August channel update

Hello everyone! Just a bit of an update on what I'm working on the moment, and how the channel's going as a whole.

As usual I've got a few things in the pipeline - I've probably got 5 or 6 videos with relatively complete scripts, but it's often the last bit of finishing them off that takes the longest. Sometimes I put a lot of time into a script, then decide it isn't working for me and abandon it - but then I will often come back to them a few months later and find they still have a future after a fresh look! One such example is a video about the divide between Metro & V/line/Suburban & Country trains in Victoria, and how it doesn't really make sense in some places. I made a 90% finished script for this over a year ago then decided it was going nowhere, but I had another look over it the other day and I think it will actually be very good - so that will likely be coming up soon. Another exciting project I've begun is an explainer on the 2003 Broadmeadows runaway. For those who don't know, this was an incident where an empty Comeng train rolled 16.8km from Broadmeadows to Spencer Street, where it collided with an N class at 75km/h. This will be sort of, part story telling/part explainer, using some diagrams and stuff. Fortunately the ATSB report is still available so there's no shortage of detail to work with. I forget who it was that suggested I make this video - if it was someone on here, thankyou! Another thing that will happen soon is an update to the Melbourne fare explainer I made last year. This will basically be an update of the same video with some new bits just dropped in/replaced, so it will go up with minimal fanfare. This is partly just to update it with some things that have changed to the fare system over the last year (like the V/line fare cap), but also to include and alter a few other bits based on feedback I've received in the comments. Most of the videos I've mentioned in previous updates are still slowly ticking away in the background - The Upfield line video will definitely happen, it's very early stages but hope to get stuck into that pretty soon. I'm aware that the channel has been very Melbourne-heavy for the last year or so, and I very frequently get asked about doing videos in other cities. I do have some Sydney videos planned, but these won't progress until I have a chance to make another trip up there - I hope to do this in the next couple of months. I get asked about Brisbane a lot - it's somewhere I haven't been for a couple of years, and I would love to make some Brisbane videos - but like Sydney, it won't happen until I get a chance to go there again. At some point there will be a video about Adelaide suburban trains, it's one I've been wanting to do for a while and is really just waiting for a few other videos to get out the way first!

Shorts: Most of you will be familiar with youtube's Shorts, which is basically a TikTok lookalike feed of short (less than 1 minute) vertical format videos. I've only put up a few, but some of them are getting a very large number of views - you may have seen the one I did about people not liking Tangaras: this was made after Reece from rmtransit alerted me to a tweet where someone asked about it and mentioned my channel. Without taking it too seriously, I whipped up that short the same afternoon (about a month ago), and it's already close to getting 80,000 views. In fact, right now, ALL my top 5 viewed videos in the last 48 hours are shorts. This is partly just due to the way the shorts feed works, and the views themselves are kind of, worth less than views on a traditional video (for one thing they pay a tiny fraction of the revenue). But they do have a value in driving traffic to the channel, so I see it largely as an advertising platform for the channel's main content. They don't take much effort to make, so I will be putting a few of these up in-between normal videos.

A little fun fact: When I made those two St Kilda tram videos live the other day, I did so about 2 hours before the Matildas kicked off against England, a game which was watched by about 40% of the Australian population. Normally when I upload a new video there's a constant stream of views and comments for the first few hours, but during the second half of the soccer there was a measurable dip in viewers across the channel, and a complete absence of comments - which picked up again immediately after the game ended!

4K: Some of you may have noticed that I've started uploading some videos in 4K over the last year or so. I never did this in the past because there was no point - none of my footage was shot in 4K. However with a lot of recent videos using footage from my Gopro 10, it's now become worthwhile. Increasingly I also use a lot of still images in my videos, which are more than high enough resolution for 4K as well. It's possible that some videos which are made up of predominantly older footage will still be uploaded at 1080p for the time being. Until the other day I'd never actually seen one of my videos on a 4K display - but then I watched one of the city walking videos on my brother's 4K TV and, it was amazing seeing all that detail jump out!  

It was March this year when the channel passed 10,000 subscribers: right now it's rapidly approaching 15,000 and I'm pleased to say that at the current rate it will certainly pass 20,000 before the end of the year. I'm considering jumping on the bandwagon and doing a Q&A video when we get to that milestone, and will most likely do a call out for questions once it gets a bit closer.

As always, thanks so much for your support!

~Martin