Learning how to let's play
Jan. 19th, 2014 01:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
estiroseI've been trying to produce a decent Let's Play of a video game for the last few years, but I got stuck because cellphone cameras on screens do not a great thing make. Plus, you can't film during daylight. (See some of my pictures on my Tumblr for how bad things can look, especially Fatal Frame IV.)
I broke down and bought a setup (cost me less than $100 USD) to record from the console. There are some downsides (I have to record my commentary track on my phone), but it works.
Setup:
Diamond VC500 Capture device. It's a dongle with composite and S-Video imputs. Comes in Mac and PC versions.
Video/Audio amplifier (splits and amplifies the signals so I can actually see where I'm going and don't have any display delays).
Laptop (which runs Windows 8.1)
EZGrabber software (included with Diamond VC500)
Recording device for audio commentary (I use an iPhone with an app that allows me to upload my audio to dropbox).
Headphones (for being able to hear the game while commenting)
Software for editing: Windows Movie Maker (video editing), Audacity (audio editing), Format Factory (video and audio conversion).
EZGrabber is set up to grab in DVD-quality, which is the only decent quality. Files are quite large, so I use Format Factory to convert to a much smaller AVI and delete the original. I also convert the audio from MP4 to MP3 with the same software, use Audacity to fix the fact that I have a really soft voice (and strip out the extra seconds between the start of the audio commentary recording and the video recording), and then add the video and commentary tracks (telling WMM to prioritize the "music" track. Then I save out the project as MP4, supposedly Youtube-ready videos.
I still have a few things that need to be fixed/made easier - the brightness on my recordings leaves a lot to be desired when playing very dark Fatal Frame (heaven knows what would happen if I tried to record Kurosawa house in II without fixing that), I need to enunciate more, and I need a headphone extender so I'm not so close to the screen. Also, I live next to my complex's parking area, so sometimes I get outside noise, which I can't fix. But otherwise, part 1 works quite well.
I broke down and bought a setup (cost me less than $100 USD) to record from the console. There are some downsides (I have to record my commentary track on my phone), but it works.
Setup:
Diamond VC500 Capture device. It's a dongle with composite and S-Video imputs. Comes in Mac and PC versions.
Video/Audio amplifier (splits and amplifies the signals so I can actually see where I'm going and don't have any display delays).
Laptop (which runs Windows 8.1)
EZGrabber software (included with Diamond VC500)
Recording device for audio commentary (I use an iPhone with an app that allows me to upload my audio to dropbox).
Headphones (for being able to hear the game while commenting)
Software for editing: Windows Movie Maker (video editing), Audacity (audio editing), Format Factory (video and audio conversion).
EZGrabber is set up to grab in DVD-quality, which is the only decent quality. Files are quite large, so I use Format Factory to convert to a much smaller AVI and delete the original. I also convert the audio from MP4 to MP3 with the same software, use Audacity to fix the fact that I have a really soft voice (and strip out the extra seconds between the start of the audio commentary recording and the video recording), and then add the video and commentary tracks (telling WMM to prioritize the "music" track. Then I save out the project as MP4, supposedly Youtube-ready videos.
I still have a few things that need to be fixed/made easier - the brightness on my recordings leaves a lot to be desired when playing very dark Fatal Frame (heaven knows what would happen if I tried to record Kurosawa house in II without fixing that), I need to enunciate more, and I need a headphone extender so I'm not so close to the screen. Also, I live next to my complex's parking area, so sometimes I get outside noise, which I can't fix. But otherwise, part 1 works quite well.
