Since Blizzard announced the upcoming Transmogrification feature, pretty much everybody and their brother who has a WoW-related blog is writing about it. Now it's my turn. Everybody's talked about how excited they are (or aren't) about it and how it opens up a whole new way to customize your character. If you look around online, nothing I'm saying here is breaking new ground. It's all been said before. But I've been having to repeat a lot of it lately, so I'm finding it necessary to just have it all written down in one place so I can just say "Read this => http://dft.ba/-Transmog"
Here's what we know about Transmogrification and Void Storage so far (and remember, this isn't released yet, so it's all subject to change):
- Void Storage will function kind of like a secondary personal bank. It will have 80 slots, and it will cost money to unlock.
- When you place something into Void Storage, it removes all enchantments, stats, class requirements etc on the item. If you take the item out of Void Storage (assuming you can, of course, which we don't know yet) it will come out as just the default version of that item. Void Storage essentially just stores the ID number of the item you've placed into it.
- To apply a look onto any item, the look you want will have to belong to an item that you've placed into Void Storage.
- The item you're borrowing the look from must be of the same type. You can't make Plate look like Cloth, and vice versa. This goes for weapons too; no maces if you're really using swords.
- There is an exception to the item-type rule with ranged weapons. You can make bows look like guns, guns look like crossbows, etc.
- You can not borrow the look from Legendaries or Heirlooms. Now running around Org with Thunderfury or Zin'Rokh unless you actually have them equipped.
- Some "silly" items (with "silly" determined by Blizzard) will not be able to have their looks borrowed. No dual-wielding fish or frying pans.
- You must have the original item to borrow it's look by placing it into Void Storage. Blizzard has stated that they're looking into a way of you getting some looks back such as the DK starter set, but no news on that yet.
- The item you're borrowing the look from must have stats. This means that you won't be able to transmogrify your shirt or tabard (unless Blizzard changes this for them). It also means, you can't have your dagger look like the Acolyte's Dagger - though you could make it look like the Ogre Pocket Knife which uses the same model.And no, the armour stat on an item doesn't count as a stat.
Here's what we don't know about Transmogrification and Void Storage:
- Fucking lots
If you haven't figured out how you want your character to look like, there are plenty of resources to draw from. There's a whole slew of websites devoted to RP sets. There's also the WoW Model Viewer, which can help you sort through all the models for a specific slot (with toggles for item type so you can turn off the types you can't/don't use), and also help with making sure you don't look like a clown (unless that's the look you're going for) with all of it on at once. I heavily recommend using WMV in conjunction with Wowhead so you can look up the item that you like (when you select an item in WMV there are two numbers that follow the name, the first is the item number), and you'll be able to see if that specific look is attainable. Some may not be, but Wowhead also has a little tab for each item that shows what other items share that item's model (often with just a recolour). If you're looking up a lot of items, copy http://www.wowhead.com/item= and paste it into your address bar followed by whatever number you want to look up.
Here are links to just a few RP gear blogs. There are many out there. Feel free to leave me links to any I didn't mention in the comments (as well as any corrections I may need to make) below. I'll edit them into my post.
It's For My RP Spec!
Oh, Azeroth
The Visual Roleplay Gear List
The WOW Debutante
World of Warcraft Fashion Guru
Blizzard Dev Blog Posts on Void Storage & Transmogrification:
Void Storage
Transmogrification
(Edited for additional links.)
Saturday 20 August 2011
Friday 19 August 2011
MMOsolation
Many many thanks to The Wayward Initiative for allowing me to do a guest post today. If you haven't already read it, please do so now. Linkety-link.
Thursday 11 August 2011
"stfu dabos ur a baddie"
In between recording, editing, and uploading videos to Youtube, I've been playing WoW here and there. Despite having plenty to do on my main, and being in no way bored of him, I've been playing on the Oceanic Nagrand server. The time zone difference between mine and the server's is such that when I'm playing after midnight, I'm right in the middle of their prime time. I play Alliance-side on a Worgen DK named Dabos in a tiny tiny guild. Like 9 toons, but only two accounts tiny. I'm the only one in the guild to have logged on in the last month. On the toons there anyways. The owner of that guild is a friend of mine from Kael'Thas.
None of this is important, really. I'm just pussy-footing around the topic at hand, which is incidentally the topic of this post. That phrase was said to me in party chat maybe twenty minutes ago, and it's ruined my night. I was in a Utgarde Keep run, and the tank had commented to the mage that he'd never seen anybody kite mobs into his aoe range before. The hunter in the group said "what's that?", and I responded with "the opposite of what you're doing" because the hunter had been kiting away from the tank, and had been pulling mobs before the tank was ready.
Then the hunter said "stfu dabos ur a baddie". I don't know if he meant my dps, or something else, but that comment really bothered me. I have "/assist focus" macro'ed into every ability, and the first thing I do when I enter a random is /focus the tank. I'd taken Howling Blast out of my rotation because the aoe from it was almost getting me killed on every pull in previous randoms [with different people]. Maybe Howling Blast not being in my rotation any more was hurting my DPS. Maybe the fact that I could only attack what the tank was targeting due to the" /assist focus" macroed into my abilities. I don't know, I don't run dps meters.
But to be told that I'm a "baddie" really bothered me. It bothers me more, maybe, that I got called one by somebody whom as a tank would drive me insane. But I stfu'ed, and I finished the run. And I don't want to play WoW any more. At the very least, I don't want to group with people any more. I've mentioned in previous posts that I don't want to be dead weight. This type of stuff really bothers me. Fuck, maybe he was just being a douche or trolling. I shouldn't let it get to me. But I can't help but wonder if I really am a "baddie".
Unrelated to the above, I won't be posting any more videos to Youtube until August 29th. I received an automatic notification from my ISP that I was at 90% of my monthly bandwidth limit, and I still have 18 days left in that time period. I can't afford overage costs, and I might still end up going over the limit from normal usage. 10gb [my monthly limit is 105gb] really isn't that much to spread out over 18 days.
This post has no proper ending, unless you count this sentence, which you shouldn't (due to poor sentence structure).
None of this is important, really. I'm just pussy-footing around the topic at hand, which is incidentally the topic of this post. That phrase was said to me in party chat maybe twenty minutes ago, and it's ruined my night. I was in a Utgarde Keep run, and the tank had commented to the mage that he'd never seen anybody kite mobs into his aoe range before. The hunter in the group said "what's that?", and I responded with "the opposite of what you're doing" because the hunter had been kiting away from the tank, and had been pulling mobs before the tank was ready.
Then the hunter said "stfu dabos ur a baddie". I don't know if he meant my dps, or something else, but that comment really bothered me. I have "/assist focus" macro'ed into every ability, and the first thing I do when I enter a random is /focus the tank. I'd taken Howling Blast out of my rotation because the aoe from it was almost getting me killed on every pull in previous randoms [with different people]. Maybe Howling Blast not being in my rotation any more was hurting my DPS. Maybe the fact that I could only attack what the tank was targeting due to the" /assist focus" macroed into my abilities. I don't know, I don't run dps meters.
But to be told that I'm a "baddie" really bothered me. It bothers me more, maybe, that I got called one by somebody whom as a tank would drive me insane. But I stfu'ed, and I finished the run. And I don't want to play WoW any more. At the very least, I don't want to group with people any more. I've mentioned in previous posts that I don't want to be dead weight. This type of stuff really bothers me. Fuck, maybe he was just being a douche or trolling. I shouldn't let it get to me. But I can't help but wonder if I really am a "baddie".
Unrelated to the above, I won't be posting any more videos to Youtube until August 29th. I received an automatic notification from my ISP that I was at 90% of my monthly bandwidth limit, and I still have 18 days left in that time period. I can't afford overage costs, and I might still end up going over the limit from normal usage. 10gb [my monthly limit is 105gb] really isn't that much to spread out over 18 days.
This post has no proper ending, unless you count this sentence, which you shouldn't (due to poor sentence structure).
Monday 8 August 2011
Anatomy of an Audiosurf video
Audiosurf is a great game, if you're a gamer, and music-lover such as myself. It's the only game I've ever recommended to people both in real life, and using Steam's recommendation thing, and I've been recommending it pretty much since I first got it. Whenever I get a new computer, or do a system recovery on a current one, it is always the first game on Steam that I install. It is also the bread and butter of my videos on youtube.
Other than WoW, it's the first game that I started putting footage from up on the web. I use videos from it to keep my recently-imposed schedule of (at least) one video a day, as it's fairly simple to put an AS video together. So I figured I'd do a post, going through, step by step, how I put together a video for it these days, while I edit some videos of it.
First off, I'll launch the game itself, and I'll sit down and play through an entire album by an artist. I'm editing videos from four albums (one album each) by Celestial Aeon Project, Metatronik, Obsidian Shell, and Oleg Serkov. As I play through an album, I'll write down the names of songs where I got Clean Finish and Stealth bonuses. If you're unfamiliar with Audiosurf, those are just multipliers that affect your final score, that you get by finishing a track without having hit any grey blocks and having any hit blocks on your grid. This gives me a rough guide of which songs from each album I'm going to be editing.
Playing through an entire album, and selecting the songs that I did well on is a lot more efficient than how I used to select tracks for editing. I used to select a specific song, and record footage of that specific song. Sometimes it would be an easy ten minutes of recording, but a lot of the time, one single track could take upwards of an hour to record a good run, with minimal framerate lag from the recording software. I still do a song or two, here and there this way, (most recently, my nyan cat video) but I mostly do it the album play-through way now.
After I've recorded the footage, and made my notes about which songs might be edited, I go to the artist's Jamendo page, and the pages for the songs that I've selected. For what I'm editing today, the first video I'll be working on will be a song from Celestial Aeon Project's album "The Fall of Ragnaros". Looking at my notes, I see that I did well on the songs "Stormfront" and "To the Depths". I open these pages up for a couple reasons. The first, and most important reason is to check which Creative Commons licenses are being used for the songs. Some of the CC licenses prohibit the use of music in the way that I'll be using them. Usually, the same license will be used for the entirety of an album - like with this album - but sometimes, there is a different license being used for a song, and the song's page will reflect that. In the case of this album, the CC license that's been used means I can use these songs for my Audiosurf videos, as long as I credit to the artist (accomplished by a link in the video description), and don't make any money off of the use (accomplished by disabling monetization of the video on the Youtube (if I had a Partner account on there and was making money off my videos by default, which I'm not, so it's something I don't have to worry about right now). I leave those pages open until I'm done my editing process, to speed up the writing of the video description (as I link to the artist's page as well as the page for the track so people can download the song, and support the artist).
Moving on, now that I've looked at the licensing info for the songs that I'll be looking to edit, I open up the audio files for those songs in my media player of choice. I use VLC player - despite owning a pro copy of Winamp - for the sake of convenience, but which you use really has no impact on this process. Since Audiosurf videos - at least, in my case - are more about the music, than the skill of my playing (though that's still a concern, otherwise the songs I did poorly on would still be in the running) I want to choose the most interesting track to listen to. For this album, it's a relatively easy decision, as I only did well on two songs. Both songs are good songs, but to me, "Stormfront" is the more interesting track, so that's the one I'll be editing.
It is only at this point that I finally launch my editing software. Once it's launched, I import the folder that FRAPS outputs its footage to. I did a lot of recording lately, so I have 641 GB of Audiosurf footage sitting in there, as well as another 295 of Torchlight footage that I'll be editing in the future. Needless to say, the importing process could take a bit of time to do. I usually put the kettle on while I wait for it to import. I then select all of my Audiosurf footage and place it on my timeline. Yes, all of it. Looking at it on the timeline, I skim through until I get to the footage of the specific song I'm looking to edit, which in today's case is about 18 minutes in. Then, I select the video tracks that involve that song, and put them on the second track of my video editor. If I'm editing more than one song I'll go ahead and do the same thing for the other songs as well. After I've moved the clips that concern what I'm going to edit onto the second track, I remove all the other clips from the first track.
Once I've done that, I go back to the media room section of my editor, and select all the (Audiosurf) video clips that don't have a little green checkmark on their preview image, I right-click them, and then select "Delete from disk". Audiosurf videos are the only videos where I do this, as there is a lot of footage of the game, that I straight up, just won't be using, and the raw footage that FRAPS puts out takes up a lot of hard drive space. When editing footage from other games, there's a lot of back and forth in my file usage, and transitions, and sometimes even if I'm not going to use the video footage from a clip itself, I may use a freeze-frame from it, or the audio track. But how I handle my Audiosurf videos is a lot more cavalier, and I use an entirely different method for them.
Once I've removed the unused video clips from my hard drive, I go about with the editing process. This normally doesn't take too long, but it depends. For my "album in one go" clips, it's just a matter of splitting the clips at the start and end points of the song, and removing the unnecessary footage from the timeline. For the songs where I specifically chose that song, it's usually the same process, there's just more footage being removed from the timeline, as well as a bit more video splitting. For those videos I'll do the necessary editing at the beginning and the end, but I'll also split the clip right as the video fades from the summary pre-loading screen to the track. When you hit restart while playing a song, that doesn't get shown again, and I like that information to be shown at the start of the video. I then go on to the clip where I finally succeed at completing a track, and go frame-by-frame to the very first frame after the Esc menu is off-screen, and split the clip there. I remove any footage that happens to still be between those important splits, and I close the gap on the track. None of this extra work is necessary for today's footage, though, so I just have to do my basic splits and timeline removal.
At this point, I like to watch the whole clip in the preview pane to make sure that I don't have any small gaps between my video clips that will show up in the final project as a quick flash of black. It's important to note that when dealing with raw footage recorded via FRAPS, that most video-viewing software isn't properly equipped to deal with the raw data available in the unprocessed footage, so there may be the appearance of extreme framerate lag. Video editing software's preview pane is better equipped for viewing this type of footage, but it is still going to look like there are dropped frames. I'm just looking for gaps in my playback, at this point though, so I try not to let those "dropped frames" bother me. Assuming, everything is okay, I move on to the end stages of the editing process.
What I do next depends on a couple things. If I intend to upload footage from another game today, or I've more videos that I intend to edit more videos, I'll save the project, and close the program. When I want to produce the video, all I have to do is open up my editing software, open the project file, and I have my fully edited video waiting to be rendered. If the video I'm editing is not an Audiosurf one, or it's a video that I want to use as the picture, for a picture-in-picture of a different video, I'll go to the produce tab, and render it as an mpeg-2 NTSC 1080p video. Your video editor's codecs and desired picture quality may differ, but I render all my videos in 1080p. For those videos, after they're rendered, I'll often go look at the finished file, and see if there's any issues with the final product that I didn't catch during the editing process, and if so, I'll fix them, re-render and watch it again. I don't do any of these pre-upload renders for my Audiosurf videos any more, as the editing process for them is fairly straight-forward, but I do this for all my other videos still.
Assuming, everything is ready to go, whether the video is an Audiosurf one or not, I'll go to the Produce tab again, and select the Youtube tab within that tab.This tab takes a lot of the work out of uploading my videos - though sometimes it doesn't work properly and I still have to manually upload. I fill in my youtube account information, and I select 1080p from the quality drop-down menu. This information is stored in between sessions, so I only really have to do this once. I then fill out the title, description and tags for the video as well as selecting the category for the video. The title and tag fields are a bit more limited than uploading directly from Youtube, as you can't put as much text in, but this is still handy if what I'm uploading is more than 15 minutes long. If I'm uploading a video that is more than 15 minutes long, PowerDirector automatically splits the video at the 15 minute mark, makes a playlist on Youtube for the videos, and fills in the tags, description and title for each of the videos, appending a"(x/y)" (where x is the current part number, and y is the total part number) to the video title. At this point, I also decide whether I'm going to upload the video as public or private. If you upload a video as private, you can then make it public later, by going to the video details on Youtube and changing it in the privacy settings. It will still show up in your subscriber's subscription boxes once it goes public, but depending on how long ago it was uploaded, it may end up being buried under more recent stuff. I generally select public, but sometimes I'll upload it as private, and then make it public the next day. It's up to you.
I then hit the Start button (Not to be confused with Windows' Start button), and it begins the rendering and uploading process. I generally do this even when I know that the uploading portion of it isn't going to work, as the video still gets rendered into files that you can manually upload, and are conveniently split at the 15 minute mark, if applicable, and are in your desired Youtube video quality. Also, in the case of my videos, I still end up with a 1080p quality video in a smaller filesize than I can easily get by rendering using a different codec. Depending what time it is, while the program is doing the rendering/uploading process I'll either go to bed, read a book, or play a casual game.
And that, is how I go about, from start to finish, making an Audiosurf video. And remember, for all that work, these are videos that take the least amount of work for me to publish. Hope this was informative, and thanks for reading. There will be four new Audiosurf videos today, so be sure to subscribe to my Youtube channel to catch those, or follow me on Twitter so you can see my updates on their release.
Other than WoW, it's the first game that I started putting footage from up on the web. I use videos from it to keep my recently-imposed schedule of (at least) one video a day, as it's fairly simple to put an AS video together. So I figured I'd do a post, going through, step by step, how I put together a video for it these days, while I edit some videos of it.
First off, I'll launch the game itself, and I'll sit down and play through an entire album by an artist. I'm editing videos from four albums (one album each) by Celestial Aeon Project, Metatronik, Obsidian Shell, and Oleg Serkov. As I play through an album, I'll write down the names of songs where I got Clean Finish and Stealth bonuses. If you're unfamiliar with Audiosurf, those are just multipliers that affect your final score, that you get by finishing a track without having hit any grey blocks and having any hit blocks on your grid. This gives me a rough guide of which songs from each album I'm going to be editing.
Playing through an entire album, and selecting the songs that I did well on is a lot more efficient than how I used to select tracks for editing. I used to select a specific song, and record footage of that specific song. Sometimes it would be an easy ten minutes of recording, but a lot of the time, one single track could take upwards of an hour to record a good run, with minimal framerate lag from the recording software. I still do a song or two, here and there this way, (most recently, my nyan cat video) but I mostly do it the album play-through way now.
After I've recorded the footage, and made my notes about which songs might be edited, I go to the artist's Jamendo page, and the pages for the songs that I've selected. For what I'm editing today, the first video I'll be working on will be a song from Celestial Aeon Project's album "The Fall of Ragnaros". Looking at my notes, I see that I did well on the songs "Stormfront" and "To the Depths". I open these pages up for a couple reasons. The first, and most important reason is to check which Creative Commons licenses are being used for the songs. Some of the CC licenses prohibit the use of music in the way that I'll be using them. Usually, the same license will be used for the entirety of an album - like with this album - but sometimes, there is a different license being used for a song, and the song's page will reflect that. In the case of this album, the CC license that's been used means I can use these songs for my Audiosurf videos, as long as I credit to the artist (accomplished by a link in the video description), and don't make any money off of the use (accomplished by disabling monetization of the video on the Youtube (if I had a Partner account on there and was making money off my videos by default, which I'm not, so it's something I don't have to worry about right now). I leave those pages open until I'm done my editing process, to speed up the writing of the video description (as I link to the artist's page as well as the page for the track so people can download the song, and support the artist).
Moving on, now that I've looked at the licensing info for the songs that I'll be looking to edit, I open up the audio files for those songs in my media player of choice. I use VLC player - despite owning a pro copy of Winamp - for the sake of convenience, but which you use really has no impact on this process. Since Audiosurf videos - at least, in my case - are more about the music, than the skill of my playing (though that's still a concern, otherwise the songs I did poorly on would still be in the running) I want to choose the most interesting track to listen to. For this album, it's a relatively easy decision, as I only did well on two songs. Both songs are good songs, but to me, "Stormfront" is the more interesting track, so that's the one I'll be editing.
It is only at this point that I finally launch my editing software. Once it's launched, I import the folder that FRAPS outputs its footage to. I did a lot of recording lately, so I have 641 GB of Audiosurf footage sitting in there, as well as another 295 of Torchlight footage that I'll be editing in the future. Needless to say, the importing process could take a bit of time to do. I usually put the kettle on while I wait for it to import. I then select all of my Audiosurf footage and place it on my timeline. Yes, all of it. Looking at it on the timeline, I skim through until I get to the footage of the specific song I'm looking to edit, which in today's case is about 18 minutes in. Then, I select the video tracks that involve that song, and put them on the second track of my video editor. If I'm editing more than one song I'll go ahead and do the same thing for the other songs as well. After I've moved the clips that concern what I'm going to edit onto the second track, I remove all the other clips from the first track.
Once I've done that, I go back to the media room section of my editor, and select all the (Audiosurf) video clips that don't have a little green checkmark on their preview image, I right-click them, and then select "Delete from disk". Audiosurf videos are the only videos where I do this, as there is a lot of footage of the game, that I straight up, just won't be using, and the raw footage that FRAPS puts out takes up a lot of hard drive space. When editing footage from other games, there's a lot of back and forth in my file usage, and transitions, and sometimes even if I'm not going to use the video footage from a clip itself, I may use a freeze-frame from it, or the audio track. But how I handle my Audiosurf videos is a lot more cavalier, and I use an entirely different method for them.
Once I've removed the unused video clips from my hard drive, I go about with the editing process. This normally doesn't take too long, but it depends. For my "album in one go" clips, it's just a matter of splitting the clips at the start and end points of the song, and removing the unnecessary footage from the timeline. For the songs where I specifically chose that song, it's usually the same process, there's just more footage being removed from the timeline, as well as a bit more video splitting. For those videos I'll do the necessary editing at the beginning and the end, but I'll also split the clip right as the video fades from the summary pre-loading screen to the track. When you hit restart while playing a song, that doesn't get shown again, and I like that information to be shown at the start of the video. I then go on to the clip where I finally succeed at completing a track, and go frame-by-frame to the very first frame after the Esc menu is off-screen, and split the clip there. I remove any footage that happens to still be between those important splits, and I close the gap on the track. None of this extra work is necessary for today's footage, though, so I just have to do my basic splits and timeline removal.
At this point, I like to watch the whole clip in the preview pane to make sure that I don't have any small gaps between my video clips that will show up in the final project as a quick flash of black. It's important to note that when dealing with raw footage recorded via FRAPS, that most video-viewing software isn't properly equipped to deal with the raw data available in the unprocessed footage, so there may be the appearance of extreme framerate lag. Video editing software's preview pane is better equipped for viewing this type of footage, but it is still going to look like there are dropped frames. I'm just looking for gaps in my playback, at this point though, so I try not to let those "dropped frames" bother me. Assuming, everything is okay, I move on to the end stages of the editing process.
What I do next depends on a couple things. If I intend to upload footage from another game today, or I've more videos that I intend to edit more videos, I'll save the project, and close the program. When I want to produce the video, all I have to do is open up my editing software, open the project file, and I have my fully edited video waiting to be rendered. If the video I'm editing is not an Audiosurf one, or it's a video that I want to use as the picture, for a picture-in-picture of a different video, I'll go to the produce tab, and render it as an mpeg-2 NTSC 1080p video. Your video editor's codecs and desired picture quality may differ, but I render all my videos in 1080p. For those videos, after they're rendered, I'll often go look at the finished file, and see if there's any issues with the final product that I didn't catch during the editing process, and if so, I'll fix them, re-render and watch it again. I don't do any of these pre-upload renders for my Audiosurf videos any more, as the editing process for them is fairly straight-forward, but I do this for all my other videos still.
Assuming, everything is ready to go, whether the video is an Audiosurf one or not, I'll go to the Produce tab again, and select the Youtube tab within that tab.This tab takes a lot of the work out of uploading my videos - though sometimes it doesn't work properly and I still have to manually upload. I fill in my youtube account information, and I select 1080p from the quality drop-down menu. This information is stored in between sessions, so I only really have to do this once. I then fill out the title, description and tags for the video as well as selecting the category for the video. The title and tag fields are a bit more limited than uploading directly from Youtube, as you can't put as much text in, but this is still handy if what I'm uploading is more than 15 minutes long. If I'm uploading a video that is more than 15 minutes long, PowerDirector automatically splits the video at the 15 minute mark, makes a playlist on Youtube for the videos, and fills in the tags, description and title for each of the videos, appending a"(x/y)" (where x is the current part number, and y is the total part number) to the video title. At this point, I also decide whether I'm going to upload the video as public or private. If you upload a video as private, you can then make it public later, by going to the video details on Youtube and changing it in the privacy settings. It will still show up in your subscriber's subscription boxes once it goes public, but depending on how long ago it was uploaded, it may end up being buried under more recent stuff. I generally select public, but sometimes I'll upload it as private, and then make it public the next day. It's up to you.
I then hit the Start button (Not to be confused with Windows' Start button), and it begins the rendering and uploading process. I generally do this even when I know that the uploading portion of it isn't going to work, as the video still gets rendered into files that you can manually upload, and are conveniently split at the 15 minute mark, if applicable, and are in your desired Youtube video quality. Also, in the case of my videos, I still end up with a 1080p quality video in a smaller filesize than I can easily get by rendering using a different codec. Depending what time it is, while the program is doing the rendering/uploading process I'll either go to bed, read a book, or play a casual game.
And that, is how I go about, from start to finish, making an Audiosurf video. And remember, for all that work, these are videos that take the least amount of work for me to publish. Hope this was informative, and thanks for reading. There will be four new Audiosurf videos today, so be sure to subscribe to my Youtube channel to catch those, or follow me on Twitter so you can see my updates on their release.
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.
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.
Monday 1 August 2011
Your move, Reg
It's an unfortunate thing that playing video games still has a social stigma despite how many people do so. My father even has video game consoles, though he doesn't play them very often. Embarrassingly enough, he actually has more than I do. Or did prior to my move, though even then I only had a PS3 and a DS.
When people ask me what I did last night, there's less condescension if I consistently state that I did nothing - with all the implications of a complete lack of a social life behind that statement - than if I were to say that I played computer games all night, despite the fact that I'm able to play computer games with my friends. Not all, in fact a large majority, of the games I play can be played with friends, but some can, and thus there's more social interaction involved.
What I think is even more unfortunate is how even within the limited circle of those who play video games, there's a stigma against those who play MMOs. It makes very little sense to me, really. They justify their bias behind things like how those who play them don't have social lives, and their wasting their lives playing the same thing every day, but I don't buy it. There's certainly people who do play MMOs all day, and only MMOs, at the expense of real life priorities, but the same can be said for other games. And as for the monotony behind playing the same video game every day, I'm sure there are still people who play Counterstrike and that was first released in 1999 - the same year as Everquest. And MMOs by their definition do have a lot more social interaction than your average computer game. Granted, some people choose to ignore that aspect and prefer to play alone, but those other people are still there and there will be some interaction.
Even within the group of people who play MMOs there's cliques that form around the discrimination of other MMOs. If you look at Vendetta Online, there are people comparing it against Eve, since they are both space-based MMOs. If you log into EVE, and mention World of Warcraft, you'll get made fun of. There's a phrase that constantly gets repeated in that game that when an Eve player quits in favour of WoW, the average IQ of both games goes up. If you log into DC Universe Online people will contrast it against Champions Online. I could go on, but I'm sure you get the point.
As far as entertainment goes, video games are relative new-comers, and MMOs even more-so with in that form of media. But when you get down to it, it's a form of entertainment. How does sitting down to play a computer game make me a "loser" when spending the same amount of time watching a movie doesn't? Why should I be discriminated against by people I know in real life for spending my evenings playing video games? Why should I be wary of mentioning to people who do know I'm a gamer, that I play WoW? It shouldn't matter, but somehow it does. If it didn't I wouldn't have had to post the journal I kept of my journey to a different blog to separate it from my gaming blog.
Just a thought.
PS: Shortly after I published this, Rock, Paper, Shotgun published an article entitled "Look, Single-Player People Are Just Better". You aren't helping, guys.
When people ask me what I did last night, there's less condescension if I consistently state that I did nothing - with all the implications of a complete lack of a social life behind that statement - than if I were to say that I played computer games all night, despite the fact that I'm able to play computer games with my friends. Not all, in fact a large majority, of the games I play can be played with friends, but some can, and thus there's more social interaction involved.
What I think is even more unfortunate is how even within the limited circle of those who play video games, there's a stigma against those who play MMOs. It makes very little sense to me, really. They justify their bias behind things like how those who play them don't have social lives, and their wasting their lives playing the same thing every day, but I don't buy it. There's certainly people who do play MMOs all day, and only MMOs, at the expense of real life priorities, but the same can be said for other games. And as for the monotony behind playing the same video game every day, I'm sure there are still people who play Counterstrike and that was first released in 1999 - the same year as Everquest. And MMOs by their definition do have a lot more social interaction than your average computer game. Granted, some people choose to ignore that aspect and prefer to play alone, but those other people are still there and there will be some interaction.
Even within the group of people who play MMOs there's cliques that form around the discrimination of other MMOs. If you look at Vendetta Online, there are people comparing it against Eve, since they are both space-based MMOs. If you log into EVE, and mention World of Warcraft, you'll get made fun of. There's a phrase that constantly gets repeated in that game that when an Eve player quits in favour of WoW, the average IQ of both games goes up. If you log into DC Universe Online people will contrast it against Champions Online. I could go on, but I'm sure you get the point.
As far as entertainment goes, video games are relative new-comers, and MMOs even more-so with in that form of media. But when you get down to it, it's a form of entertainment. How does sitting down to play a computer game make me a "loser" when spending the same amount of time watching a movie doesn't? Why should I be discriminated against by people I know in real life for spending my evenings playing video games? Why should I be wary of mentioning to people who do know I'm a gamer, that I play WoW? It shouldn't matter, but somehow it does. If it didn't I wouldn't have had to post the journal I kept of my journey to a different blog to separate it from my gaming blog.
Just a thought.
PS: Shortly after I published this, Rock, Paper, Shotgun published an article entitled "Look, Single-Player People Are Just Better". You aren't helping, guys.
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