He seems funny but I can't stand the Youtube-style "ADHD" editing with cuts every 3 femtoseconds. I feel like I'm holding by breath watching it. There's no gap to process what you've just seen or heard.
I get that it's effectively the point: you overwhelm your audience without giving them the time to consider switching to a different video, but I find it frankly unpleasant.
> I get that it's effectively the point: you overwhelm your audience
Equally, you could argue reading a recipe in a book takes less than a minute; stretching the same recipe out to five minutes is already pretty leisurely.
If a video maker wants a shot for 'rinse the rice before you boil it' anything over 3 seconds is filler.
I can understand tight editing and skipping over redundant parts but this goes way beyond that. Take this video from the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uBDNhe6Gkk
It starts with "Guess what's for dinner everyone <cut> shitty mall curry in a jar <cut> [puts bin on table] <cut> he shoots he scores <cut> almost... [intro] What's going on <cut> we're back in the kitchen saying <cut> no to jar sauce [cut to filtered dramatic zoom] neveee <cut>" etc... They should add an epilepsy warning at this point.
Many of these cuts don't actually cut anything, they're just changing the crop to make the video more dynamic. I find it headache inducing. You never have a continuous shot that lasts for more than 5 seconds or so. Everytime he naturally takes a breath while talking he cuts. Every time a shot lasts for more than 5 seconds he changes the crop to make a dramatic zoom on his face or something.
It's a very popular type of editing on Youtube as far as I can tell, but I find it unbearable to watch.
Honestly it's just amateurish editing combined with single-camera footage. Lot of modern TV shows and movies also cut every 1-2 seconds, and reality/contest TV is worse than YouTube with cut frequency. But, they do things like overlapping the audio through the cut, switching camera angles on the same, "continuous" scene of events, using good cinematography to make the cuts feel natural, like you're just turning your head as someone else starts speaking, or to respond to some new event happening "over there."
The criticism of simply the frequency of cuts seems weak to me, it's been like that forever with most types of video entertainment content.
I think this “YouTube style” started as a way to work around having only one camera, and often no-one behind it, even, but also not being good enough to get compelling long, static shots with no cuts needed in the edit (which is quite difficult)
It's probably part of it but cutting away all the breaths and making the video as dense as possible reminds me of TV ads. You want to pack as much as much as possible in a short timeframe and sound super dynamic and not give the audience the opportunity to think about what they're watching. Trim all the fat. It looks like an infomercial almost.
Bingo, yes! You put the words to it... This YouTube style is exactly like those irritating ShamWow and OxiClean commercials that feature pitchmen filling every millisecond with their voice, without any break in the dialog. But instead of 30 seconds of it, they go on like that for 10 minutes. I tried to watch that video and couldn't take it for more than about 30 seconds. Totally exhausting.
Yes. Still, I thought the comment you responded to made a refreshing change from 100 successive HN comments saying they have to watch youtube videos at 1.5x speed cause they're boring and a waste of time otherwise! Can't please everyone I guess.
If you're making a video of a recipe, it seems to me like a unique opportunity to focus in more detail on what it looks like when each step is done properly.
The one that always comes to mind is when I'm baking and the instructions say to whip egg whites until soft peaks form. When exactly is it "soft"?! Sure, I know now, but I definitely didn't know back then, and as it turns out a video is a great way to get the point across.
I get that it's effectively the point: you overwhelm your audience without giving them the time to consider switching to a different video, but I find it frankly unpleasant.