Our Rendering Nightmare

To start, I'll just upload this script that I wrote yesterday, but never employed (thankfully): 

"A lot of people complain about YouTube screwing them over. They say the algorithm just hates them, which often isn’t true, but is rather a result of inexperience or lack of effort in videos. In essence, they want to blame anybody but themselves, and just saying the algorithm hates them is the easiest scapegoat. But this is not that. This has nothing to do with the algorithm. So when I say this, understand that this is not just me complaining and whining, but is rather a genuine issue. YouTube has screwed us over, and they refuse to help us. And because of that, this may be the end of SRG Skiing.

This all started in the San Francisco airport. I was uploading the Cardrona Insider’s Guides, and they came through with moments, including the opening clip, having serious artifacting. Artifacting is basically when the compression of the video screws up, which causes these lines and squares you can see here. The source file, when playing on my computer, has no issues whatsoever, and plays in crystal-clear HD. I figured, at the time, that when I got home to Colorado and reuploaded on a different wifi network, that it would all be fixed. Unfortunately, that was not the case. So that night, I got on a support chat with an agent who just told me to wait 48 hours. I was fine with that, but deep down I knew that waiting 48 hours would do nothing. And lo and behold, I was right.

Two days later, I uploaded another video, this one called The Southern Lakes Ski Fields, Ranked. It had the same issue, except it was thrice as prevalent due to this video having much more footage than the Cardrona videos. As I saw that, I checked the Cardrona videos and saw no change. It had been the 48 hours, so I got on another chat. This agent, the most useless of all, which is impressive, told me that in exceptional cases, it can take more than 48 hours, so I should just wait longer. I knew at this point that I was going to be on my own. So I started trying to figure it out.

Throughout the next couple of days, I got minimal sleep as I produced three more videos, all the while trying to figure out what was wrong. Every single one has had this issue. 

There’s a laundry list of different things I have tried. I tried uploading from a hotspot. I tried a different computer. I tried uploading from my phone. I tried changing a problem clip, and even though that sometimes worked, I just don’t have enough stock to switch out every single clip that’s artifacting. I have re-exported and re-uploaded using a million different settings for quality, framerate, bitrate, codec, preset, and have even tried having the video upload directly from Premiere instead. And nothing at all has worked. And then I had a genius idea: what if I just screen-recorded the flawless source file and uploaded that? So I did. The screen-recording played back on my computer just fine. So I uploaded it to YouTube, and you probably know by now, but it artifacted in the exact same spots. So these were two entirely different source files. Nevermind that I uploaded in mkv, mov, avi, mpeg2, and mp4 and none of them worked, no, this was an entirely different video in YouTube’s mind. But yet, the same clips were still grainier than a wheat field. So I got on yet another support chat. This time, it showed promise. 

The agent asked me to email him the source files of the videos so he could put them in on his end. He saw what I was seeing, and realized that it was something on their end. And he was taking steps to fix it. And then it all came crashing down. I sent him the files, but he never responded. After promising a 24 hour response, I didn’t get a response until three days later, and when I did get a response, it was from a different person. And I… I’m just going to put the email up on screen so you guys can read it yourselves. Just remember that laundry list of things I already tried.

So yeah, as you can see, this was extremely helpful. She even linked the same article as every chat agent before her. She was supposed to be from internal support, someone who knows the actual system and the technical nitty-gritty. But instead, I just get an article telling me to make sure I select the gear icon and watch the video in HD. As soon as I made progress, it went back to the start. And while the chats take a few minutes to get a response, emails take several days. Which means that all those chats I had before? Well, I pretty much get to repeat that exact same thing, but instead of 10 minutes, it’s going to take 10 days. This is absolutely ridiculous. I have tried every possible solution from my end. It’s clearly on their end, and I’ve proven it in ten different ways. But yet, I just can’t get any help from YouTube. I finally feel I’m getting somewhere, but then my guy disappears and someone else pops up and tells me to do all the things I already did on August 8th when the issue first appeared.

I have hardly been sleeping. This has affected my mental health, my friendships, and my relationship. I’ve been in a constant cycle of change setting, export, upload, pray for the last 8 days, and nothing is working. We have well over an entire month’s worth of videos ready to go, except that they’re unwatchable. I can’t publish them. It’s that bad. I’ve never had this issue before, and I didn’t change a single, minute detail about my entire process. This was my entire livelihood, and I’m fighting for my life to save it, but right now, it’s a losing battle. For those of you thinking “just upload the video, all of us would watch it and have no issue with the quality,” know that I appreciate you. But this isn’t about you. We need to grow the channel. Our biggest growth months are November through February. But at this rate, we’re not going to have any non-artifacted videos ready by November. Which means that the opening clips are still gonna look bad. If we publish that, sure, you guys will watch it. But new viewers, well, they’ll get a poor impression and click off. And the algorithm, well we all know it doesn’t like that. So growth would stagnate. So I am in this state of reckoning, where I’m not sure at what point to cut this off and not worry about it anymore. Not do it anymore. Because if I keep making videos and making videos and making videos but I can’t publish them because they look terrible, then it’s not worth the time and effort I’m spending. Same can be said about fixing the issue. There’s a certain point at which it’s not worth me publishing videos, because I purely don’t get paid enough. If the clips are low-quality, growth stagnates, and I end up putting all this effort in for nothing. No views, no money, nothing. Hence why this might be the end of SRG Skiing. I always thought it would be PeakRankings that would do me in. Instead, it’s YouTube themselves. 

If anybody has a solution, or knows a guy who could help, or anything like that, I beg of you, do whatever you can. I need help. I start college next week. So I have a few days left to try and figure this out. I’m 95% sure this is entirely YouTube, but if there is ANYTHING I haven’t tried, please suggest it down below. If anybody knows anybody who works at Alphabet, Google, or YouTube, please, please, please get me in touch. I don’t want to go out like this, but I fear I may have to. I’m young, so at this stage, this is my life’s work. I have put so much into this, and YouTube is making me throw it all away. I feel horrible, worse than I’ve ever felt before. Even if I wanted to sleep, I’m not sure that I could. I was getting excited. These were some of our best videos ever, one in particular. I was proud of them, happy with how they came out. We just finally got a website going. We were primed for an explosion this season. But our fuse has just been stomped out by the big ugly boot of help centers in the Philippines."

That sums up our nightmare pretty well. But I've always held that there's a certain level of not-giving-a-sh*t that has to be had in this world in order to progress. And I had my moment today. I made the videos creative commons and added a download link to combat the poor quality of the videos. But I couldn't keep waiting on people to respond to emails and keep exporting and uploading over and over again for the 121st time (not joking). So I published it. It's now out there for the whole world to either marvel or mock. I'm still standing, and the jury's still out on how those videos will do. But SRG Skiing pushes on. Thank you all for all the support. All my love, I'm out.