EPTEverything has to be JUST right when the game is on and the camera is rolling. There's more to recording live commentary than opening a piece of "recording software" next to your videogame and letting it fly. The complexity of the technology demands it. Hell, I have a radio, calculator, art theatre, telephone, television, moving picture box, wire-having-ass set of computer technology here and somehow I am sending you messages with it.
In the first three stages of producing a video my workflow goes as follows: I first play a videogame and record commentary. Then it is time to do some post-production to create an introduction sequence, an outro-duction, and an amount of editing of that actual footage that ranges from 0 to 1,000 cuts. Usually, I try to record sessions that require 0 cuts. The third step of the video production workflow is to let Adobe Media Encoder take its time rendering the file. Ideally, everything has gone very smoothly and we can move on to the publishing phase.
THIS BLOG POST WAS ORIGINALLY ABOUT HOW @#$% (^!( %%!(( %@%% ADOBE MEDIA ENCODER $^#& &*#!!@% SUCKS %&!( CRASHING #### EVERY VIDEO RENDER
Of course, in the publishing phase we're going to have to create a video description. Publishing to youtube has three major parts in my experience. Let's break down Publishing and drill down into it's consitutuents:
1. UPLOADING: We upload the video to youtube. Its easy, thank goodness.
2. MONETIZATION & AD PLACEMENT: This can be as easy or as hard as you like and somewhat depends on the length of your videos. Youtube's ad options are: in-video pop-up banner at the beginning, pre-roll ad, end-of-show ad, and mid-stream ads that can be placed upto every 7 minutes.
3. DESCRIPTION, TAGS & ANNOTATIONS:
Creating a video's description: Copy-paste a short Standard Message. Submit description.
NOT SO FAST, MISTER!
We need each description to work with our video. Viewers check out the description during any part where their attention from the video is fading, viewers will also tend to open the description immediately upon loading the video or during a pre-roll ad. The description needs to have entertainment value of its own along with that Standard Message! For me, I have begun using a new technique wherein I create a keyword poem that serves to entertain and has begun to improve my search result outcomes after just 7 days use ((AKA Youtube Video Description Keyword Stuffing Experiment in Progress)). Anyhow, descriptions benefit from being entertaining and non-repetitive for the viewers watching tons of videos.
Tags. Enter more keywords for the search engine.
I believe there is value in having annotations on each of my videos and I know of no template for Youtube annotations. Every, every, pop-up on the video whether a simple-but-necessary "click here to subscribe" or an equally simple and helpful link to another video must be manually added. This means the annotation's time on, time off, text message, size, position, and link information has to be put in by hand on every video. This isn't so bad except for when the web browser crashes, flash crashes, navigate to and load up the particular times in the video in which annotations will appear..
Bam. Created and published a video.
In summary, the technology does not always cooperate and the time from recording the commentary to developing it into having any chance of reaching an audience is greater than what many observers expect. In this post, I have only touched the tip of the iceberg and may get deeper into some of the stuff going on behind the scenes of the scenes of the scenes when I have time and inclination to write.
On a more whimsical note, Wolfenstein The New Order is out and it is pretty awesome. Here's one of the gameplay sequences from the commentated playthrough at my channel.
BLASKOWITZ THE ASYLUM PATIENT - Wolfenstein The New Order Part 6
BTW this game is 44gigs.. and it crashed. And wouldn't load again. Steam verification states: Congrats, you must re-download 39 of 44 gigs. Lost some footage when the game crashed and the footage that hasn't made it onto Youtube is getting choked by Adobe Media Encoder's crashing -- Today I will be following a tutorial in order to set up a different, open-source bunch of piecemeal programs to render my videos instead of Adobe's crap encoder.
Best Regards,
RG
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