[clxxx]

It’s hard to call it a side project because it became my highest revenue stream now after a year of building it, but I started a youtube channel with a friend. However, given that I put in less than 6 hours a week on it (working less and taking a smaller cut of profits), it still feels like a side project.

We started in January and are now at ~30k a month and growing steadily. Our revenue streams are split by ad revenue, patreon, sponsorships, and other various income split somewhat evenly. It took a year of working with seeing no profits, but now we are growing at a steady pace and just hired our first employee (an analyst, we are a finance youtube channel)! We see it more an an e-learning company with youtube as it’s main marketing base, as we are building out career courses (for investment banking and MBA stuff), a newsletter, and sites for helping people with their investments.

I’m the editor, and I vastly cut down my editing time by building out a program that does most of the editing for me using ffmpeg to automate 80% of the work. A video that might take 8 hours to edit only takes me 2 hours, and I think thats the biggest reason it feels like a sideproject still because of the optimized workflow.

[jonwinstanley]

Can you also commercialise the program you wrote to cut down the editing? Surely that’s a valuable product even if it’s for a niche type of video

[clxxx]

I definitely could, but as of now all the parameters and algorithms are so specific to the content that we produce that it would take some time to generalize it. Something I'll work on in the future for sure.

[tmaly]

I am curious to know how you use ffmpeg for editing?

I have used it to slice up videos I recorded in batch.

[clxxx]

I use it extensively in a program I wrote out. I have it automatically trim out silence in front and end of clips and combine it with an algorithm to detect mistakes and take them out. Then it zooms in and out of clips and attaches pictures to create slideshows and adds transitions and cover pages etc based on a text file that gives instructions. Here’s the channel if you’re curious: https://m.youtube.com/c/rareliquid. All the transitions, photos, backgrounds, zooms, etc are automated.

[anderspitman]

Cool. Do you have something specific you do to flag a mistake for the algorithm, like clapping?

[clxxx]

Any silence longer than two seconds/48 frames (or any length I program it for). Programming for claps would be easy as well and I’ve considered it, but I thought just staying silent would be easier for Ben (guy in the vid) than clapping all the time. Mistakes actually happen incredibly often.

[tmaly]

do you use something like ffmpeg-python or just shell out?