Why does YouTube propose teleporting moments for thumbnails so often?

[Dimon12321]

Recently I've uploaded a one-hour walkthrough video, and guess how many thumbnails generated by YT have green teleporting flashes covering a half the screen? Two of three!

This certainly is not an accident. I have more than 30 Doom videos of different lengths already, where at least one of three thumbnails is of me teleporting somewhere.

 

 

Why does this happen? Does YouTube find such moments worth putting on thumbnails? 

Yeah, when you use a teleport, you stand still and the picture, besides this green flash, doesn't move, so it's easy for YT to process this moment. But in the same way, other still moments, like intermission screens, are proposed much less often for thumbnails.

There are a few videos where I often use teleports and YT doesn't propose green flashes, which makes YT's nature of choosing a "good" moment for thumbnail at the beginning part, in the middle and at the ending quite weird. 

Sometimes Doom videos are recognised as Minecraft videos, so maybe YT tries to find a familiar moment for people to truly recognise the video as the one from this or that game. I've never thought Doom is famous for teleporting moments and I don't think such an effect is often seen in Minecraft.

 

Anyway, what do you think of it?

[exl]

My best guess is it detects a change in "scene" because of both the sudden change of background and the bright flash. And "interesting" scene changes is where it might create thumbnails.

[ZOMILE]

Bullshitty youtube logic, i think. 

[MFG38]

Maybe the YouTube AI just likes the color green.

[HeatedChocolate]

Green is the color of money so it's only natural that that's what the AI wants.

[Scypek2]

Clearly an artifact of some kind of AI-driven coolness detection algoritm! It's been working quite well for me. Even when I upload mostly unediting recordings on zoom meetings, it usually picks three frames with people having very different facial expressions on each of them. It gave me good thumbnails for my doom videos too, especially for the first 3IAC trailer. I'm pretty sure I also got two teleport flashes recommended on my latest video.

 

[Jacek Bourne]

It probably sees something like a bright center and a dark edges and then determines that this picture is interesting and chooses it.

[Immorpher]

I think @exl is onto something.

I notice the algorithm seems to look for scenes with a lot of visual changes and loud sounds. I think teleporters happen to have a big visual change synced with a sound. It happens all the time in my videos too. I believe the algorithm assumes these occur in high-action scenes which make for "good thumbnails".

[mrthejoshmon]

I've long since purged hundreds of videos from my channel but I can confirm that teleport thumbnails were popular with the algorithm, as well as hell knights being shot by a shotgun (for some reason).

[GarrettChan]

Besides this, I think SSG a Demon in the face also are very likely to be picked.

[Biodegradable]

While I like Exl's theory, I think it happens more prominently than any other circumstance in a Doom gameplay video simply because it's one of the few moments in any given recording where you're standing still for more than a few seconds.

[fai1025]

Well, in my case...

I think you can spot the pattern here. they're all automatically generated, I didn't change it.

[HalfLife9000]

Just now, fai1025 said:

Well, in my case...

I think you can spot the pattern here. they're all automatically generated, I didn't change it.

s h o t g u n

[⇛Marnetmar⇛]

19 minutes ago, fai1025 said:

Well, in my case...

I think you can spot the pattern here. they're all automatically generated, I didn't change it.

Huh. Mayhaps YouTube's algorithm thinks that the shotgun reloading animation is a swipe transition?

[Nevander]

Better than having thumbnails when you get rekt by a Baron.

[Immorpher]

9 hours ago, Nevander said:

Better than having thumbnails when you get rekt by a Baron.

I would love to have all my thumbails showing me dead to a lost soul haha

[insertwackynamehere]

The scene change thing is almost certainly it. I'm far from an expert on this, but I once was trying to figure out how to detect scene changes to remove the (potential) bumpers from before and after downloaded Youtube music videos. I skimmed a few papers, had my eyes glaze over on a lot of the complexities, and then made a relatively naive and simple scene detection change thing based on histograms that worked fairly accurately. Long story short, the fact that the teleportation flash takes up like 90% of the screen and pretty much completely changes the resulting image from the frame before is going to result in a new "scene" for most "dumb" image detection purposes (in theory, an AI with the power of human reasoning would conclude it is the same scene with a teleportation flash, but we aren't there yet, at least at scale).

 

Also, it might even be on purpose; it depends whether Youtube is hoping to find "chapters" or just considers massively divergent frames to be "exciting", disregarding the scene change implication, but still using similar math.

[IcarusOfDaggers]

Theory: It's because gaming video algorythm is adjusted to modern games.  In those games, the largest fights tend to also be the flashiest. Guess what else is bright and flashy? Teleport. If something is brighter, teleport flash is discarded as something common.

 

In almost every youtube screengrab, you can reasonably see, that indeed, the higher the brightness, the higher the chance that youtube detects it and suggests it as a screenshot. 

 

However, when teleports are very common, youtube tries to find something uncommon instead

[Razza]

 

Youtube seems to love the colour red/pink for my vids. Maybe it just picks moments where there's a big contrast of colour in the middle of the screen (also SHOTGUN)

[IcarusOfDaggers]

It does make sense. Teleport usually has green and black, that's also high contrast