EPTI enjoyed NonY and Day[9]'s commentary on the MSL finals so much, immediately I knew this had to be made into a much more solid viewable media. What I mean by that is that many Starcraft fans sometimes do these kinds of commentary of their own, or subtitles for favorite VODs, but these things tend to disappear in a short time, and after a couple of months already forum posts start to pop up every once in a while asking 'where can I get that old commentary/subtitle...' and then you have to find and download the correct VOD to sync it with, anyway you know what I mean.
I thought very highly of their analysis of the game, Day[9] and rS.NonY said a lot of what I felt when watching the finals, and so much more. Their understanding of the game is far greater than my own, explanations of the deeper concepts and ideas behind what the players had in mind really enlightened me about what went on in the game beyond what seemed obvious.
So, myself lacking the required video editing skills, I got my friend who's an excellent anime encoder (and wishes to remain incognito) to help me out with this project, and he did an amazing job! to make a very long story short (because it was more complicated than what I'll explain here) basically we (ok.. he, but I was encouraging!) took the original wmvs of the finals, stripped them of the audio, then synced them with the commentary audio into one file (with the original sound lower on volume and the commentary way higher, we could also go for pure commentary and no background sound but after comparing we found that the background sounds are really crucial to keep the game atmosphere), the audio files are longer than the actual videos because Day and NonY continued talking about the games after they were over, which means you had to add more video or YouTube and other video hosting sites would reject the 'audio only' parts, so we added a TeamLiquid logo (with fade-in) until the audio was finished, which means we had to convert the wmvs into avi format, then re-introduce the synced sound files inside, and all sorts of tweaks in the middle to keep the video/audio from being damaged in quality (big success), and we're very happy with the results :-)
And here it is, forever immortalized :-)
Pre-Game Commentary: (awards ceremony)
MSL Finals Game-1:
MSL Finals Game-2:
MSL Finals Game-3:
Programs used: (XviD for codec. Also had to use 3 versions of vdub, just because mainline vdub sucks)
VirtualDubMPEG2 for ASF/WMV extraction & frameserving.
VirtualDub (normal) for encoding.
VirtualDubMod for muxing. (AviMuxGUI is excellent but the results don't always turn out compatible with all players, or YouTube)
Audacity for audio editing.
WM Encoder for making WMAs.
WM Stream Editor for remuxing WMAs into WMVs.
LAME for encoding MP3s.
And of course Avisynth for video editing.
For anyone interested, the general process went as following:
VdubMPEG2: Load WMV, demux audio, start frameserver.
Avisynth: Add logo to frameserved video.
VirtualDub: Encode with XviD to AVI.
Audacity: Mix audio + commentary.
Lame: Encode audio to mp3.
VirtualDubMod: Mux mp3 with video.
NonY and Day[9]'s original thread:
http://teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=50473
I'm a YouTube uploader, but if any of you wants to upload the games on other video hosting sites, the more the better, I'll upload the files onto RapidShare tommorow and post the link.
