No, I "honestly" cannot tell you how long it takes, can you you please tell me how long you spent so I can get a better picture of the situation? The intros are very good, not saying they are bad.
First off, I appreciate the compliment. Its nice to know that everyone isn't emotionless robots with the soul intention to attack your decisions.
As for how long an actual intro takes, of course it varies from intro to intro. However, most intros have two main stages: the actual rigging and modelling, texturing, etc; and the post-effects such as colour correction, syncing, etc.
The rigging stage [for intros like these] takes roughly 1-2 hours. This is without including the process of coming up with your idea or style of the intro.
Then there's the main render. Depending on the power of your computer, this can be relatively quick or extremely long. My computer is pretty good at processing renders, however it still makes my computer virtually unusable until it finishes. Anyway, these intros averaged around five seconds long at 30 frames per second for a total of 150 frames needing to be rendered. My computer, depending on the complexity of the scene, renders a frame about every minute and a half meaning the render finishes after around 3.5-4 hours.
After that, there's the post editing in After Effects. This typically isn't as long as the actual rigging/modelling itself and generally take 30-60 minutes depending on what needs editing or changes.
Altogether this comes to a total of around 5-7 hours per intro.
-Taking into account that I didn't model the first intro and made it all within AE, all three intros took around fourteen hours to create. Then, of course there's also the thumbnail I made, the recording of the giveaway, and the upload of the video, which took another good four hours combined.
Still not as bad as my laptop on which a render alone took 32 hours.
So yeah, intros aren't something you can just throw together quickly in order to make a quick profit.
So...basically you are making people subscribe in hopes they stay. I guess that is fair but it is still buying subscribers with the promise of free stuff. Doesn't matter what your reasoning is, underneath it all is the desire to gain subscribers by offering them some incentive, in this case, a free intro.
No, not 'making' people subscribe, but actually putting myself out there with some actual incentive for people to get interested in my work.
I could very easily have gone around the forums/YouTube spamming my channel on more popular or well-known places in the hopes that people would actually visit my channel, however this is definitely a bad way of trying to gain exposure; when I see people advertising their channel, I'm usually not inclined to click them. This is due to there being no incentive to and no real knowing to what you're looking at and therefore usually a waste of time. By showing your work [and channel] you've created yourself, people actually see your content first hand and can decide it it'd be something that interests them.
I often see people doing giveaways like this and I'm often interested by it, not because of the free stuff (because I can already make some perfectly fine stuff myself), but because I'm interested to see their work and content and it its something that will captivate me.
I hope I explained that clearly..
I've also already said why I want people to subscribe for it.
If you wanted to give back to your current viewers, you would have simply not advertised this giveaway, that way only the people who actively watch your videos and are fans of your work would enter. This would mean that your true fans would get your work and you would really be giving back to them. Instead, you are attempting to include a larger community which in turn causes your actual viewers to have a lower chance of winning.
I can't help but agree with you there..
I extended the giveaway to MCGamer for the reasons aforementioned, to gain exposure for my channel and also because it, well nearly is the time of giving and MCGamer's really the only online community I'm apart of and I wanted to give something back for once.
Yes, you could say it is just an advertising trick to 'bait' in subscribers or money or whatever, but hell, what Holiday isn't? Dozens of them have been turned into commercial tricks to lure more income into the businesses and obtain a greater profit. Christmas is known as the birth of Jesus Christ to Christians yet businesses have twisted it into a way to gain from it themselves.
Honestly, if you'd pass up the opportunity to give back to people and benefit from it yourself, I'd think you're insane.
You're right, you never forced them to enter, but we both no that no one is going to pass up free stuff if all they have to do is click subscribe. Thats like a restaurant having a free burrito night, you aren't forcing anyone to come to your restaurant, but come on, no one will pass up a free burrito.
Except me, I dislike burritos. ;P
In all seriousness though, I don't really think anything justifies that though. It still remains, it cannot be considered 'buying' subscribers if they're not forced into it in the first place.
+Not everyone even wants an intro as they may not have a YouTube channel or they already have a perfectly fine intro. However, curiosity often takes the better of people wondering what the intros look like. So then they either decide, "Hey, this is really nice! I'm gonna check out more of this guy's content" or "Eeugh, this is terrible. I'm not interested in this" and they subsequently close the page.
That honestly wasn't the greatest comparison as intros are forever, they don't disappear or constantly need to be replaced or replenished whereas a burrito does. Once you eat it, its gone so you're going to want more than one free burrito however you generally don't want a new intro after every couple of days, unless of course you're never satisfied and greedy.
Aka, telling people to subscribe in hopes they stay and continue watching, aka buying subscribers.
That's a really crude comparison...
I don't see how giving people a trial or taster of your content is anywhere
near like buying subscribers.
//Sorry for the god-awful long post, I just wanted to make my opinions and stand-point clear.
