The Factory: Claude AI: My Secret Weapon for Polished Content & Smart Solutions
Hey, it’s Larry. This time we are going to discuss the fun that went into making what was labeled “Beginner’s Guide to Claude” and was published as “My Secret Weapon for Polished Content & Smart Solutions.”
From the last post, you know, behind the scenes, I was getting more and more frustrated with ChatGPT and the AI Tools that I was using. Things were not flowing well, the tools were giving me nightmares and the B-Roll turned into a challenge. I vowed to make this experience less frustrating. I started simplifying my videos significantly. The problem was, when I watched what I created, I didn’t like it. I decided that the first section, that all the gurus called the hook, to me was boring. I decided that I wanted a twenty-nine second video to go with the twenty-nine second introduction. The problem was, most AIs could only generate eight to ten seconds of usable video if you were lucky. I needed twenty-seconds. I tried and tried to get a decent ten second video and then extend it to a twenty second video. AI would usually generate something wonky near the twenty second mark. I kept changing my prompts, being more and more detailed but it wasn’t working. After a day, I finally got a twenty second video that was OK. It took me another day to get it to a thirty second video which wasn’t totally crazy. It wasn’t perfect, but if you saw some of the video it generated, it definitely would have given nightmares.
When I generated the vocals for the video, Elevenlabs were still in beta with their audio that added emotions to the reading and that was extremely troublesome. In fact, in one scene, you hear what starts off as a male voice, then suddenly becomes a female voice and then reverts back to a male voice. That was not my doing. Elevenlabs actually generated it that way and I thought that was different and actually kept it. It was also better than a lot of the other versions that it gave me for that scene. I decided that if I just don’t display that avatar during the part where the female was speaking it might be interesting. So if you thought that was intentional, it wasn’t fully.
By the time I uploaded the video to Youtube, the first video was out for almost a week and the second video was going on the next day. The watch count of the first video was dismal. It took about twelve hours before anyone watched it and it was a couple of my friends. It was pretty devastating. I know that is typical but it was still devastating. I had put so much work into the video, and getting the web page set up and everything else that I needed to do to make it happen and it landed with a thud. I thought I had done everything right, I used Gemini to tell me the best time to have the video scheduled to launch, generated a title and thumbnail that various tools said were much better than the ones I initially created and used every trick that everybody said you needed to do to get your video seen, but no luck. As of the writing of the blog post, the video count is still eight. It hasn’t moved in about four days. My Channel Introduction video did better at twenty-two.
Today I need to polish up the Gemini video. I thought if I held off, I might get some insight on what I need to improve based on real feedback from the first video, but unfortunately I have to keep flying without guidance.
I wish I had better behind the scenes information but I guess this is what it is like to launch a Youtube channel. I know someday I will look back and say I did a great job, unfortunately that day is not today. I’ll talk to you again next time!
