Blue Shorts? Well, I'm in the Blue Mountains and I recently completed twelve Short Films over twelve days last month for a 'self funded retirement' project I'm working on.

Here's the result: Ozsteam's Channel

One of the villages we visit is Houtong, a little place which attracts a huge visitor number using nothing more than derelict coal mining relics and far too many pussy cats! So, of course, there's the obligatory 'Cat' video!

The result is probably as good as you can get on YT from a five year old HD video camera, given the limitations but for those who are interested, here's the workflow:

Sensor: Super 35
Framerate: 25P
Codec: ProRes 422 HQ (200Mbps)
Glass: Carl Zeiss Contax: 21mm Distagon Prime, 28-85mm and 80-200mm Zooms
Edit: Lightworks
Export: AAF and/or EDL
Finish & Grade: DaVinci Resolve
Mastering: Uncompressed YUY
Transcoding and Delivery: ClipToolz (H.264 'vimeo' preset at 10mbps)

Competition! (see if you can pick the clip which was entirely shot not on ProRes HQ at 200Mbps but internally, on AVCHD at only 28Mbps)

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I'm returning to Taiwan in March/April to complete the documentary shoot on a rare geared Shay steam locomotive which will be operating at 2200m in the central Highlands.

PS: please subscribe, especially if you're a railbuff!

I looked at your videos and went to your website. Very nice.

I have found the secret to using YouTube as a tool is, "traffic, traffic, traffic". Most of my videos only have something like 20-50 hits and that's okay with me since they were put up for purposes other than marketing. When I went to put up that bulldozer for sale video, I did some internet reading. In two months it has over 400 hits. Now I'm not going to compete with Katy Perry on those numbers but I have seen other videos with similar subject matter only get 2 hits in as many years.

The videos will only show up as recommended videos if you have sufficient traffic and the right 'tags'. Otherwise, YouTube computers think you don't have good stuff. If you want to get traffic from internet searches, the text under your video is important. If you want people to go to your website or whatever, you have to use the following format to create a clickable link:


You can increase your traffic by embedding a video all around the internet, seeding. Also, you can track statistics to monitor how effective your approach is.

Whatever it takes to get traffic.

Thanks Don, yes working out how TY actually 'works' could be a full time job. I just wanted to get the ball rolling as my first commercial tour is not planned till 2017 so hopefully by then, the site/s will be busy.

You are right, its all about the numbers but it's amazing how quickly Google responds to search commands. For example if you google 'craig marshall's tours', my latest YT videos feature highly even though there is a popular musician with the same name who regularly 'tours'!

I guess I'll need to 'learn' Face-gram and Insta-book too....

FaceBook is really at the forefront of business. I see Lightworks is using Twitter. I don't have those instant things. FaceBook is opening up to videos, I think I saw that on the evening news.

I have created a business account on FB so I'm working through the process of fine tuning the site but like anything else, it's a steep learning curve.

Craig Marshall wrote:
Unless you are 13 years old.