Annotations are dead.
Long live end screens!
Annotations, for those of you who don’t know, are kind of like post-it notes that
can be placed on Youtube videos, together with a link or writing.
They weren’t the most loved of features.
The poor things.
They had a bumpy and problematic life.
Indeed, I was one of the first to poke fun at them wayyy back in 2008 when they first
came out.
My old parody video predicted that they’d terrorise Youtube, filling it with annoying
popups and useless information.
And to some extent…
they were.
And it’ll be good that this will no longer be possible.
But for all their many flaws, annotations could be used for good, too!
To correct videos where there were mistakes, without having to re-upload.
To link to other relevant videos, or even to skip through the current one!
Your imagination was the limit.
With enough time and patience, you could have created interactive stories with these things.
Choose-your-path adventures!
And so on.
But very few people did and it failed to catch on.
I, however, found use for this interactive feature with my weapon showcase videos in
CS:GO.
These display all of the user-made custom weapon finishes, one after another.
You’re not supposed to watch through them all like a normal video.
That would be boring!
Yet with annotations, within just 2 or 3 kliks(Philip) you could jump to the exact bit you wanted
to, to see the weapon art you were thinking of buying.
Sort of like a computer game showcase in Youtube form!
These videos evolved and improved with every one that I worked on… until Youtube announced
the removal of annotations.
It was a sad moment for me, just part-way through this project.
BUT there was a silver lining: any annotations already up would remain!
This meant that if I could make the videos before May 2nd, 2017, that the annotations
would remain on those videos…
hopefully forever!
There was just one problem: in the year leading up to this I had made 8 videos on the weapon
cases.
To complete the series…
I had a month to make 38 more.
Oh dear.
Honestly, at the time I didn’t really see myself managing it.
But I’m the stubborn sort who would have always asked myself ‘what if’ if I didn’t
try it.
So I went for it.
38 videos!
April was going to be a very long month for me.
Creating any Youtube series takes time.
They don’t like to be rushed and if you do then you WILL make mistakes and ruin your
first batch of videos, when a simple test video could easily have pointed you in the
right direction in the first place.
Fortunately, my already-completed 8 earlier videos helped with this.
They showed me that this kind of video could work.
They taught me obvious things, like how to make this kind of video and so on.
But I also learned some less apparent things.
Initially I just wanted to showcase the skins in the highest possible quality, without any
narration.
But apparently you guys like me talking!
The moment I stop, everybody clicks off it.
That 3 second pause probably lost me 20,000 viewers.
Jokes aside, I learned that I needed to be saying something.
But what?
I cringe when I think of what it could have been:
‘Yeah this is a nice gun.
It’s got nice colours and was made by a nice person.
This is nice.
I like that nice bit here’.
Nobody wants that.
I tried to do research into the weapons, their prices and so on.
But it still didn’t feel right.
That sort of information goes out of date and is easy to find elsewhere if you look
for it.
And then it dawned on me: what about the stories behind the making of these skins?
I began to try and make contact with the developers to give them a chance to talk about their
designs.
I didn’t know how they’d react or how much there would be to say about this.
I couldn’t have predicted how well it turned out.
I uncovered a very active community of clever, creative and friendly people who were happy
to share their stories with me.
I learned what got them into creating weapon skins, and went from not being able to make
skins myself to… well, still not being able to but I developed an understanding and respect
for those who could, and learned just how much time, thought and love they’d invest
in their own creations.
From the money they made from getting theirs accepted, it enabled some of the younger artists
to be able to afford to go to University and to pursue a dream career.
Others collaborated with talented artists from other communities to bring their works
into Counter Strike.
And some just enjoyed experimenting with patterns and couldn’t believe it when their skins
were accepted.
All in all I reached out to over 100 artists, from all walks of life.
Google Translate helped a lot when speaking with some from Russia and Japan!
Everybody had a story to tell and knowing this just made me more determined to get the
series finished before annotations were removed.
Once you realise it’s down to you, two things happen: you get the motivation to work as
hard as you can.
And you ask yourself why you didn’t start on this sooner!
I set myself a strict routine for every day to ensure that it all got done in time.
I had a few weeks left at this point, but had already left it too late.
And so began Operation MAKELOTSOFWEAPONSKINVIDEOSBEFOREANNOTATIONSAREREMOVEDFROMYOUTUBE.
Problem is, owning each of the custom skins in CS:GO would cost tens if not hundreds of
thousands of money.
So although it only works in singleplayer, I could change how they looked in game by
editing Counter Strike’s files.
I can’t even begin to describe how long-winded and fiddly this is.
I think I might have Stockholm syndrome because this TEXT FILE has become REALLY INTERESTING
to me!
I could talk about it for hours!
I probably have more experience with this file than even Counter Strike’s makers do.
That’s probably not something to be proud of.
Oh and I don’t recommend you do this, since the changes won’t show up in multiplayer
games and will automatically kick you until you change them back again.
So don’t do it.
But armed with these custom weapon textures, it was time to film them.
Welcome to the black room.
It’s a custom level for Counter Strike that I made myself.
Believe it or not, it’s set outside!
That’s sunlight, lighting up these weapons.
Yet it’s painted with a one-way dark interior to keep the background black for the sake
of the showcase and consistency.
And with a large pit in front of the player to chuck the weapons into once I’m done
with them.
It’s here that my in-game character stood for hours, firing and reloading Every.
Single.
Skin.
How many?
515.
Each takes about 5 minutes to capture, meaning that I spent the equivalent of a working week
just simply CAPTURING the weapon footage.
And I’m left with 42 hours of 4K content, which came to about a TERABYTE in size!
For this.
You see it?
Look!
It’s all blurry!
Normally you’d want to avoid blur.
But this isn’t the rubbish sort.
This is genuine motion blur.
If my weapon showcases look ‘smooth’, perhaps smoother than other 60 FPS videos
do, then this is why: I capture it at 1/8th speed and then speed it up.
The result is a 60 FPS video that looks more like 480 FPS.
Thankfully my Ryzen was quite happy to do the hard work for me.
I think that for about a week it was crunching 4, 480 FPS 4K videos at once.
It was actually bottlenecked by the speed of my hard drives so I ended up splitting
the work across 3 at once.
On about day 4, having done nothing but film weapons in slow motion for 3 days, I needed
a rest and casually booted up Half Life 2 as my PC continued working in the background.
I can’t elaborate how nice this little break felt.
This here is a level from about half way through Episode 2, set in an abandoned quarry.
It plays a bit like a labyrinth.
This was only the third time I had played through this bit of the game even though it’s
probably my favourite section from any Half Life game, ever.
I don’t know why.
I just like it.
You have Alyx sniping zombies from up above and it ends with an awesome collapsing bridge
setpiece.
It was at this point that my videos had rendered and so I returned to work.
But I will forever remember that temporary respite from Operation MAKELOTSOFWEAPONSKINVIDEOSBEFOREANNOTATIONSAREREMOVEDFROMYOUTUBE.
ANY WAY.
I stuck to my rigorous routine of work, day in day out, like a good boy.
And as always happens, I awoke at 7 AM on the last day and realised that I was… a
day behind.
How was this?
Well, turns out that going to bed a little later every day meant that over the course
of 2 weeks, I had lost a day.
I was getting up almost 24 hours LATE.
At 7 AM the following day.
Classic Philip.
And now I had a day to get 2 FULL days’ worth of work done before Youtube removed
annotations.
And there were still 5 videos to finalise, as well as 5 that I hadn’t even started
on.
The clock was ticking and I got to work on 5 videos at once.
Doing things in bulk makes even the easy bits of making a video into HUGE challenges!
5 scripts amount to over 9,000 words means an HOUR AND A HALF of narration.
I even had to take a break half way through!
I never have to take a break normally.
What I’d have given for a… second kliksphilip to help me with this task.
And I don’t say that lightly.
All the while I made sure I kept my PC busy, too.
Pretty much whenever I found a mistake in a finished video I’d fix it and render again
in the background.
It wasn’t anywhere near as intensive as earlier; my Ryzen was only rendering 1 or
2 4K videos at any given time.
I’d casually allocate a handful of threads for each task so that it didn’t interfere
with what I was working on in the slightest.
So late in the project, a powercut or hard drive failure becomes your worst fear and
would have spelt the end for me… but fortunately didn’t happen.
As it approached midnight I had reached the editing stage, but the script and narration
had taken much longer than I had expected.
So I cut my losses and aimed to get 6 videos done perfectly rather than have all 10 rushed
and with mistakes in.
But you see…
I had a secret up my sleeve!
Youtube doesn’t operate on UK time.
In the past it’s been 8 hours behind.
And sure enough, midnight came and went and I was STILL able to edit annotations on Youtube.
But the safe period was over.
Any moment they could cut the feature and all half-finished work on these videos would
have been for nothing!
I carried on working as the sun rose.
By about 8 am I had 8 of the videos finished and up to a standard I was happy with.
Having been up for a solid 25 hours I thought I’d be getting tired but was feeling more
awake than ever.
Which kind of helped.
After this I resorted to an even more desperate state.
I would upload the last 2 videos at the soonest possible opportunity, even if I knew they
had mistakes in!
Whilst this was happening I’d fix them and re-render with the aim of uploading the corrected
versions later.
But I wasn’t taking any chances.
I knew I was on borrowed time and ensured that at given moment I’d have copies of
these videos already up on Youtube, with fully working annotations.
Finally, at about 3 in the afternoon and 32 hours of solid work since I had gotten up
the previous day, a day late, Youtube carried through on their ominous promise and the annotations
feature was no more.
I had gotten 9 of the 10 videos done, with the 10th being the revolver case which was
complete but with a few superficial fade-in/fade-out issues that nobody else will care about but
which will haunt me to the grave.
If only I had had a few more minutes!
If only we had opted for that faster broadband package!
If only I had gotten up a little earlier on the day after to do the day before’s work
the day after I should have.
I jest.
It went better than I could ever have hoped for.
I closed down the hundreds of things I had open for this project for the final time.
And I emerged from my cave a free man and had a triumphant walk to Aldi.
Still didn’t feel tired.
Maybe I had broken my body!
Maybe I’d never need sleep again!
…then when I got home I slept for 15 hours.
You can’t cheat sleep.
And to boot I now have a number of these videos still to release to Youtube!
Thank you to all of the skin’s devs for sharing their stories with me.
I hope I haven’t pronounced any names or words incorrectly.
I mean, CYREX!
Is it CYREX or CYREX?
Who knows.
Since the deadline I’ve been too scared to watch the videos myself in case there are
mistakes!
So instead I’ll just keep releasing them on this channel.
If nothing else I hope that they’re entertaining and informative.
And you can watch them knowing that they were among the last videos on Youtube ever to have
annotations added to them.
I know we got off on the wrong foot, but I’ll miss the annotations feature.
It has enabled me to create an interactive archive of all of the custom weapon finishes
included in Counter Strike!
Just you wait.
Apart from that new case that Valve released 2 days ago.
Thanks, Valve.
And thanks also to AMD for providing me with a Ryzen 7 series processor.
It really did handle whatever I threw at it during Operation MAKELOTSOFWEAPONSKINVIDEOSBEFOREANNOTATIONSAREREMOVEDFROMYOUTUBE,
even with 4, 4K renders going on in the background.
Next time: 8K?
…5 4K renders?
960 FPS?
So many possibilities.