Lately I've been looking at two charities that have received some recognition amongst gamers; Child's Play and Extra Life. Child's Play is definitely the more famous of the two as it's the charity run and supported by the Penny Arcade guys, as well as the charity that all donations from the Desert Bus For Hope event go to. Last year they raised two point two million dollars. All donations from that charity go towards buying things on an Amazon wishlist, set up by the participating hospitals to buy video games and such for the sick children to help raise their spirits.
Extra Life is a very similar but entirely different charity, that as well as being primarily supported by gamers also involves gamers on a more person-to-person level. Think of it as the Terry Fox Run, only with playing video games instead of running, if that helps. Somebody who signs up as a player, agrees to play video games - whether they be on console, PC, facebook, or their iphone - for 24 hours straight, and they get people to pledge a certain amount per hour played. So if you pledge $1, you're agreeing to donate $24 to the hospital that the player has chosen to support. The donations attained go directly to the hospitals. Extra Life asks their players to raise a minimum of $100 but of course, hopes for more.
Do NOT get me wrong. I absolutely believe that both charities are amazing and are doing great things. But I personally believe that Extra Life helps the sick children in a much more direct route; helping cure the problem, instead of helping them cope with it. Sometimes the cure isn't attainable in the child's lifetime though, and I understand the need to make them as happy as possible in the interim.
This October 15, I will be participating in the Extra Life charity event, and I encourage you all to support me in supporting them by pledging. This is my donation page.
For further information about Extra Life & Child's Play, I encourage you to read their websites, which can be found at http://www.extra-life.org and http://www.childsplaycharity.org
Monday, 5 September 2011
Saturday, 20 August 2011
Transmogrification and you.
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.)
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.)
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.
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