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Comment by peteforde | Hacker News Reader

I love the creativity of the hack, especially when he sync'd the video position with the scrubber. Respect.

I also love the guy's vaguely deranged, Adult Swim -inspired commentary. I went from hater to fan in about 30 seconds, once I realized that he must idolize Tim Heidecker. Again, respect.

However, what I love the most is how the video was composited and edited. What tools do you use to pull that together without slaving over every detail? It looks deceptively low-budget but there's a lot of really subtle details in the way he zooms in on the URL, tweens and flips his video around that make the whole thing feel like a Tim and Eric special feature.

I'd love to know how to produce that sort of result on a meaningfully short timeline.

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Heyyyy thanks glad you enjoyed it! I was surprised to wake up and see this on Hacker News today.

Thought I'd comment on the video editing:

It is all pretty low tech. I use Adobe Premiere to edit and mostly just animate transform, scale, and crop effects to achieve everything. Like for the zooms you pointed out I double up a layer of the screencap and then crop and scale. It's a bit painstaking at times.

Another little part is when I do the screen recording I set my desktop background to an image with a colored box area of 1280x720. This is the area I know will be "on screen". So I have the windows I want to pull in during the video just outside this area. Then I crop to this box in editing. I think this is better looking than just capturing the whole desktop, and I like the live feel.

I'm enjoying evolving this style... I sometimes have thoughts of making some kind of gross homemade video compositing tool in JS. But I haven't gotten there yet...

Check out ShareX, it can easily capture a subset of your screen, and you can hold a modifier (I forget which) to snap to common video resolutions / aspect ratios.

Everything about this is great, I'm not a big video watcher but I just sat through that whole thing it was gold. The selfie direction flips, the interjections from you in another setting instead of chopping the video (both funny but also a nicer way to do it honestly). The concepts you're showing. All really good. Keep it up I'll be watching!

Thanks for the tips and tricks. If you ever made a video on how you make videos, I'd be first in line to watch that.

I haven't looked at Premiere since the bad old days before it traded places with Final Cut as the default choice for editing. These days, I spend most of my time on Ubuntu and use Kdenlive for my very minimal requirements.

The one thing you have that is much harder to teach is great comic timing. I suspect that it will serve you well in many aspects of your life. I don't know if you've been polishing your fast five, but if you ever have an opportunity to try your hand at standup, I'd encourage you to go for it.

Youtube poops and endless music video memes are some of the best things to come out of the meme culture. Because folk culture is now truly ‘multimedia’ and we have a horde of people for whom hyperactive video and sound editing is second nature. Now just to wait for when it becomes mainstream and commoditized like graphics editing.

I'm hoping for about the same fate for knowledge visualization techniques—might see it happen soon enough now that ‘data science’ is in vogue.

Indeed. I don't need it much, but the video and audio editing techniques I learned from making YTMNDs has been valuable.

A nice side effect of it being so commonplace now is that most youtubers are doing their own editing, meaning the jokes and queues are very authentic to their personality and intent, vs having to be inserted after the fact by a separate professional who just wants to get the job done. See for example shows like Laymen Gaming or Girlfriend Reviews, both of which are full of Arrested Development style cutaway gags.

> meaning the jokes and queues are very authentic to their personality and intent

I think that's less a thing than we maybe think. I think the medium crafts the message and even the messenger. There are certainly YouTube like "patterns" and I see a lot of channels eventually devolve into them. Time and again over time I see something I like and then they ever so slightly creep towards the YouTube drama stuff, and before you know it they're doing "reaction videos" and even if their other content is still active it just doesn't feel as authentic anymore.

Not to say I entirely disagree, but I do think the medium has a great deal of influence and IMO that impacts "authenticity" and etc.

This makes me think of that editing 'style' where Youtubers will edit out every single pause for breath, so not only do you see their head snapping about every 2 or 3 seconds, you're practically listening to one massive sentence. To me it feels awful and it ends up making me feel tense.

Like anything though, it only takes one or two people to do it before it catches on and everyone starts emulating it.

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