Fringe Follow-up

I'm writing this while waiting on the YouTube bots again, and thought I'd share.

I'd hoped to get the second half of the Fringe pilot episode (it's a double-length one like DS9's Emissary) out to officers and up on Wednesday, but suddenly I had a problem with the mortgage company that took hours to sort out and I barely had time for it. The next day, though, I got the script finished by early afternoon. That timing was good, because it was also when I needed to make my once-a-month trip to Shawano with my wife. 

When we vacationed at Shawano in 2020, we found out the nearby casino has cheap cigarettes with no tax, so once a month we return to Shawano, have a nice dinner out, and buy her a month's worth of cigarettes that I keep in a safe (yes, she has broken into anything short of a safe). So after finalizing the Fringe script, we went to Shawano, had a nice dinner, and then went to the casino for our monthly run. Except the gift shop closed early to do a full inventory and restock in anticipation of the big holiday weekend. So I came home, recorded and edited Fringe, posted it, and it was blocked.

This was when I made a bad call. I was going to just send the file directly, but I thought it'd be an easy tweak. It had taken seven tries to get the first part of the pilot up, but once I did, it wasn't even "flagged but visible" as I typically get. And I had taken longer than usual to edit it because I applied an extra strict approach.

See, I've learned some things about the bots. First, if you go past 15 seconds, you'll certainly get flagged. You also need space in between clips sufficient not to blend them together. You also need clips that can't easily be mistaken. And before you ask, upside-down or mirrored no longer works. Reversing a clip (having it run backwards) will trick the bot, but seems to create an automatic flag because every time I've tried it, I've had it blocked later after manual review. The bot works based upon length of the video, and about the amount of the full motion video you have. The bot will also sometimes treat a still image as if it were video if it's close enough to where a clip left off (this is why, if there's a freeze frame after a clip, it will often be of a different shot, otherwise the bot treats it as more video and count it as a longer clip).

Because it took seven tries on the first, but then was passed through with no flags at all, I was hoping to put this public on the red channel, as I'm rather pleased with it. So on Friday I got up and started working on three things simultaneously: putting part 1 on the red channel, fixing part 2 so the bot was happy, and writing the script for today's Lower Decks episode. About two in the afternoon, I made another trip to Shawano, alone (it's about two hours round trip) to try to beat the holiday traffic. After getting back, I had one last try on putting part 1 on the red channel, then gave up. For some reason, even though Part 1 is just fine right now on the black channel, the red one keeps demanding more and more changes to not be blocked. I grudgingly surrendered to not being able to put this on the visible site and focused on Lower Decks and Part 2.

By about 10:30, I finished finalizing Lower Decks' script and gave Part 2 my full attention, rather than running a few tries an hour while I was writing. Now I would post it, wait for it, and then fix it and try again. This went on until 2:30, when I gave up and went to bed. I got up at 9:30, came back to it, and it is now three hours later, and it STILL is getting blocked. And here's the crazy part: I was even more careful than normal! Sometimes when the bot is persnickety it'll go after 14 or 13 second clips. So I aimed to make most clips at about 10 seconds, and despite taking precautions, it is still flagging inexplicably for longer periods.  It'll flag like 13 seconds, but that's a 10 second clip and 3 of another, unrelated clip. Oy.

So I continue banging my head on this, but the good news is that when I'm finished, I have Lower Decks ready to go, and I know what to do with that one!