Starting in 2021, I'm going to be testing out for my future videos to not show the 10-second video intro. This is an experiment to improve general watch time and slightly reduce video length. According to online forums and many of the YouTubers that I'm subscribed to, they either have no video intro, a short greeting, or they use a pre-intro teaser and a short video intro. I know you want to get to the point in any video, a gaming video, vlog, tutorial, etc. I'm planning on doing this for about 5-10 videos depending on the outcome. If that doesn't work, I'll consider doing a 10-second max pre-intro teaser for certain games with the video intro right after the teaser. If either of them doesn't have positive outcomes, then I'll resume showing the video intro.
It finally came! I've bought a used Nvidia Geforce GTX 1070 Founder's Edition graphics card a few days ago on eBay. This will replace my previous GPU, the EVGA Nvidia GTX 970 SC. The reason why I bought a regular 1070 and not an aftermarket car is that I didn't want a very powerful GPU and experience bottlenecking with this Xeon W3690 CPU. As of right now, the GPU is working great is it's a well-deserved upgrade to boost my FPS at over 60 FPS. On BeamNG.drive, I get an average of roughly 70 FPS on the West Coast, USA map with a typical Beamng vehicle. On PC Building Simulator, it remains at a stable 75 FPS on both the Esports DLC workshop and the career workshop. Drug Dealer Simulator shows FPS values between 10-50. It's just like in episode #3 after the 1.0.6 update where I got so many lag spikes as the game was loading in assets in front of me. I don't know if it's a CPU or RAM issue because of these issues. And lastly, in Automation, I get an average of 55 FPS with ultra graphics settings. Overall, this is a great card compared to my last one. The GTX 1070 is a 150W card compared to the 970 is a 145W card. Not only that, I'm still using the stock 525W PSU in this Dell T3500. All I had to do to get this to work was that I had to buy a 6-8 pin PCIe adapter with this new GPU. It works without any problems whatsoever. This new GPU will become my main one until I plan to build a custom computer. That will happen in the future after college. In tomorrow's video, I'll come back to Automation to resume my car builds and test them in Beamng. So look out for that real soon!
I've had a lot of changes done to my channel. One of them is my brand new Discord server. This server is for keeping contact with me about upcoming videos, exclusive access to my finished Automation car builds, video suggestions, and more! (to come) Another update is a new video outro. I kept the song, but instead of the old JMPS mail truck driving at high speeds, I used my Inspira Impressive WRECK STEVE, A.k.a. the Subaru WRX STI clone. In the outro video, rather than having a camera orbit around the vehicle while driving, I got action shots of multiple close calls in traffic while getting the perspective of the AI driver's POV. Which leads to an unfortunate ending for the car... The last update of my channel is a brand new trailer. It's still the same format; highlights of my recent videos, the text coming at you, etc. It also mentions my new Discord server rather than my Twitch account that I haven't used in over a year. For those who are interested in joining my Discord, here's the link right here!
When I started my YouTube channel back in early 2011, it wasn't in great shape. Which includes my profile picture that consists of a flaming skull that I've made in Dell Webcam Central on my parent's laptop which was a Dell Inspiron N5010. I've used that profile pic on all my associated accounts and on YouTube for about a few years (Feb 23, 2011 - 2013.) That flaming skull photo is still used on a couple accounts such as Addicting Games, an online flash & HTML game website. I haven't used that account in ages since I don't know the password to that account. Also, on the 24th of February, I published my channel art at the same time with the second profile picture. It didn't have the social media links in the first one as the picture only contains the abstract drawing. On December 25th, 2016, I've updated the same channel art to add my social media links. Like my Facebook, Twitter, and Twitch accounts. Along with my YouTube channel name. About my previous profile picture, I've created the logo from a website called FlamingText using the "Chrome" design and added my channel name over a black background. Since I had a Samsung Chromebook at the time of making the logo, I took a photo of the profile pic since I didn't know how to resize the picture properly. The picture came out fairly dark, but still recognizable in my YouTube videos and channel. When August came around, I've thought up ideas to update my profile picture and channel art. I'd mentioned it before in one of my previous blog posts which was the channel trailer reveal. I stated that I had future plans to update and create them myself. Rather than finding an image online and putting text over it. Like my last channel art picture. With the power of Adobe Photoshop, which I use to create video thumbnails, I got to work on creating those pictures. The first one which is the channel art. My new channel art consists of many pictures in a collage that represents the games I commonly play. In the middle are my channel name, motto, social media links, and channel brief. Which is surrounded by a thin black rectangle for those viewing on desktop and mobile. Those on TV can see the entire collage of pictures that are copy and pasted to save time and storage. Also, there is a dim green to red gradient that goes across the middle of the channel art picture, but it doesn't go all the way across the picture because I thought it would be somewhat distracting and difficult to see the picture collage. The second rectangle of where my channel name is at consists of a white to black gradient with a black to white gradient stroke around that rectangle. I've added the gradient on that rectangle rather than a single color is to give more center of attention to the channel art when someone sees my channel for the first time. Same thing with the gradient rectangle stroke. For my profile picture, it may not look the best out on the internet, especially for someone who has under 1k subs at the time of posting this blog post. It consists of a dark, but dim blue to black gradient as the background color. Also, in the background, the three zeros represent the last three characters in my channel name. The three zeros were completely senseless when I made the account in 2011 when I was a kid back then. Now, I've thought in mind what they actually mean. You may think it's a Star Wars droid character, novel, or Australia's emergency number. It actually means these three phrases of my start on YouTube; From zero vids, zero subs, and zero fame. That correlates to my motto, "From 0 content until now." More about the profile pic, I added portions of my channel name to the picture. The "MrJacon" at the top of the picture is the first part of my name which is bent slightly upwards. In the middle is the word 'triple' which properly names the three zeros at the end rather than saying, "Zero zero zero." Lastly is the word 'zero' which is bent downwards slightly. It shows new viewers how to pronounce my name properly without grinding their gears in their head. Even though I say it in each video intro. As I said, it may not be the world's best and most appealing pictures of all time. At least it's an improvement from the last ones. The reason for the update was to make my image and my channel look more professional. With an appealing profile picture and channel art, it will show new YouTube viewers what to expect on my channel if they were to subscribe to me. These pictures will be used on August 9th, 2020, until whenever I update them in the future.
I forgot to post this about a week ago, my secondary hard drive that stores a majority of my games, and YouTube project files suddenly became inaccessible. When I booted up my computer and check the file explorer, it asks me to format the drive like if it's brand new or something. When I used a data recovery program by EaseUS, it shows over 3.5 TB of files to recover (1.6 TB that I need recovered.) I bought a one month license for them, and I'm waiting for a 2TB hard drive to serve as a backup drive since I don't have one. After the OS got corrupted a couple months ago and now this, I should really invest in something to store my recent data without going through the hardships of recovering and grieving over lost, important data. Since I'm not going to use that hard drive often, I'm going to buy a used one on eBay, but the auction ends in about 3 days from now. Hopefully, I win the auction and get the hard drive because I have plans on resuming PCBS and American Truck Simulator but I can't because the hard drive is messed up. I posted an image on my social media the day it happened thinking the hard drive was dead, but it seems like it isn't. If it is, then there would be any chance to recover any data. I hope that data doesn't go anywhere for the next week till I get it working again! If it gets lost... then RIP.
EDIT 8/5/20: I have recovered a portion of my data using the recovery program, but some of those files couldn't be recovered. Possibly being corrupt when the hard drive screwed up that day. I've just formatted the entire hard drive and backed up necessary data to an external HDD by Seagate. Hopefully, I don't go through another problem like this in the future, especially for a 4TB hard drive of where I store all my games and YouTube project files on. After 2 1/2 years of using my first intro and outro, I decided to change it up. My first ever intro and outro were created on November 17th, 2017. I used Official Motions's 2D neon intro template and the opening riff to an uncopyrighted French rock song, The Awakening by Onlap. For the outro, I used YLLiBzify's animated end screen, but I've managed to add the subscribe card in the middle of the screen while his template didn't have that. Both were created with Adobe After Effects, but I stopped using that program because I'm more devoted to MAGIX Vegas. For the new intro, I used RKMFX's dust particle template named Intro #413 which has a custom orchestral track and I changed the effects such as having my name converge to the middle of the screen and have the dust particles come from the left and the right. And for the new outro, I made the end screen on Photoshop and the background video consists of me driving the JMPS Mail Truck at a high speed through traffic on BeamNG.drive. For the song, I used a royalty-free track from The Music Bakery called, Running Hot. What's pretty strange is that I've discovered the song from a direct-to-video compilation called Banned from Television: Prison Files. In my opinion, it is weird for me to discover a good-sounding piece of music from something that you don't really expect to find. Credits are in the video's description. On November 17th, 2017, I've revealed my channel's first-ever intro and outro as a result of reaching 250 subscribers. I had some considerations over the past few weeks on updating both scenes for my upcoming videos. I'm currently in the works of updating the intro and I've just completed the outro as of right now. I expect to complete the intro within the next few days, but I'm aiming to reveal them by mid-June. I'll reveal them on my Facebook and Twitter accounts, including here. Stay tuned for a reveal date for the new intro and outro scenes!
EDIT 6/2/20: I have completed the intro finally and I plan to reveal them on Wednesday, June 10th. Including with changing the intro and outro, I will revise a part of the home screen to suit the new changes coming to my channel. I also have plans on updating my channel's background art and channel trailer to introduce new people about what to expect for my channel. Today, I have received a microphone boom arm from InnoGear for the Samson C01U. This new mic stand will replace the old tripod stand that I've been using for the past 16 months on YouTube. When I was recording the commentary track for a video, sometimes the audio would sound dampened and like I'm talking from a distance. It's because I had the mic about 16-20 inches away and the audio gain at 82%. With the high audio gain, it could easily pick up background noise such as the computer fans and some outdoor activity like a loud car driving by. I would have to use a noise reduction tool from Audacity (still use it today) to silence any background noise, but it could affect the quality of the audio no matter how strong the filter is. Now, since the mic is now closer to my mouth, I can get the most out of the mic which includes a pop filter that came with this mic stand. The pop filter can reduce or eliminate "plosive" sounds like P's, K's, etc. It even sounds a lot more clearer than in the past! This mic stand is definitely a good upgrade from the old stand which I'm going to keep as a backup in case things go wrong. Hopefully that's not the case!
As of yesterday night, my computer decided that it doesn't want to work properly because most of my RAM isn't being detected and my Windows 7 is showing the BSOD everytime I start it up. This turn of events happened when I changed the thermal paste on my CPU. With the RAM, I have 6x 4GB 1333 MHz Hynix ECC RAM installed on my computer. I've never had a problem with this until now. Fortunately, I have a 2.5" hard drive enclosure that connects to my laptop that performs a LOT LESS than my main computer. Using a backup service called Acronis True Image, it says that backing up all ~430 GB of my data will take 2d 9hrs to complete. Expect a delay in uploading any videos in the future.
UPDATE 2/28/20: I have reinstalled everything that I've backed up from Acronis and also replaced the motherboard. It turns out that I've damaged the CPU socket which didn't allow the computer to read every stick of RAM installed on my computer. If I were to boot up the computer using the old mobo, it would give me an error stating there is a "Memory failure in DIMM 1." It also did the same in a couple other RAM slots except for two of them. Those two somehow worked which gave my 8GB of RAM that was readable on the computer and the rest was "Hardware Reserved." After installing the new mobo, I have NOT run into any new problems and all of my RAM is detected and usable! It only cost me $35 do replace it. Yesterday night, I have surpassed another major milestone in video views. I have reached more than 1 million views since the day I've created my channel on February 23rd, 2011. Even though I'm a small YouTuber with some potential, this is a big step for me to see what I'm capable of. Also, for those who've been worrying about me not posting anything new for the past 5 months is because I'm so devoted to my sophomore year in college. I have been focused on schoolwork that I've never got the chance to record anything. I'm planning on getting back on track during my Thanksgiving break and during winter break around late December. I've bought a few new games on Steam such as Kerbal Space Program, POSTAL 4, and Thief Simulator. I want to start recording those if I have the time to do it. I'm also considering on recording Cities: Skylines since I've featured it on a benchmarking video of the Nvidia FX 580 VS 750 Ti SC which you can see the video HERE. Despite the hiatus in uploading videos, I promise to get back on track shortly. Even though YouTube's overhauling its policy very soon...
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August 2021
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