LP Update/Comment Thread

[IskatuMesk]

Only one I can think of.

[Pr0nogo]

I will check it out and maybe do an LP of my own.

Yours was an eye opener, though. I think I understand a lot more about what good casting and LPing is really about - specifically the topics of sharing thoughts as you progress rather than blandly playing the game and not saying anything, which is what I had a tendency to do as I had yet to develop my skills in speaking while playing.

[IskatuMesk]

Casting has been a very double-edged experience for me. When I first started casting with SC2 beta I was met with overwhelmingly negative feedback. Like 95% negative reviews on any website that ended up linking my videos. In hindsight, my casting was awful. The mic quality was bad, audio imbalanced, and my speech was very clearly derived of someone who hasn't spoken more than a few sentences to people physically for a decade+. While I had the game knowledge, I never had the voice.

As I verified my GoW and Exigo videos, I realized I needed to speak my mind more. Exigo and GoW are a far cry from my first true LP, which was Darksiders (and to an extent the WoL campaign), but Demon's Souls I think is infinitely superior to my previous works. I really worked it into myself to speak as often as possible, even if it was as simple as reading my mental activity outloud.

LP'ing isn't just about playing a game and talking. You, as the player, are the conduit through which the user's experience is conducted. You are as important as the game itself. If you say nothing, it's just a third person observation with no attachment.

Demon's Souls has a ton of slow moments. Keeping active, keeping the energy going, was critical to overcoming them not only through playing but through casting. I would never have finished this game if it wasn't for the LP.

[Pr0nogo]

I think taking it from that perspective is really helpful with regards to how I might begin casting much, much better than I have before. I'm loud and obnoxious, but not nearly talkative enough when playing, and the LP I'm currently working on does benefit from me speaking much more often. However, I am still suffering from horrible microphone quality.

I think I might try my hand at summarising my collective experience into a review, as you did with your LPs. I will seek to streamline my process at any rate, and improve.

[IskatuMesk]

With Armageddon Onslaught being my last real mod, ever since then I've been largely focused on video media production. Ever since sc2 beta and beyond I've been mostly just making videos of various types. So, practice practice got me where I am now, and I've still got a long ways to go.

[Pr0nogo]

Any specific tips you'd toss my way, with regards to casting or video production of any kind?

[IskatuMesk]

I'll see what I can conjure.

[Pr0nogo]

I do appreciate it.

If it would help, I will provide a download link to the shitty WMV format of the first segment of my Flame Knives LP. It ends rather suddenly as my power went out for a whopping four and a half seconds, and resulted in FRAPS completely butchering the encoding for the final five minutes.

Do you use Vegas to render your videos in .mkv?

/e
Youtube. GameFront decided to give me an upload error when it finished. Guess it had a concussion.

I will be reuploading it at a later point so that it is in 1080p.

[IskatuMesk]

Alrighty. Video-wise, here's what I do.

http://campaigncreations.org/forum/view ... =66&t=6403

I think you should lower the game volume a bit. My goal with volume is to prevent circumstances where the game audio ends up masking my mic. This can be problematic to test because you can end up with circumstances like I did in GoW3 where the music in some later fights was loud enough to overcome my talking. That's the single largest problem I see with your video so far. Particularly if you run a compressor to normalize the volumes like I do, it has helped me to even lower the volume a little bit lower than I anticipated to be "good", since the compressor raises its volume.

Running a compressor helps normalize your volumes so you're audible even when talking quietly, and keeps screaming and stuff from being deafening. Pretty much, there's no reason to not run one. This is done through Audition on the final audio stream. So, basically, make sure the volumes are fairly normalized and then hit it with a compressor to average out the spikes and low points.

Otherwise I think the rest will come down to practice. I might make some kind of editorial on Demon's Souls to give a bit of insight to how I do things though.

[Pr0nogo]

Alright, this is indeed a far more complicated process than shoving FRAPS recordings into movie maker and hitting publish (which is, you guessed it, exactly what I've been doing).

I'll bookmark the guide and be sure to check it out. I already have many of these programmes.

And yes, Vegas is slow as SHIT. It's at 80% for 1080-24p after running for a whopping ten hours.

[IskatuMesk]

I have been notified that VLC may have trouble with seg 4 around the 2 hour mark. I verified this in MPC and have no issues. Once again, if these videos give you problems in VLC or Chrome, use MPC with madvr. It is very possible that mkvmerge spits out bad frames that VLC has trouble with. I can't do anything about it.

Otherwise it's generally possible to skip past the "broken" parts.

[IskatuMesk]

A little update.

I'm balls-deep in Dark Souls, and while I have staggered behind in encoding/verification I am currently 6 segments verified and working on the 7th. I plan to catch up entirely before beginning recording again, but we'll see. During this downtime I'll be resting. It is very possible the entire production could be finished in December, which would be a nice production out of the way and allow me to hit 2013 with a bit less work to do.

Because the series is 1920x1200 and there's gobs of motion blur, the segments will be 2-3 hours and range from 2-4gb. I'll be providing Micro encodes for this series as a result.

I have two additional MGEC videos in the goat locker ready to be finished off. The first is a video that talks about how I plan projects, my conceptual builds and their goals, and a bunch of thought processes surrounding it. The second is a video that is basically an editorial on Demon's Souls and casting. I have a third video that talks about my UDK ARPG plans and the genre and stuff but I doubt it'll be finished before I do the Audio video.

Completion of the Audio introduction video, the Editorial, and the Planning videos will mark Wave 2 and I'll close Wave 2 with those 3 videos. I have no ETA as I have to rebuild the audio video entirely from scratch and the editorial needs more work.

[Pr0nogo]

How many segments will be present in Dark Souls, do you estimate?

[IskatuMesk]

Not sure. If I were to make a wild guess, I have about 12 or so segments worth in total right now. But the segments are shorter (due to the much larger filesize) than Demon's Souls.

[Pr0nogo]

Alrighty. You said you have someone else look at your segments before releasing the entire LP, right? To, like, help verification or something? I'd be more than happy to help you out there if you need it.