the audio quality in this episode is completely fine… compared to the previous 4 episodes, anyway. If anything, there should have been an apology for the lag in this episode or an apology for the audio in episode 4, which had bird noises or something in the background.

As I expected, episode 5 unfortunately breaks the trend of increasing quality throughout the previous 4 episodes. Overall, I would rank it as the second worst episode, with only episode 1 being worse. Very little happens in the episode, and what does happen doesn’t have much effect on the next episode. You could probably skip this episode and you would hardly miss anything.

The re-edit

But what about the re-edit? Was I able to salvage something decent out of this mess? Much to my surprise, yes! After cutting out all the lag and the majority of the cave segment, as well as speeding up the boat ride and making the usual polish cuts, I ended up with a fairly decent video that I’d say is pretty watchable. It’s not as good as the re-edits of episodes 3 and 4, but it’s a huge improvement over the original version of episode 5.

In total, I cut the episode down from a length of 27:16 to 12:36; that’s a decrease of 14:40. The original version of episode 5 was already the shortest one I had made, and the re-edited version is similarly the shortest of the re-edits so far. Although not much happens in the episode, you only spend 12 minutes watching the re-edited version, so it doesn’t take up that much of your time and the lack of content is more forgivable.

I probably could have cut it down even further down to below 10 minutes, but I was a bit worried that if I kept cutting it down, there would hardly be enough left to call it an episode. Unfortunately there’s not much interesting content in the episode, so I can’t just cut out everything that isn’t really exciting. If I did, then there probably wouldn’t be anything left. So instead, I tried to just make the episode feel like it was continually moving forward and not dragging on with nothing happening. I think this has the effect of making everything feel a bit more interesting and fresh.

One thing I noticed while rewatching the episode and preparing for the re-edit was that, while in the caves, I mentioned the weird liquid physics in Minecraft and how it was unlikely that they would ever change due to the risk of breaking contraptions. Of course, if you’ve been keeping track of recent Minecraft news, you will have heard about how the developers had considered changing water mechanics in the upcoming Update Aquatic, but backed down due to not wanting to break existing builds and contraptions. I thought it was kind of funny how my statement from 2015 was unintentionally relevant to recent events, so I decided to keep that part of the caving segment and add a little joke about the canceled change to water mechanics.

Another observation from re-editing this and other episodes: the Minecraft soundtrack sounds pretty cool sped-up, and speeding up footage sometimes makes it a whole lot funnier. I don’t know if it’s just me, but I think crashing my boat into the ice on the edge of the snow biome is a lot funnier sped-up, and my silly little Wheeeee! while running on the ice sounds even sillier. And of course, it has the bonus of making the footage take up less time and making the episode shorter, so that’s neat.

Overall, I’m definitely pleased with how the re-edit of episode 5 turned out. It’s still not that great, but it’s such an improvement over the original and I was expecting worse, so I’m happy.

Conclusion

The original version of “A Laggy Boat Ride” is pretty bad, but the re-edit turned out surprisingly well. I still wish it could be better, and the episode could probably be skipped, but I’m happy that I was able to improve it as much as I did in the re-edit.

Although episode 5 wasn’t that interesting and not much happens, the episode that comes immediately afterwards is the complete opposite… it’s very interesting and some really important and unusual stuff happens. I’m really looking forward to rewatching episode 6… and I think re-editing it will be quite fun as well.

But until then, this has been SuperGeniusZeb, and I thank you all for reading!

Watch the original version of “A Laggy Boat Ride” on LBRY and YouTube!

Watch the re-edited version on LBRY and YouTube!

Yeah! It’s been a good episode.

Those were the words I spoke near the end of the 4th episode of SuperGeniusZeb Plays Minecraft. I felt that I had accomplished a lot in the footage I had recorded, which would make for a good episode. Looking back, I think I was right… in comparison to the previous 3 episodes, anyway.

“From Wood to Stone” has more interesting content in it than any of the previous episodes. There is a bit of game progression, a lot of mob combat, a building timelapse (which I was still mistakenly calling a “montage” at the time), and some cave exploration all in a single episode.

Unfortunately, the episode has a lot of boring moments in between the interesting parts. Getting the sheep takes up way too much time, there’s a lot of moments where I talk about something I plan to do while doing pretty much nothing on-screen, and there’s plenty of other footage that should have been cut up.

Even the interesting parts aren’t really that interesting. Building a pen for animals should have just been a quick timelapse or not shown at all. Mob combat is neat, but it gets repetitive quickly. Exploring the cave is probably the most interesting part, but I hardly spend any time actually exploring, with a lot of time being taken up by me digging tunnels trying to find the source of hostile mob noises.

While watching this episode, I also noticed that I was still trailing off some of my sentences and talking too quietly. And also like previous episodes, I barely though through what I was going to say when I started recording, and so a lot of my explanations of my plans come out messy and take up more time than they should. And of course, my microphone quality isn’t the greatest to begin with, so it can be a bit confusing and frustrating when I’m talking about something.

On top of those audio issues, I noticed that there was quite a bit of background noise. When I started watching the episode while preparing to make a re-edit, I heard what sounded like birds in the background. At first, I was a bit confused, as this didn’t seem to have been in the previous episodes.

Then, as the episode continued, I heard myself mention that my laptop battery had almost run out of battery power and that I had been recording outside. So most likely, those were actual bird (or some other outside animal) noises. Why was I outside? Well, this piece of dialogue from myself 2 ¹⁄₂ ¹/₂ years ago also reminded me that I had recorded this episode while at my grandparents’ house. They had a porch outside with a table where I decided to put my laptop and record this episode in order to not have a bunch of background noise in my video or cause a bunch of noise inside the house myself. Yeah, it’s a little ironic that I ended up with background noise while trying to avoid background noise, but trust me, it would have been a lot worse if I had recorded the episode inside.

I was still trying to keep a weekly upload schedule at the time… these days I wouldn’t bother trying to record an episode outside of my home, and I probably wouldn’t do it outside, either… especially now that I know that it would lead to bird noises in the background audio. (Though I actually kind of like the bird noises in this episode. It almost seems like intentional ambient background sounds in the game, which makes me kind of wish Minecraft had ambient noises like that.)

On another note, I think this episode is quite significant in the history of the series. As the title of the episode hints, I change the look of my house from wood planks to stone bricks, which combined with the start of the upwards tunnel to the next room, set the style that the house still uses to this day. Additionally, the area that would later become my main storage room is mostly mined out.

The pointless sign is also first placed in this episode. That little sign, with a message that tends to change a lot, was one of my early intentional “quirks” I decided to throw into the series. I thought it would be fun to just have a sign with random messages every episode (or couple of episodes), which in hindsight is almost the series equivalent to the yellow splash text on the title screen of Minecraft.

Is this the best of the original versions of the SuperGeniusZeb Plays Minecraft episodes so far? On the one hand, I feel like I wasted a bit more time in episode 4 than the episode prior, but the interesting parts of episode 4 are more interesting, so overall, I think episode 4 is better.

On top of that, I think that the re-edited version of episode 4 is definitely the best of the re-edits so far. With episode 4 having more good content to begin with, cutting out all the boring parts resulted in the final product being the most enjoyable episode yet. In total, I cut out 14:53 from what was originally an episode with a duration of 34:56, resulting in a re-edit with a 20:03 length.

So what did I cut out? First of all, the section in which I get sheep was greatly reduced in duration. The entire sequence of me building the sheep pen was cut out, and the task of finding and leading the sheep was reduced to a few clips.

Then, after cutting out some unnecessary footage where I harvest some crops and state the obvious (I want pigs more than sheep but don’t have carrots), I cut up the outside mob fighting sequence to get rid of slow moments and make it feel a bit more fast-paced. While creating the re-edit, I was considering just cutting out that entire section of the episode, since it might feel repetitive or uninteresting. I was just fighting basic mobs with little real threat after all… I was so close to my house and world spawn point that I could easily have retrieved any items I dropped upon death. However, in the end I decided to keep most of this part of the episode since it shows my progression from being wary of fighting mobs at all in the first episode to being able to easily defeat several mobs and feeling much more confident in this one.

That’s not to say I wasn’t still a bit too cautious, however, as shown later in the cave where I get scared by only a couple of mobs, assume that there must be a zombie spawner (I wish!), and end up not doing much actual cave exploration. I find it to be a bit ironic, knowing that in fairly recent episodes, I’ve made some big mistakes by being too confident.

Fun fact: during the end of the outside mob fight, you can actually see the enderman placing the grass block on top of my house if you slow down the video and watch closely.

The building montage timelapse from which the episode gets its name has also been modified in the re-edit. In the original episode, there was a pause in the middle of the timelapse where I showed what the house looked like with all the wood planks removed. I decided this little diversion was unnecessary and I merged the two timelapses into one timelapse, removing the original audio track with background music and replacing it with the same background music, not because I wanted to be redundantly redundant, but because otherwise there would be an awkward cut in the timelapse music where it started over. Just by luck, the re-edited music track lined up perfectly with the modified timelapse, allowing me to cut off the music at a point that feels really natural. In my opinion, this was the first timelapse in the series that was worth recording, and the re-edit made it even better. I’m glad that this time I chose an episode title that was derived from a good part of the episode, not a boring one like episode 2.

After the building timelapse, there was another section of the episode where I fought some mobs at nighttime, but I decided to cut this out in the re-edit since I had already done this earlier and it broke the flow of the episode by having me say I’ll go make some more stone bricks and then proceed to spend a bunch of time fighting mobs before finally doing that and getting back to building.

Finally, I cut out some footage of me discussing how I was mining out the storage room (I’m not really sure why I even recorded that dialogue in the first place), and got rid of the majority of the search for the mob noises, which was pretty dull since it was just me mining tunnels in various directions to try and find something. It’s another one of those things that, if I had made the episode today, I probably wouldn’t have even recorded, and definitely would have cut out in the first edit.

The re-edit also contains a bunch of smaller “polish” edits where I would cut out a couple seconds here and there… too many and too insignificant to mention on their own. But together, I think they help to keep the episode moving and slice off a bit more time.

Overall, I’m quite pleased with how the re-edit of this episode turned out. Now I’m curious about what rewatching and re-editing episode 5 will be like. An episode with a title of “The Laggy Boat Ride” implies lag, obviously. From what I can remember, there’s definitely a lot of lag during the boat ride, but I don’t recall if there’s lag during the rest of the episode or not. Lag makes for poor video quality and usually not very good content, so I’m worried that this episode won’t end up nearly as good in its re-edit as episode 4.

Will the trend of increasing episode quality continue? Or will episode 5 have too many problems to fix? Find out next time, in the next interesting but probably not exciting “Looking Back” blog post… same Zeb-channel, but probably not the same Zeb-time! This has been SuperGeniusZeb, and I thank you all for reading.

Watch the original version of “From Wood to Stone” on LBRY and YouTube!

Watch the re-edited version on LBRY and YouTube!

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. 😉