I think the general goal with the inline is a good one as it does try to get the user to be more engaged. However, I think the issue is they need to be present

I think the general goal with the inline is a good one as it does try to get the user to be more engaged. However, I think the issue is they need to be presented in a way that is less obstrusive to a user that came to simply watch a video in peace. One quick and easy thing that could be done is making the popups blend with the page a bit more. Right now the main site is dark background and light text and then suddenly there is a box with a jarringly white background with a generic blue button that really doesn't mesh with the rest of the site at all glaring at you. Also, having multiple popups back to back is almost insulting to your users. If they take the effort to dismiss the first popup, the last thing they want immediately after it is another popup. I was almost afraid to hit the close button on the 2nd (create a clip) popup because I thought another one would popup somewhere else on the page. If I clicked on some kind of "Tour" button, it would be acceptable to point out all the social features of the site or where to goto create a clip and such. If I came to a video page to view a video, the video should be the focus. Another mistake I think is the "neil thinks this is the best part..." popup. I understand there is a sense of community and social features to the site but so do 90% of the sites users go to these days. A better way may be to present related videos or other videos "neil" has created that add value to the user instead of forcing the focus to be "hey this is neil's video guys!". Another thing you could try doing is moving the 2nd popup that asks you to make a clip appear a bit later. Maybe a minute after the video starts playing or even better, at the end of the playback of the video when the visitor has completed what the visitor initially came to the page for. The nice thing about this is that by the time the 2nd popup appears, the user has had a chance to soak in the site's layout and content and see why 'making small clips from long videos' can be a good thing. The branding strip is nice but it blocks a part of the video. Making it translucent (60%-75% transparent) would make it a little less annoying as I can still partially see the video as opposed to completely blocking the top part of the video as it does now. And having it as "hover" based action may be good too. That way when the user moves the mouse over to start playback or pause or stop the video, the bar will appear. It should also fade out after the video has been playing for a few seconds.