Lets Play!

[tandino]

Let's finish: STALKER part two is up for those of us with the link. YouTube has screwed up something in the processing stage leaving it with no thumbnail (from what I can gather it's a temporary thing so I'll pop it back on public when the issue resolves itself) and there's a few seconds missing from the end which means I'll have to re-render (and re-upload) it. I'll likely do it tonight when I don't need my 'puter for anything.

For all of you early adopters wanting to watch right away, have at it. Might be a little too long at 40 mins but the edit was a lot quicker for me this time, so hopefully the only way is up from here. Can only get better!

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpxc-385KqM[/media]

cheers!

[FatherJack]

Nice I liked that, I saw the upload notification and watched it at 480p - it seems to take a while before the higher res versions become available.

I haven't had much success recording anything at full res, even something as old as Unreal (albeit with hi-res textures) slowed down when I tried recording at the same time, so perhaps I should go for something a bit more sedate.

[TheJockGit]

Brilliant Tandi... loved the narrative, and you expertly showed how easy it is to die in that game, really pleased I am not the only one.

Well done buddy you get 5 stars

[fabyak]

Very good! I initially thought that 40 minutes might be too long for me but before I knew it the end had arrived! What were the mod packs you used? I now want to go and play this

[tandino]

Very good! I initially thought that 40 minutes might be too long for me but before I knew it the end had arrived! What were the mod packs you used? I now want to go and play this

Thanks mate! I used the Call of Pripyat Complete mod. It's a big download but it's an exe file that does all the leg work for you. Proper version is up and public now without the nasty clipped bit off the end. Enjoy and feedback!

[Grimmie]

I think you've definitely got a lot more freedom for narration when it comes to an open-world game, I'm finding your STALKER stuff really interesting. You're able to react to situations in a more interesting way than "Shoot it and move on", which is what I'm reduced to in Unreal II.

I might revisit it later, but I'm tempted to either play a game I've never touched before (like bulletstorm, or any of the Indie Bundle 8 games I got recently), or something like Oblivion/Skyrim modded up the wazoo.

Thoughts?

[Grimmie]

Oh, yeah, and more Spore.

[Joose]

something like Oblivion/Skyrim modded up the wazoo.

To steal an idea from one of PCG writers: Get Oblivion/Skyrim. Install a number of mods, randomly selected, without reading the mod descriptions. Play game, record results, recoil in horror.

[Grimmie]

Or I could let 5punkers choose the mods?

[tandino]

I think you've definitely got a lot more freedom for narration when it comes to an open-world game, I'm finding your STALKER stuff really interesting. You're able to react to situations in a more interesting way than "Shoot it and move on", which is what I'm reduced to in Unreal II.

I might revisit it later, but I'm tempted to either play a game I've never touched before (like bulletstorm, or any of the Indie Bundle 8 games I got recently), or something like Oblivion/Skyrim modded up the wazoo.

Thoughts?

I think open worldey or open ended games are definitely the way to go within reason - we don't want to overdo it or it'd soon get old. The thing about STALKER is that it's definitely unpredictable (Zombie capping me whilst I'm already shit up by a bloodsucker was a highlight for me).

You're dead right though - as wanky as it sounds, when I can wander around a bit and explore I have more time to think of things or voice my inner monologue (like displaying my personality in a way). I like Let's Play's that allow the player to just go off on a rambling tangent and I think it'd be a struggle to do this in Corridor Shooter #19. After I'm done with STALKER I was thinking about doing Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines, XCom, Deus Ex (one of them) or Thief: Deadly Shadows. Feel free to do one of those if you need a change of pace. I like the Spore series though, it'd be great to see that finished too.

[FatherJack]

I recorded about an hour of Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 last night which is taking up 100GB on my hard disk, but I don't really know what to do with it. I messed up the audio recording, so am going to have to re-record the voice track, but any tips on how to do it, what formats to use and adding the 5punky bits would be really useful.

[Grimmie]

I recorded about an hour of Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 last night which is taking up 100GB on my hard disk, but I don't really know what to do with it. I messed up the audio recording, so am going to have to re-record the voice track, but any tips on how to do it, what formats to use and adding the 5punky bits would be really useful.

I let fraps record game audio and record microphone over Audacity, so I can dip the game audio during editing. I export my microphone audio in .wav, as it's lossless (I think?) and I'm just gonna delete the big ol' audio file afterwards anyway. Deej will probably recommend a better lossless format though.

I think a few people have suggested cheapo video editors in the thread already, so I'll skip over that.

Essentially, if you want to film HD, record your video in 1920 x 1080. That's the main thing.

Make a new track (or sequence, or whatever your editor calls it) for HDV (high-def video) 1080p 30fps - or whatever framerate you recorded at, fraps lets you choose. I think the standard for video is 29.97fps, but anyway.

As for exporting..

Export as .mp4 with a variable bitrate of 8mb - 10mb. It'll take a while to upload to Youtube, but it'll be smooth as heck.

The default for my export was like 30 - 50mb bitrate, and quadrupled the output size. So 8-10 is much smaller, and decent quality for internet video.

[deject]

Deej will probably recommend a better lossless format though.

FLAC, naturally, is my choice for lossless audio, though obviously it doesn't have the greatest software support. If disk space is an issue, you could archive your audio in FLAC and just extract the WAV as needed.

[tandino]

I recorded about an hour of Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 last night which is taking up 100GB on my hard disk, but I don't really know what to do with it. I messed up the audio recording, so am going to have to re-record the voice track, but any tips on how to do it, what formats to use and adding the 5punky bits would be really useful.

I let fraps record game audio and record microphone over Audacity, so I can dip the game audio during editing. I export my microphone audio in .wav, as it's lossless (I think?) and I'm just gonna delete the big ol' audio file afterwards anyway. Deej will probably recommend a better lossless format though.

I think a few people have suggested cheapo video editors in the thread already, so I'll skip over that.

Essentially, if you want to film HD, record your video in 1920 x 1080. That's the main thing.

Make a new track (or sequence, or whatever your editor calls it) for HDV (high-def video) 1080p 30fps - or whatever framerate you recorded at, fraps lets you choose. I think the standard for video is 29.97fps, but anyway.

As for exporting..

Export as .mp4 with a variable bitrate of 8mb - 10mb. It'll take a while to upload to Youtube, but it'll be smooth as heck.

The default for my export was like 30 - 50mb bitrate, and quadrupled the output size. So 8-10 is much smaller, and decent quality for internet video.

Depending on what version of Premiere you're using, there's actually a preset for YouTube 1080p encoding - does all the work for you! Min and max bitrate defaulted to 8mb for me.

I too record using the same methods as Grimmie. Audacity to record my mic audio, Fraps to record game audio/video. Seems to work pretty well too.

[Thompy]

If you want to get best quality per MB go look into x264 (I would say stuff but I've all but forgotten everything I learnt a year ago). H.264 is the best encoding option for YouTube uploading and x264 is by far the best implementation. There is x264VfW which is a plugin but the results from Sony Vegas weren't great. Even worse was the incredibly expensive licensed encoder Vegas used which is by MainConcept, absolute garbage. x264 is free and programs like Avidemux have it built in.

So if I wasn't editing I'd put it straight into Avidemux (depending on what capture software/codec I was using it was a faff at times such as needing to set up a proxy streaming file, which is a whole other story) or export from Vegas to an AVI. Eventually I got Vegas to stream directly to Avidemux using the same proxy software but by then I'd lost interest.

This is only if you want to get really geek of course, or your upload speed sucks like mine did (0.3MB/s). YouTube also has a help pageon optimal settings if you're doing it manually.

Hey, guess I did say something.

[FatherJack]

Windows Movie Maker does WMV and that's about it and most of the other programs I have either don't like, or won't export MP4.

I thought the actual wrapper (ie the file extension) had less to do with stuff than the actual video codec used inside the wrapper.

It's recorded at 1440x900 which is a bit of a pain in the arse, nothing I've tried seems to resize it (to 1080) properly, but it doesn't look too bad slightly reduced. I'm less concerned with it being super awesome quality than not completely shit, which is what encoding as a compressed AVI or MPG do to it. I shall use my slightly-less-knackered microphone and hope it's not as noisy as my regular one is on TS.

I'm obviously keen to have as few encodings as possible, but I would also rather like that 100GB back at some point.

[Grimmie]

It's recorded at 1440x900

It's okay, that's 16:10 ratio instead of 16:9. My monitor's 1920 x 1200 (which is also 16:10) and I managed to record my Unreal II lets play in that resolution like a numpty. Premiere just cut the top and bottom most pixels off when I exported it at 1080p, but it's not really noticable. You could export it at 1440x900 as normal, you'll just get back bars across the top and bottom like da mooviez. No big worry. It's not worth trying to resize it.

It's more than 720px high, so you'll get at least 720p quality on youtube, which is just fine.

[FatherJack]

Started the upload of part 1, should be there in four hours or so assuming I don't absent-mindedly close the window :S

Had to go with WMV in the end, as I hadn't got the disk space to save the edited version as raw AVI (which Fraps saved as) then encode as MP4 as the editor I was using (Ulead) couldn't do anything else reliably or decently - will have to look at learning one of my other editors for future stuff, I'm just comfortable with Ulead's operation and quirks and it's hard to change.

6.4GB at 3Mbit/s - doing the maths, it's not quick but I guess that's just how it is. I only hope it doesn't fail or time out part-way through.

I took much inspiration from Tandino's free-form reaction to events as well as Grimmie and Mr. J's "what is going on here?" quips all of which I really enjoyed, so instead of having anything scripted as as I had to re-record the voice audio and it wasnt truly live I kinda winged the re-record in a single half-hour take. I started out a bit stilted and it naturally degenarated into a shambles pretty early on, but I think I settled into it after that, so I've left it all in rather than overediting it.

At first I cringed at hearing my own voice, but after a dozen or so listens while editing it just sounded like Some Bloke talking and could concentrate on the content without worrying about the overly breathy mic 'technique', background computer hum and all-over-the-place accent*.

I don't consider myself a showman and I'm not posting this as some sort of preview to the vid to generate hype, I'm trying to document my first-time experience of making a voiced-over video in the hopes that my experience of doing so, overcoming my retiscence in the first place, dealing with the technicalities and actually getting to the stage where I'm thinking "yeah, I'm okay if someone else was to actually see that" will inspire more of us to have a go.

I love everything the existing contributors have done and there is plenty of help on hand for the technical aspects for those like me who are new to this. I can safely say that being part of 5punk has made me a more sociable person - which if I'm honest was something I really needed - and being the owner of 5punk I've tried to push myself even further in that direction.

I don't talk much, but as I've mentioned before when you get me on a subject I enjoy (ie: games) I'm like that Fast Show character obsessed with the music of Frank Sinatra and you can't shut me up, so I'm hoping to bring that zeal to the vids. Everyone else in 5punk I've met in RL is a bit like this - there's just this massive commonality and shared ground such that when you just start talking like you would type something on the forums you instantly feel comfortable, without having to worry if you sound too geeky or obtuse like you would conversing with a random - and it's this feeling you should foster when recording a vid.

--

Ok, now the vid says only 2.5 hours to go. I doubt it's taken an hour and a half to for you read this far, but it's truthfully taken me that long to write it.

I'm quite the perfectionist when it comes to posts, which as a hopeful author is a good thing, but terrible when it comes to actually getting a video with a voice-over into production. Thankfully (maybe) I'm rather a fan of the view that the first take (warts and all) is always the best. Sure you can munge in corrections and stuff where you told outright falsehoods, but that first-off rant is the real, core you - and that's what we all want to see.

In RL I'm kind of known for my (deadpan) one-liners, which often seem to (metaphorically) bring the house down - yet I couldn't repeat even a single one from memory. They're just a gut-reactionary vocal response to the current situation, straight from the subsconcious and out of my mouth before I have a chance to verify their worth, or more poignantly, political correctness. The response often includes "you say it like it is, FJ". Brutish and raw commentary are what I like to hear, of course edited to avoid causing upset from overly-broad generalisations or bigotry, but if something is a massive steaming pile of shit then call it out and point the finger.


*I'm not trying to do an accent, it's all my natural voice - I've picked up voice-mannerisms from more people outside my town than within it and I have this thing where I pronounce words correctly for emphasis, yet fall straight back into the lazy version immediately after.

[Grimmie]

Ooh, I'm all rather excited

My little Lets Play baby is growing up. Can't wait to see how yours turns out FJ!

[FatherJack]

Here it is.

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIhCbpo3eOM[/media]