Sunday 7 August 2011

Divergently Focusing

The worldwide premier of the documentary about raiding in World of Warcraft - "The Raid" - was tonight, and it was a really good movie. A little short, but put together very well.  The music composition was amazing, and the editing was phenomenal as well. I'm a little surprised that there was censorship of the cussing, and what words were censored versus which one's weren't, especially considering that the general subject matter was gaming, and as I said on twitter while watching, gamers "fucking like to fucking swear". If you missed the livestream release, for the next 72 hours the video will be free to view - though I don't have a URL for that at this time, I'll post a link on my twitter tomorrow once I do. You can also purchase a standard definition DVD from createspace right now. I'm going to touch on that again briefly at the end of this post, but before I do, it's time to talk about my favourite thing: ME!

I've been working pretty hard lately at a lot of things. For a long time now, I've been recording game footage and editing it together with music. If you know where to look, you can even find a video tutorial I made back in Vanilla WoW about how to tame a worg from UBRS solo. Because at that time, you needed to tame different pets to learn their ranks of specific abilities, like max rank Howl in the UBRS worg's case. The video was poorly put together, but I made it and released it for the internet to enjoy.

It's been a long time since I made that video, and I've come a long way in a lot of ways. I've gone from using FRAPS and Windows Movie Maker, to using FRAPS, and a whole bunch of other programs. Those who read my twitter will have, presumably, read about all the difficulties I had with a recent video I made about fishing in Runic Games' Torchlight. That video has been completed, and uploaded, though still unlisted, and I used five different programs to put it together - not including Torchlight itself. I'm still not entirely happy with it; I'd like to work some more on the transparency I used in some of my overlays, for example. But I know that if I spend any more time on that video I'm going to lose my mind.

I still make a whole bunch of mistakes along the way.. During the editing of that fishing video, the audio track in one of the important bits became unsynched. I ended up having to rerecord that entire section, and then I ended up not using the recorded audio anyways. In a recent recording of gameplay footage, I forgot to tell FRAPS to record the audio, so I have an hour and a half of footage with no audio, that I can't rerecord. I'm still figuring out how I should approach the editing of that footage.

But I've progressed. I understand the basics of picture-in-picture, layering, transparency, fading audio. I now know that the vast majority of credits sequences in videos on Youtube are done incorrectly, and I also know that if the people who made those videos are aware of something being wrong, they can't put their finger on what. There's all kinds of tricks I've learned that a lot of people don't necessarily think about when they watch a video, but still register on the subconscious level.

Even the most basic of my videos, the Audiosurf ones, have come a long way, even in the relatively short time I've been doing them. While I still only use two programs to produce them, a lot more work and thought goes into them than you'd think. For every 5 minute song I play and upload, there's probably half an hour of raw footage going into the video editor. By it's very nature, uploading gameplay footage is copyright infringement, Audiosurf footage even more-so. But to help reduce the content ID matches for those videos, I've removed any previously uploaded videos that had content ID matches, and I now exclusively use Creative Commons licensed stuff, usually from Jamendo. On most videos featuring music, there's usually at least one person who wants a download link for the song, and it's nice to be able to legally provide one. None of this is stuff that you think about when you're just watching videos, until you start making them.

I'm devoting time to make sure I have good production quality on my videos. I try to make sure I'm constantly releasing stuff, and tagging it properly. I'm looking into 3D animation software to make myself a logo that I can overlay at the start of my videos. I'm looking into music composition software so that I can have copyright-free music in my introductions. These last two are highly worrisome, as I don't have any real talent in these fields of creativity, but I have such a strong idea of what I want that I have trouble describing it to others.

All this work is partially because I actually enjoy the whole process, but I'm trying to get noticed now. That's why I recently changed the URL for this blog (Please update your links & bookmarks if you haven't already) and for my twitter. Unfortunately, I wasn't unable to get the same account name across the various sites, so it's split between the names "reverendunk" and "ronove", but it's a lot less confusing than it was before. It's also why at the top of my blog, there's now links to follow me on twitter and subscribe to my videos on Youtube (But you're already doing that, right? ;p ). I've even resorted to changing my user name on Audiosurf so that any time I play a song, and get on a scoreboard, whether I'm recording or not, there's a chance people will check out my Youtube channel. I would love to do this type of thing for a living, as while I love cooking, it is a very high-stress profession. It probably won't happen, but, to that end, I've applied for an Ad Sense account, and will apply for a Partner account on Youtube once I reach a certain subscriber threshold. If a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing right, and if it's worth doing right, it's worth getting paid for. That's the theory anyways. I've no idea how successful this venture is going to be.

Now, for those of you who tuned into the livestream premier of "The Raid", and stuck around to the end for the contest details... A lot of you were surprised, and annoyed - myself included - to discover that the contest was only available to U.S. citizens. This is doubly odd, given that it was a worldwide premier. I can almost understand why they excluded other continents, but I'm slightly surprised that Canada wasn't included. I get that it's international, but really, it's on the same continent. Anyways, I've decided to hold my own contest. It's going to be a little different though. For one thing, there's not going to be any tangible rewards, and another is that it's not a real contest. You see, for something to be considered a contest, there has to be people who win.... and people who don't. Ronove don't play that game. If you enter the contest, you "win". What you "win" is an unlisted video made just for you, to your specifications.

There are some conditions of course. Your specifications can not cost me money. I'm currently unemployed - by choice, mind, but unemployed nonetheless - so I don't have any income to spend on this. If you want gameplay footage, and I don't own the game (though I do own a lot) you're either going to have to buy it for me (not recommended), or chose another game. They can't be lewd, rude or crude. That's a bit broad, but I'm slightly worried that if I go into specifics on that somebody might find a loophole, so let's just say that "lewd", "rude", and "crude" are terms to be defined by me on a submission-to-submission basis.

To enter the contest, all you have to do is subscribe to my Youtube channel (link at the top) and then send me a message on Youtube saying that you've subscribed, and what you want your video to be of, with "Focused Divergence" as the subject. There is no entry date for this contest. I shall do this in perpetuity. Only one entry per person, please. I know it's fairly simple to make another account, but let's go with the honour system here.

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