Three Hours or Eight?
The most important moment in an all-night ambience video is the one where it stops. So we moved it to the morning.
For the first few months, every Still Earth scene was about three hours long. It felt like plenty: long enough to fall asleep to, short enough to render and check carefully. Then we looked at how people were actually watching. Most sessions started between ten and midnight, on a television, and the viewer did not come back to press play again. The film ended somewhere around 2 a.m., in the dark, with nobody awake to notice. Except, of course, the part of the brain that never stops listening.
What happens when the scene ends
Two things, and both are bad for sleep. First, the sound floor drops. Whatever the rain was masking, the fridge, the road, a neighbour's door, is suddenly audible again at full contrast. That kind of change is exactly what the sleeping brain treats as worth waking up for; there's more on why in Why Ambient Sound Helps You Sleep.
Second, on most devices, something else starts. Autoplay picks the next video and it is rarely a quieter one. We've heard from people who fell asleep to rain and woke to a car review. That's not a small thing at 2 a.m.
A three-hour scene ends in the middle of the night. An eight-hour scene ends after you're up.
Why eight and not four
Eight hours is the length of a night for most adults, with a margin. It means the scene is still running when the alarm goes, and the last thing it does is fade rather than cut. It also means fewer decisions: you don't have to set a sleep timer, work out when it will stop, or queue a second video. Press play once.
There is a cost. Eight-hour files are large and slow to make, and every seam in the sound has to be checked across the whole length, not just the first hour. But that's our problem, not yours, and the new Storm Rooms are all built this way.
When three hours is the right call
- Working. A focus session doesn't need a full night. Three hours is a long block with a natural end, and the end is useful: it tells you to get up. Try the rainy coffee shop or the lofi forest hut.
- Background in the daytime. A fire and some waves while you read on a Sunday. Length doesn't matter much; pick the picture you like.
- Falling asleep, with a device that sleeps too. If your TV or phone turns itself off after an hour anyway, the scene's length is irrelevant, and a shorter one loads faster.
Setting it up so the length works for you
- Turn autoplay off on the device you sleep with. On a TV it's usually in the YouTube app's settings; on a phone it's the toggle at the top of the player. This matters more than anything else on this page.
- Dim the screen, don't rely on the timer. Most TVs can drop to a very low brightness. A dark screen with sound is better than a sleep timer that cuts both at once.
- Pick one scene and keep it. The same rain every night becomes a cue, and the cue does half the work. The full list is in the library; the eight-hour ones say so in the corner.