The other day, I was watching a timelapse YouTube video of a programmer who had created a video game prototype in just 48 hours. The timelapse video itself was only about 5 minutes long, which means everything zipped by at lightning speed.

The only way to get anything useful out of the video was to watch it frame by frame. It's not like it was a tutorial or anything, but it was still insightful enough to watch from start to finish.

Have you ever wanted to watch a YouTube video frame by frame? It's actually much easier than you might think. No plugins or extensions needed. Only two keys on your keyboard.

All you have to do is pause the video and then use the period key (.) to go forward one frame or the comma key (,) to go backward one frame. One tap, one frame. Tap at your own frequency to watch the video however fast or slow you want.

Try it with the digital art timelapse video above. You can also use the J and L keys to skip forward or backward by a few seconds rather than one frame.

What other uses for frame-by-frame YouTube can you think of? Are there any other interesting YouTube tricks you think are worth sharing? Let us know in the comments below!