Wong Fu film premieres on YouTube

In May 2010, Wong Fu Productions (Wesley Chan, Ted Fu, Philip Wang) and Ryan Higa started talking about doing a special project: a high-quality, long-form film that would be released just on YouTube for fans. Well, the moment is here: the film is now on YouTube, and Philip tells us more about it.



Written in a couple days, the 35-minute movie was shot in one intense week this past summer. Drawing from the talents of a few dedicated friends, the crew was no bigger than 10 and was usually just the three of us from Wong Fu Productions (WFP), plus the actors. There was no big budget, no big company, no big crews or equipment behind the shoot – just us, a DSLR camera, and the desire to do something major and to support each other.

In a time when "YouTubers" are still foreign to industry studios and decision makers, we didn't want to wait around for someone to give us the green light. We just went ahead and did it ourselves. Being Asian-American is not something most mainstream outlets believe is marketable. We struggle with this constantly. But with Ryan and Wong Fu's combined audiences, and a fresh approach to producing high-quality stories, we can show the world what we're capable of – not just as individuals in a new industry, but as a community, as well.

Philip Wang, Wong Fu Productions, recently watched "Agents of Secret Stuff."

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Q&A with Chef John of Food Wishes

Chef John Mitzewich is the voice behind YouTube’s most subscribed cooking channel, Food Wishes. Chef John today posted his 500th video to YouTube, and he recently took time out to answer a few questions about how he makes his videos and the trends he’s seeing as a YouTube chef.

How do you decide what to make videos about?
The whole concept of the "Food Wishes" channel is "What's your food wish?" I get tons of recipe requests, and try to honor the most popular wishes when I plan my dishes. Other times, I'll just start cooking something and realize it would make a cool video, so I'll throw the camera on a tripod and begin filming.

How seasonal are your videos -- both in terms of how you think about what you create and how your audience fluctuates?
Since I film what I eat, and I tend to eat very seasonally, the videos are generally quite in tune to what's available that time of year. Also, if I know a certain seasonal dish is coming up (like chicken wings for the Super Bowl), I'll try and plan something a few weeks ahead so people have time to learn and make it.



What are some other trends you've noticed in viewership of your videos, subscriber growth or fan comments over the years?
Subscribers and viewership have both grown steadily over the last 12 months and are increasing faster compared to when I first started out. I've more than doubled both my subscribers and viewership this year compared to last. It seems every year that the holiday season is when my entire catalogue gets a boost, as I think more people are looking for that special recipe to make for their family and friends. My viewership has also been pretty diverse. I get a huge range of ages, from kids cooking their first recipe, to seniors who've never cooked before getting into it for the first time.

What are the keys to really great cooking videos?
To me, a great cooking video is one that makes the viewer feel like they're making the video with you, not just watching someone make a recipe. I want to bring the viewer right into the scene. Close, interesting shots of the food, with an engaging, affable narration are what I try and use to achieve this.

How important is a mouth-watering thumbnail?
A great looking thumbnail that is clear, bright, and close-up, is second in importance only to the recipe title itself.

What is a common mistake budding cooks make when making videos?
They try to do a TV-style cooking show. You're on YouTube, not Food Network, so stop trying to do an imitation of a network "stand and stir" show. Generally the viewer is way more interested in the food, than the person making it; so stop trying to "perform" for the camera, and just show us the cooking.

Do you have any insight into how much technology, like YouTube videos or iPad, is moving into the kitchen?
I know this is a huge trend! I get all kinds of emails from people that tell me they take their laptops or iPads into the kitchen to cook with. A library of your favorite video recipes from YouTube on your iPad IS the cookbook of the next decade.

Thanksgiving. How do you approach this holiday as a video-making chef?
I just try to film a nice variety of recipes suited to entertaining. People are at their most insecure when cooking for friends and family during the holidays, so I want these videos to make life a little easier (and more fun!).

Anything else you'd like to add?
For someone who doesn't cook, watching a video recipe is the best, and most enjoyable way to learn. As food television trends towards reality shows and contest-based programming, I predict YouTube becomes the primary resource for on-demand culinary instruction.

Annie Baxter, Communications Manager, recently watched "Peach Brulee Burrata Recipe."

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YouTube Holiday Solutions Center to the rescue

With Thanksgiving around the corner, another holiday season moves into full swing. Every year at this time, we see searches for cooking videos and turkey recipes surge on the site, and it’s one reason we’ve aggregated many great culinary videos on a single channel, the YouTube Holiday Solutions Center, which is back for its third year.

For 2010, we’ve spiced up this holiday destination with even more recipes and how-to tips, including:

This tasty and easy-to-follow stuffing recipe from Howcast...



Ideas to decorate your home for the holidays from Real Simple Network...



A guide to building a gingerbread house with the family from Epicurious.com...



We’ll be updating the channel daily, so make sure to check back regularly. We might just have that solution you’re looking for.

The YouTube Holiday Solutions program is brought to you by Target.

Lee Hadlow, Marketing Programs Manager, recently watched “How to Carve a Turkey.”

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Happy Birthday Automatic Captions! Celebrate with more videos and higher quality

Today marks exactly one year since we launched automatic captions. We started with just a few partner channels in November 2009, and soon after turned on auto-captions for everyone. As we explained back then, we like to launch early and iterate, and this year we’ve been making steady progress to expand the quantity and quality of captioned video online. It’s been truly gratifying to see how far we’ve come.

Here’s the quick summary:

• People have watched video with automatic captions more than 23 million times, and have automatically translated captions more than 7.6 million times.
• The number of manually-created caption tracks has more than tripled thanks largely to automatic caption timing technology.
• Just recently, we’ve reduced the error rate in our speech recognition algorithms by 20%

Back in November we talked about how online video presents a tremendous challenge of scale. Before automatic captions, there were around 200,000 videos on YouTube with captions. It sounds like a lot, but at YouTube more than 35 hours of video is uploaded every minute. We want all videos to be accessible to everyone -- whether or not they can hear or understand the language.

Since March, people have been able to get captions for almost any video that has clearly spoken English. Less than a year later people have watched video with automatic captions more than 23 million times. Clearly, there’s a lot of demand for captioned content, and people have been really making use of our technology. They’re also using the technology to access content in their own languages, since captions can be automatically translated to more than fifty languages; we’ve seen more than 7.6 million caption translations.

Auto-captions aren’t perfect, so we’ve also been pursuing a number of initiatives to help people manually create captions. At our event a year ago, we introduced automatic caption timing, a feature that will take an ordinary text file and turn it into captions with time-codes. Since then we’ve added these features to the YouTube Data API to make it easier for people to write scripts and apps that can upload large numbers of captions at once. More recently, we started the YouTube Ready qualification program to help video owners find professional caption vendors familiar with YouTube. Thanks to these efforts, we’ve seen the number of manually-created caption tracks available on YouTube more than triple (with more than 500,000 available today).

When it comes to captions, we care not just about quantity, but also quality. Here again we have good news: just like a real one-year old, YouTube has been learning many new words! For example, we now recognize the word "smartphone" (turn on speech recognition to see). =)

In the past few weeks, we’ve rolled out a significant improvements to our speech recognition technology to improve the accuracy of automatic captions. YouTube's new speech recognition model reduces the overall word error rate by about 20%. Although the improvements vary from video to video, a video that had identified 50% of the words correctly before will now recognize about 60% of the words, and a video that was at 75% before will now correctly identify about 80% of the words. We continue to make improvements and there is much more on the way.

On a personal note, it's been amazing to see the feedback, videos, blog posts, thanks, (and bug reports!) sent in over the past year. Even though we can't possibly respond to them all, we love to see them, and they shape our efforts on this project. We’ve taken this feedback to make a number of subtle improvements to the service, such as adding an “Always show automatic captions” setting, adding an interactive transcript button so you can see all the captions and skip through the video, and making the red  button easier to find.

What's next? We’ll continue to work on accuracy, and we also want to make sure captions are available on YouTube everywhere, on your Internet TV, your computer and your mobile phone. We have a few other things coming... but I don't want to spoil the surprise. You'll have to stay tuned, and I hope you'll turn the captions on when you do!

Ken Harrenstien, Caption Jedi, recently watched "Sign Language from the Space Station"

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