Youtube, Frapsing, editing and other bandwagon jumping garbage.

[Scumbag]

First up this is not an advert to tempt people into watching ANOTHER awful let’s play channel. I’m not linking my work unless you want it as, right now; it’s very poor in my eyes. I don’t have a radio voice so while this is public I’d rather not advertise it right now.

I’ve been making naff game vids for slapping on YouTube of late and I’ve had a few problems getting things to a quality I feel to be worth watching.
First up is the actual capping; in Fraps the raw vids are rather large, had about 40 mins of footage taking up roughly 100Gb or more of HDD space and I’ve been playing about seeing if I can reduce the file sizes. Trying to cap stuff for 720p vids at full quality I reduced the cap frame-rate to 30 FPS due to the limitations on YouTube’s playback rate, however this seems to screw with the actual game’s frame-rates. Does anyone know of any way to improve the efficiency without the need to have such huge files, or is the solution simply “Get a new HDD”?
Secondly (and more problematic) can anyone advise on a good editing suite? Been using the Windows Live move maker thus far, and while I don’t need any fancy features its really unstable, twitchy in its performance (I add fast forward moments and it can screw the playback up), often cuts out large sections of any audio I dub in (using Audacity, which has been fine thus far) and seems to only support one music channel, so if I intend to add a commentary dub and a music channel things start getting messy. Any good pointers of what I can use in place of this botched Windows basic piece?

All advice and criticism / insults accepted.

[Skalpadda]

Haven't used Fraps or made videos in quite a long while, but maybe I can answer a few things.

Fraps will sync your frame rate to the capture rate, so recording at 30FPS will limit your FPS to 30 as well. This is done to keep things in sync and shouldn't really be a problem unless you're playing a twitch action shooter or something and can't deal with sub 60 FPS. As for efficiency, well, video data is large and you wouldn't want to compress your raw footage too much anyway, but on the other hand hard drives are (relatively) inexpensive.

For editing, I've used a cheapo version of Sony Vegas I've had since I was at uni and it's pretty decent for basic editing but afaik it costs quite a bit to buy. No idea if there are cheap or open source programs out there that are worth using. I used to do all the editing in Vegas, then save it as a lossless file using Lagarith to have a version to archive and then made h.264 copies from that using MeGUI.

Other advice, well, before you spend two hours editing ask yourself if that time spent is actually going to make your video better or more enjoyable to watch. Unless you know what you're doing keep editing simple. No one is going to object to simple fades whereas a lot of the flashy effects and transitions you find in editing programs can get annoying really fast (and tend to look cheap). If you're making videos for YouTube, they accept uploads up to 20GB these days, so worry more about the quality of your video than the file size and don't over compress it when you encode your h.264 version.

[Scumbag]

Ah cheers for that. Been holding back on HDDs due to the price hike last year, but looks like they won’t be changing back anytime soon. I guessed raw files are not things to be messed about with too much.
Lots of people have advised Vegas for editing so may give it a shot. Looks like the cheapest is about £30 ish, but to be fair I get by mostly with what the Windows Live one gives, I only really want multiple sound layers and stability more then anything, not fussed about lots of flashy extras (though good sound mixing levels would be nice).
Agree on the daft effects or superfluous crap. One thing that annoys me about most video makers is constantly flashing CG intros in your face, long introductions with lots of ego and then follow it up with far too much boring footage of repeated sections or silly zooms or shaky effects to seem more radical or whatnot. If I watch it back I tend to try and view it as a watcher rather then me reviewing my own work. “You have shown the inventory and the pistol ammo four times already. Why are you showing me this again?” “Yes, headshots are very gory and nasty, but seeing it over and over is not that entertaining.” “You say ‘Ok’,’So then’ and ‘urm…’ too much.” Etc…

[Lukasz]

Yeah. you kinda need lots of space for raw video. and people like higher res videos so 1080p is a must. but that takes space... Jesse Cox who does lots of LP (and the only LPer I actually watch) has 3 or 4 TB of space just dedicated to videos he makes. the pirce of HDDs went down again. they should go down even more in past 6 months i believe so i think you can wait a bit to get a better deal.

[Bungle]

Use Bandicam instead of Fraps. Also, record your games at 60 fps or more so you can actually play the game well. Then take it down to 30 fps after you've edited, when you actually encode the video.

[Odeon]

I've never used FRAPS because of the reportedly horrible file sizes, but a couple of years back I used Microsoft's Media Encoder 9 Series program with pretty good success to record an hour-long webinar with full audio and a final file size of about 350MB. The video quality wasn't what I'd call great, but then again it was just recording PowerPoint slides, so it didn't have to be. It was definitely good enough to get the job done though. Unfortunately, MS no longer supports that free program and has instead decided to make a pay-only encoding program, but the original can still be downloaded from some third-party sites. It can be somewhat confusing setting it up, but that looks like it might be pretty common.

CamStudio is a free open-source program that a lot of people seem to like. It seems to make some big files too, but I've only just starting trying it out, so there could be ways to make the files smaller.

[Scumbag]

Thanks for the advice from all fronts. Going to play around with a few bits of software (budget permiting).

[Odeon]

Thanks for the advice from all fronts. Going to play around with a few bits of software (budget permiting).

Please post your results when you figure out your favorite. I don't use recording software very often right now, but I'm hoping to make some gaming videos in the near future and would love to be able to skip all of the comparison work when the time comes.

[Moraven]

I used Xsplit to Stream and/or Local record.

My problem is I only have a mid level headset/mic. My voice capture is very poor sounding. Other than getting better mic I could be recording my voice in Audacity to get a better sound from my voice. Just need to be willing to put in the time to record and edit my voice over my video.

Other option is to do your video with no voice. Then rewatch it while commentating.

[FriendlyFire]

Well, the reason files are big is that big files don't require compression. You can't magically record compressed video; you need to record the frames and then compress them. Do you really want your CPU to do heavy duty video compression while you're playing a game in an attempt to record it?

[Scumbag]

Other option is to do your video with no voice. Then rewatch it while commentating.

Thats typically what I do. I get VERY hung up on pauses with lots of "Erm..." and "Well... Like..." moments so with post vid commentary you can be picky (which I never get right anyhow).

Doing the evil lets plays right now to get my voice in a good state, though usually in a character's voice to make it more interesting (for myself at least).

[db1331]

Could I have a link to your channel? I love watching LP's, and I've seen lots of terrible ones, so even if yours need some work like you say, I would still be curious to see them.

[Scumbag]

Could I have a link to your channel? I love watching LP's, and I've seen lots of terrible ones, so even if yours need some work like you say, I would still be curious to see them.

Ok, but dont say I did not warn you:
http://www.youtube.com/user/nescumzwei?feature=mhee
Newer vids are the lets plays (though the latest one is just an idiot driving in circles screaming). The dub is in Japanese as I thought it was funnier then if I did it in English (subtitles are rather libral in their translation).
Vids before that are some Demos of how some more botched / missunderstood games work trying to advise friends on how they actually function (to the best of my understanding). Oldest stuff I should make private as its holiday vids, but insult or dislike them for poluting a (bad) games channel if ye wish.

[db1331]

I watched one of your Stalker vids and a Minecraft one. There's nothing at all wrong with your voice or recording style. I'd absolutely watch an LP of yours if it was on an interesting game. My advice would be to just dive in head first. Do a few LPs of short but popular games (like LIMBO). Also, people love to watch you struggle through a tough game. I bet if you picked up Dark Souls when it releases in a couple months and posted a blind LP, you would gain a ton of subs.