Going Through My Old Videos is Rough
For the first time since I quit in June, I’ve been watching old Triple Iris videos. I wanted to make a list of videos I’d bring over to my Peertube account, since I’m shutting down my YouTube accounts in the new year. I knew I didn’t want to transfer every video over, in fact, I couldn’t. The Peertube instance where Triple Iris videos are hosted has a strict 50GB upload limit, and it’s already over a third of the way there. I had to be selective with what videos I bring over.
That’s not a problem. I watched a couple dozen TI videos and I’m stunned by how bad most of them are. No wonder I struggled to find an audience, I wouldn’t want to watch these either.
I’ve always struggled to look back at my old work. That’s true for many creators. But I look at these videos and I cringe. So many of them have that “YouTube humor” style to them. You can tell I’m putting on a voice, or over-exaggerating, over-emphasizing, and I used more clickbait titles and thumbnails than I remembered. For the first few years I tried so hard to make this channel I think I would do anything to make it happen. My first video, one covering the Kickstarter campaign for Bubsy: Paws on Fire makes me never show my face in public again.
In the last few years I calmed down. Starting in late 2023 I lost interest in the antics and focused more on producing quality videos. I remember making a conscious effort to put more effort into showcasing great indie games than trying to attract an audience. Those later videos are much better, but you can tell the spark was gone. I sound bored in most of these videos. I think back and its obvious now. I loved writing the scripts, but I always hated recording the voice over and editing the video together. You know, the two biggest parts of making a video. I guess I should have realized that meant I didn’t like making videos, but I stubbornly clung to the idea that I was going to make it, dammit.
How do you spell that word, by the way? I always switch between ‘dammit’ and ‘damn it.’ I guess I should decide already.
Anyway, I finally put together a list of ten videos I want to bring over to Peertube, mostly later videos. I began uploading there in early 2025, so these new-old videos will join the 12 old-old ones already there. Everything else on the YouTube channel will be nuked sometime in the new year, never to be seen again! They’re all on my hard drive, but even I won’t watch them.
It wasn’t as simple as just moving them over, however. Most of my old videos show a link to Ko-Fi, Mastodon, and Bluesky accounts that don’t exist anymore, so I had to cut that footage and replace it. Some videos had an opening animation sequence that had the channel’s original name (Triple Eye) that I wanted to cut out for consistency’s sake. The end slide where I tell people to “like and subscribe” (yes, I know) with links to other videos was also removed.
One video featured me on camera for large portions of it wearing a pirate bandanna. It was a pirate-themed game, so I guess I figured it was genius. I cut these segments out entirely, but kept some of the audio from them because they mention the studio behind that game closed. So I moved that audio track to the end of the video and put some new gameplay over top of it to make it sound like the original VO. That was the most editing any of these videos needed.
I’m glad I did this before my computer died. I had just finished editing the tenth video three days before my GPU bit the dust, and decided to take my whole computer with it. I already wrote about that if you want to hear about my nightmare scenario made real. I’m using my laptop, which is great for writing, but it can’t handle video editing.
This is not the return of Triple Iris. Editing these ten videos reaffirmed that I’m done with it forever. I didn’t want the good videos to be gone forever, at least for the sake of the great games I covered in them. That was always my intention with Triple Iris – to cover great indie games. I think saving these videos is a better way of doing that than deleting them. My other secret hope is that this might attract new people to Peertube as well. I’m not counting on it since nobody watched these videos originally, but a man can dream.
