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Previously, I scrapped my entire project and redid it with commentary since I thought people
would appreciate it more. I was just about to release the first of the 3D videos when
I cruelly ended the video, forcing you to wait until this video had been released.
That feedback? It came through. Most was negative, not about the video but about the method of
going cross-eyed or of the 3D implementation in Half Life 2 itself. A sort of success,
I guess? But then I discovered something horrible- somebody wanted to use their red and green
glasses. You know, the ones that I've gone so far out of my way to make people NOT need?
Well, it seems as though some people wanted to watch the video in that mode.
Simple! I enabled '3D' in the video's options. Thanks Google, it seems as though it then
defaults in red and green mode for everybody and that nobody knew how to turn it off. And
worse still, it flipped the view-points around so that even if people could enable the cross-eyed
3D, the view would be inverted with things further away needing to be focused on like
things close by. It screwed everything up in a spectacular style.
I hastily removed that video and re-rendered it with the view-points the other way around.
I re-uploaded and once again was met with luke-warm feedback. Many of the first viewers
were met with a letter-box view of the video until I discovered a tag that would force
the video into full-screen mode again. (Blame Youtube's 3D for this, not me).
Apparently a lot of people didn't know how to view it in 3D, despite everything I had
done. No doubt I look like the idiot in all of this. Everything I tried went horribly
wrong. With hindsight I should have skipped all of the attempts and planned ahead.
But that's hindsight for you. Without trying them out I wouldn't have gotten to where I
am now. I couldn't have planned for the things that went wrong- without feedback, real-world
testing and learning the hard way, I wouldn't have the knowledge that then let me make the
videos properly later on. Despite of, or perhaps because of these mistakes, I consider myself
fairly experienced in reviewing and uploading 3D videos.
This experience has taught me a lot. All of a sudden I didn't want to release all of the
3D videos on the same day, which is just as well since I had just scrapped them all. Not
that I was trying to milk it out a bit- well, maybe, nothing worse than releasing 20 videos
and people only viewing the latest one, but I also wanted time to get feedback to improve
the videos that came afterwards. Perhaps I shouldn't have made them all in one go.
Perhaps I had overestimated people's abilities to understand and to appreciate a 3D series
or maybe people simply aren't interested. Still, I only had one video to go on, which
happened to be a video with positive ratings and over a thousand views within 24 hours
of being uploaded. I got a Left 4 Dead 2 video prepared for day 2.
This one covered an entire level as I ran across a bridge. It was exciting and dangerous,
being on expert mode so that I could have failed. I figured people would like a video
where things could go wrong that weren't planned or staged. It has commentary at the beginning,
a joke in the middle and some irritating, teasing comments at the end.
To make sure that people knew how to view the videos without glasses, I made an intro.
Here was my first attempt. Spot
the problem. Yup, it was 20 seconds long. Nobody's got
time for that. I redid it like this. 5 seconds long, showing what you have to do
and telling people to read the description for additional help.
In the description I gave detailed help showing how to view it in 3D. I linked to a website
page that I had made reviewing each game, acting as a useful hub should people want
to easily browse to another game. I got the 3D properly set up. It would work for everybody,
regardless of how they wanted to view it. This would be fool-proof! I released the video...
...and to my horror, I received these responses. To be continued.