Replacing our black screen videos – Starting with the Frog Chorus

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Last month YouTube informed us that our channel could no longer monetized because we were reusing other peoples videos on our channel. You know that is false because shoot and record all of our videos ourselves. However, even when we showed that, YouTube would come back to us and say “after a careful review we have determined that your channel is reusing other peoples videos without significantly changing them”. It turns out that this may have to do with our black screen videos and so now we are replacing our black screen videos – starting with the frog chorus video.

Despite there being two parts to a video – visual and audio, it looks like YouTube only looks at the visual aspect. They don’t seem to care what the commentary is in the audio. We know this because we created the black screen videos to have audio we recorded in nature play while viewers relaxed or even slept. The audio would be half of the video but even though it is different than other people’s videos, YouTube still claimed we were using other peoples content.

They wouldn’t tell us it was the black screen. In our appeals we specifically asked about black screens and all they would say was “after a careful review we have determined that you channel is reusing other peoples content”.

Monetization is key to our moving the channel forward as it helps pay for fuel and equipment to capture more scenes from nature in different places. That being said, spending hundreds if not thousands of hours capturing and creating content only to be told by strangers that we were using other peoples content was an insult.

As a result, we are going to slowly take down and replace our black screen videos with dark screens to meet the requirements and hopefully move the channel forward. This week we are starting with our most popular video, the Frog (peepers) chorus. This new video features the wetland that are home to these critters.

For more videos like this one, check out our YouTube Channel or click here for a list of our nature videos.

Our Videos

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Someone recently approached us and accused us of reusing other people’s content in our videos. This affected us deeply because we spend so much time collecting video and audio clips. The claim was that because we are not in our videos we didn’t shoot them. This completely misses the point of our channel which is that nature is the star of our videos, not us. Also, if we were in our videos, we would be capturing us, not capturing nature which is the whole purpose of our channel.

Our homemade audio recorder/setup. The microphones are in wire wisks covered by pantyhose.

We capture all kinds of nature in our travels. Last year we traveled thousands of miles to different parts of the country to capture nature. Some of that nature is visual and other times its what nature sounds like. Early on in our capture nature career we realized that our audio recordings were not as good as we wanted them to be. We started looking at professional microphones and recorders. The problem was that they were out of our price range. This led us to look at what made those microphones so good and we attempted to mimic their design. We used a pair of wire wisks normally used in the kitchen to hold a pair binaural microphones in the middle of the wire frame. We then covered the wire frame with several pairs of pantyhose which blocks the wind and allows the microphone to capture a better audio recording. It’s not perfect but several times better than a bare microphone.

Just one of dozens of folders with our video clips

Over the past few years we’ve collected thousands of clips of video from different nature scenes and seasons. We’ve cataloged those into folders in an archive to be used when we need them. We typically like to shoot new video scenes so our videos are real but the archive is proof that we shot every frame of video that we show on our videos.

For more videos like this one, check out our YouTube Channel or click here for a list of our nature videos.