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Media Creation or how I learned to edit video and cast a pod
David_T
A fashion yes-man is no good to me.Copenhagen, DenmarkRegistered User regular
A fashion yes-man is no good to me.Copenhagen, DenmarkRegistered User regular
Alt title: The search for a better thread title.
Hello! You might be wondering why I called you all here today. Well, while we have a YouTube thread for talking about internet videos and a podcast thread for talking about whatever on Earth the podcast thread is talking about, we also have a number of people involved in creating both of these things and talking shop about how we actually do these things has a tendency to be buried by the sheer volume of those threads. So here's to how the sausage is made.
VIDEO EDITING
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wta9_6m8oiE
Courtesy of @Somestickguy
Editing video? You have a number of options.
Windows Movie Maker: It's free. It's very basic. You probably shouldn't use it.
iMovie: It's free if you buy a Mac. It's available on IOS devices and it's not that bad, actually. I know a few people who shoot and edit on their iPhone and since there's considerable overlap between Apple's iMovie and their Final Cut Pro X, it's apparently quite easy to make the step up from iMovie to FCX. My own experience with it is limited, though, so I'm going off of other people's assessment. But speaking of...
Final Cut Pro X: It's not Final Cut Pro 7, which to this day pisses some people off. It's Mac-only. Had major issues at release but that's mostly been ironed out by now. In fact, in 2014 the Will Smith feature "Focus" became the first feature film to be cut on FCX. Costs $299, unless Google lied to me. I've barely touched FCX, I was taught editing on FC7 but lost access to a Mac that could run editing software before FCX was released. From what little I've used it, it seems perfectly competent.
Adobe Premiere Elements: Mac/Windows. Part of the Elements line of budget, pared-down versions of their Creative Cloud programs, along with Photoshop Elements. Premiere is the little brother of Premiere Pro and does most of what Pro does. There's some stuff missing that I could see being annoying as you improve as an editor and want to try your hand at more advanced things. No keyframes, no green screen (chroma keying), no GPU acceleration. The advantage of Elements is that you can actually buy it. You can plunk down $99.99 (again, assuming Google is to be trusted) and own a license of Premiere Elements 14 for ever and ever and ever, you'll be back, time will tell... sorry, I've been listening to a lot of Hamilton. Why is being able to just buy it an advantage?
Adobe Premiere Pro: Mac/Windows. Unlike Elements, Pro is only available as a monthly subscription. It's a better program than Elements, personally I like it more than FCX, but to use it you either have to pay $19.99 per month with at least a one year commitment for just Premiere Pro or $49.99 a month for the entire Creative Cloud suite, which includes among others Photoshop, Audition and After Effects. If I was working with video professionally, if I was making money off of it, I could see the Creative Cloud making a lot of sense. All three programs I mentioned are programs you could easily find yourself needing and Premiere Pro is an excellent editing suite. But as is, well, it's a bit of an investment.
Sony Vegas 13: Windows-only. It's cheap. $59.99 gets you a competent editing suite. It's on Steam, so any of the Steam sales will drop the price on it. Sony Vegas is probably what I've spent most time editing on, besides Final Cut Pro 7, and... well, I think "competent" probably remains the best way to describe it. Everything you can do in Premiere and Final Cut, you can do in Vegas, just not quite as easy or quickly as in those. 13 in particular has a thing where the UI has clearly been designed for touch screens and there's no way to resize it, so you have these enormous buttons just taking up screen real estate. I'd probably go with Elements over Vegas in a battle of the budget releases.
DaVinci Resolve 12: Originally a color grading program, Australian company Blackmagic Design got so many requests for this one editing feature or this other little feature, just to finish this thing up while doing the color grading, that they eventually decided to make Resolve 12 into a fully featured non-linear editing program. There are two versions, a free version and a $995 Studio version, but unless you're editing Stereoscopic 3D, there's no reason to bother with the Studio version. Really, the only thing that the Studio version has that I could see myself missing is some noise reduction and motion blur settings. Now it doesn't have as many video effect filters built in as Premiere or Final Cut but it does support OpenFX plugins and it's also a really cool color grading program to boot. It's a system hog, you basically have to spec for this program like you would for a gaming computer, but it's very, very quickly become my personal go-to editing program. Windows, Mac and it might be the only program listed here that's also available for Linux, if that's a decider for you.
There are other programs out there, I know Lightworks is available in a free version if you don't need to output to more than 720p, but these are the major players. And Windows Movie Maker.
Now that you have your video, it needs to go somewhere. Let's look at the options.
YouTube: It's YouTube.
Alright, moving on...
Okay, okay, there are actually alternatives.
Vimeo: It's hipster YouTube. It's a YouTube alternative that's mostly focused on short films, series and animation. If you just want to play some videogames and throw that on the net, Vimeo probably isn't worth it for you, but for animation or visual effects, if visual quality is real important, Vimeo is probably the choice for you. Now, when I say worth it, I mean that while you can get a free Basic account for Vimeo, the limitations on it means that it doesn't really make sense to switch to Vimeo unless you spring for Vimeo Plus at $59.95 for a year. Plus also gets you some customization options for the player, it removes banner ads I think, and you get some stuff like domain-level control over where your videos can embed.
I guess there's also DailyMotion but... there are places on the internet even I dare not go.
PODCASTS
Are you podcasting? I'm not. I have no clue about how to podcast. So here's a YouTube video where Will Smith and Norm Chan from Tested talk about pro-level podcast setups.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opDulWLCV5s
Granted, that was mostly about podcasts that require XLR microphones and gathering people in a studio. There's simpler ways of doing things and since we do have quite a number of podcasters on these forums, maybe we can get some insight on that from @Chincymcchilla of hit Power Rangers podcast Teenagers With Attitude fame?
Here's @QuestionMarkMan with how Scriptlock handles multiple guests over the internet.
Audacity: Freeware audio recording and editing program. Available for just about everything, I think there might be some potential driver issues for Windows 10 but I've been able to run it just fine, so YMMV.
GarageBand: Available on Mac for $4.99. Generally aimed at music creation and recording, it can also be used to record your podcast and, hey, maybe you can build a cool piece of intro-music from the loops, drums and MIDI options included.
Adobe Audition: Windows and Mac. Briefly touched upon when talking about Premiere Pro, this is another one of Adobe's Creative Cloud programs, with all that entails vis a vis pricing. That aside, it's remarkably well-suited to cleaning up audio, so if that's a persistent problem for you, it might be worth looking into Audition. As with all the Creative Cloud programs, there's a free trial version to try out.
Got a podcast? Want to host it somewhere? Well then, I still have no clue. PodOmatic, Libsyn, PodBean, ShoutEngine, SoundCloud, these are all words that probably mean something to someone. Someone like experienced podcaster @Stilts.
OTHER STUFF
I mentioned music earlier and, well, sometimes you just need that perfect tune to finish up your video or welcome people to your podcast. That's when YouTube can be a dick. Well, not so much with podcasts, but if you're anything like me, you want to be sure that you're not gonna get your video taken down because someone owns the rights to O Fortuna. Actually, if you're like me you just use the Bastion soundtrack for all your videos and no one ever says anything, but still, what you really need is Creative Commons licensed music. That link has a list of places that has CC licensed songs, but I personally mostly just use the Free Music Archive, although YouTube actually also has a lot of music and sound FX at their YouTube Audio Library.
Now that you have your CC licensed song, well, I'll quote from CreativeCommons.org:
Of course, there's more to this than just video editing and podcasting, so if anyone has a good setup for streaming or capturing game video, please share. I'm if possible even more blank on that than podcasting.
Also if y'all feel there's something missing in the OP or something to add, just at me and I'll add it in.
Hello! You might be wondering why I called you all here today. Well, while we have a YouTube thread for talking about internet videos and a podcast thread for talking about whatever on Earth the podcast thread is talking about, we also have a number of people involved in creating both of these things and talking shop about how we actually do these things has a tendency to be buried by the sheer volume of those threads. So here's to how the sausage is made.
VIDEO EDITING
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wta9_6m8oiECourtesy of @Somestickguy
Editing video? You have a number of options.
Windows Movie Maker: It's free. It's very basic. You probably shouldn't use it.
iMovie: It's free if you buy a Mac. It's available on IOS devices and it's not that bad, actually. I know a few people who shoot and edit on their iPhone and since there's considerable overlap between Apple's iMovie and their Final Cut Pro X, it's apparently quite easy to make the step up from iMovie to FCX. My own experience with it is limited, though, so I'm going off of other people's assessment. But speaking of...
Final Cut Pro X: It's not Final Cut Pro 7, which to this day pisses some people off. It's Mac-only. Had major issues at release but that's mostly been ironed out by now. In fact, in 2014 the Will Smith feature "Focus" became the first feature film to be cut on FCX. Costs $299, unless Google lied to me. I've barely touched FCX, I was taught editing on FC7 but lost access to a Mac that could run editing software before FCX was released. From what little I've used it, it seems perfectly competent.
Adobe Premiere Elements: Mac/Windows. Part of the Elements line of budget, pared-down versions of their Creative Cloud programs, along with Photoshop Elements. Premiere is the little brother of Premiere Pro and does most of what Pro does. There's some stuff missing that I could see being annoying as you improve as an editor and want to try your hand at more advanced things. No keyframes, no green screen (chroma keying), no GPU acceleration. The advantage of Elements is that you can actually buy it. You can plunk down $99.99 (again, assuming Google is to be trusted) and own a license of Premiere Elements 14 for ever and ever and ever, you'll be back, time will tell... sorry, I've been listening to a lot of Hamilton. Why is being able to just buy it an advantage?
Adobe Premiere Pro: Mac/Windows. Unlike Elements, Pro is only available as a monthly subscription. It's a better program than Elements, personally I like it more than FCX, but to use it you either have to pay $19.99 per month with at least a one year commitment for just Premiere Pro or $49.99 a month for the entire Creative Cloud suite, which includes among others Photoshop, Audition and After Effects. If I was working with video professionally, if I was making money off of it, I could see the Creative Cloud making a lot of sense. All three programs I mentioned are programs you could easily find yourself needing and Premiere Pro is an excellent editing suite. But as is, well, it's a bit of an investment.
Sony Vegas 13: Windows-only. It's cheap. $59.99 gets you a competent editing suite. It's on Steam, so any of the Steam sales will drop the price on it. Sony Vegas is probably what I've spent most time editing on, besides Final Cut Pro 7, and... well, I think "competent" probably remains the best way to describe it. Everything you can do in Premiere and Final Cut, you can do in Vegas, just not quite as easy or quickly as in those. 13 in particular has a thing where the UI has clearly been designed for touch screens and there's no way to resize it, so you have these enormous buttons just taking up screen real estate. I'd probably go with Elements over Vegas in a battle of the budget releases.
DaVinci Resolve 12: Originally a color grading program, Australian company Blackmagic Design got so many requests for this one editing feature or this other little feature, just to finish this thing up while doing the color grading, that they eventually decided to make Resolve 12 into a fully featured non-linear editing program. There are two versions, a free version and a $995 Studio version, but unless you're editing Stereoscopic 3D, there's no reason to bother with the Studio version. Really, the only thing that the Studio version has that I could see myself missing is some noise reduction and motion blur settings. Now it doesn't have as many video effect filters built in as Premiere or Final Cut but it does support OpenFX plugins and it's also a really cool color grading program to boot. It's a system hog, you basically have to spec for this program like you would for a gaming computer, but it's very, very quickly become my personal go-to editing program. Windows, Mac and it might be the only program listed here that's also available for Linux, if that's a decider for you.
There are other programs out there, I know Lightworks is available in a free version if you don't need to output to more than 720p, but these are the major players. And Windows Movie Maker.
Now that you have your video, it needs to go somewhere. Let's look at the options.
YouTube: It's YouTube.
Alright, moving on...
Okay, okay, there are actually alternatives.
Vimeo: It's hipster YouTube. It's a YouTube alternative that's mostly focused on short films, series and animation. If you just want to play some videogames and throw that on the net, Vimeo probably isn't worth it for you, but for animation or visual effects, if visual quality is real important, Vimeo is probably the choice for you. Now, when I say worth it, I mean that while you can get a free Basic account for Vimeo, the limitations on it means that it doesn't really make sense to switch to Vimeo unless you spring for Vimeo Plus at $59.95 for a year. Plus also gets you some customization options for the player, it removes banner ads I think, and you get some stuff like domain-level control over where your videos can embed.
I guess there's also DailyMotion but... there are places on the internet even I dare not go.
PODCASTS
Are you podcasting? I'm not. I have no clue about how to podcast. So here's a YouTube video where Will Smith and Norm Chan from Tested talk about pro-level podcast setups.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opDulWLCV5sGranted, that was mostly about podcasts that require XLR microphones and gathering people in a studio. There's simpler ways of doing things and since we do have quite a number of podcasters on these forums, maybe we can get some insight on that from @Chincymcchilla of hit Power Rangers podcast Teenagers With Attitude fame?
Chincymcchilla wrote: »Podcasting through the internet is pretty easy nowadays!
For Teenagers With Attitude, we literally just use Skype and Audacity.
You can use any communication software because most of the time you won't actually be recording the call itself.
Each person uses audacity and records their direct mic input. This way you can cut out background noise of each persons track which would be impossible if you were recording the call itself. The only thing you have to do is create sync points by doing a countdown and having everyone clap, then matching them up when doing the editing in audacity later.
For equipment, to get started you can use one of these: http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Microphones-Snowball-Condenser-Microphone/dp/B006DIA77E
or a bunch of other fairly good starting mics if you don't like Snowball. MAKE SURE YOU GET A POP FILTER, they're for like 3 bucks.
Here's @QuestionMarkMan with how Scriptlock handles multiple guests over the internet.
There's been a couple of mentions of Audacity and that Tested video mentioned a couple of other programs, so let's just link them here.QuestionMarkMan wrote: »Ok, so since we have multiple guests every episode, sometimes all over the internet, I wanted to try and find an easier solution than having them all record through Audacity on their end (especially since these guests are just on for one episode). I eventually found Cast, which it looks like has actually gotten out of Beta now so everyone can use it! It's all browser-based, and basically I create a room and it'll generate room links that I can send to each guest. They join, I click Record, and then Cast will simultaneously upload everyone's individual audio to the cloud while we're recording. Afterwards I can then download each individual audio file and edit away in Audacity (they also have their own editing interface in the browser that you can use, along with publishing tools, but I like having more control). The only requirements are that you have to use Chrome, and everyone needs a mic/headphones.
If you want to hear what it sounds like, the Brad Muir/Khris Brown episode was the first time we did two people over the internet at the same time with Cast.
Audacity: Freeware audio recording and editing program. Available for just about everything, I think there might be some potential driver issues for Windows 10 but I've been able to run it just fine, so YMMV.
GarageBand: Available on Mac for $4.99. Generally aimed at music creation and recording, it can also be used to record your podcast and, hey, maybe you can build a cool piece of intro-music from the loops, drums and MIDI options included.
Adobe Audition: Windows and Mac. Briefly touched upon when talking about Premiere Pro, this is another one of Adobe's Creative Cloud programs, with all that entails vis a vis pricing. That aside, it's remarkably well-suited to cleaning up audio, so if that's a persistent problem for you, it might be worth looking into Audition. As with all the Creative Cloud programs, there's a free trial version to try out.
Got a podcast? Want to host it somewhere? Well then, I still have no clue. PodOmatic, Libsyn, PodBean, ShoutEngine, SoundCloud, these are all words that probably mean something to someone. Someone like experienced podcaster @Stilts.
Okay, so, you've got your podcast recorded and edited, but now you have to figure out where the hell to put it. Unless you have your own webspace to upload episodes to (like T4CT has set up for the various Viking Rocketship podcasts), your two primary options are probably going to be ShoutEngine and Libsyn. Which one you choose depends on what's important to you.
ShoutEngine starts out free, so that's definitely nice to have when starting your first podcast. There are also no storage or upload limits, so you could be putting up 500 MB episodes every day and they wouldn't care (please do not actually do this, though). The primary limitation is on bandwidth, which is typically not an issue for a podcast that's been around for less than a year or two. A high-quality, long-form podcast (i.e. two hours) would be around 100 MB, so at 10GB a month that's 100 downloads per month. The upgraded tiers are pretty cheap, too, unless you get a LOT of downloads. They've also got all the typical blog integration, analytics, XML creation, and other utilities that any podcast hosting service worth a damn will have.
Okay, so what about Libsyn? There's no free options, so it's gonna be more expensive when starting your podcast. Unlike ShoutEngine, though, Libsyn's monthly fee is based on upload bandwidth, not download. So if, like the example podcast I mentioned previously, your episodes consistently average out to 100MB, you'd never need to pay more than the tier that gets you 400 MB of monthly storage. You could have 10 or 10,000 listeners and it won't matter to Libsyn, which means the prices actually end up being better than ShoutEngine's for podcasts that have gathered a large listener base. Also, Libsyn was one of the very first dedicated podcast hosts, which means it's had a whole lot of time to add some nice bells and whistles to its service. Aside from the standard stuff, it has options for automatically publishing content to social media like Tumblr, Facebook or Soundcloud; options for publishing bonus content along with the episode; built-in monetization options through ads or subscriptions; and extensive WordPress integration. So yeah, Libsyn might not be the best place to start your podcasting career, but it's a great place to migrate to once you've started getting an audience and/or want more publishing tools to work with.
There is one piece of advice I have that applies to every podcast host, though, and it's VERY IMPORTANT: when it comes time to give iTunes a link to your XML feed, DO NOT use the "raw" URL that your host of choice gives you. Instead, go to Feedburner, stick the raw URL in there, and then give the Feedburner URL to iTunes. Why go through this extra step? Well, aside from the handy tools and analytics Google provides for free, the primary reason is to give yourself flexibility. For example, let's say you start by hosting on ShoutEngine, but then your podcast gets big and you decide to migrate over to Libsyn. If you had given iTunes the ShoutEngine XML feed, you'd have to go through the rigmarole of submitting a new XML feed to iTunes; and you'd have to inform anyone who's subscribed to your podcast directly through the XML feed that they'll need to jump over to a new XML feed. But if you have that Feedburner wrapper over your feed, you can just give Feedburner the new XML URL and your subscribers won't miss a beat. So please, do yourself a favor and use Feedburner!
OTHER STUFF
I mentioned music earlier and, well, sometimes you just need that perfect tune to finish up your video or welcome people to your podcast. That's when YouTube can be a dick. Well, not so much with podcasts, but if you're anything like me, you want to be sure that you're not gonna get your video taken down because someone owns the rights to O Fortuna. Actually, if you're like me you just use the Bastion soundtrack for all your videos and no one ever says anything, but still, what you really need is Creative Commons licensed music. That link has a list of places that has CC licensed songs, but I personally mostly just use the Free Music Archive, although YouTube actually also has a lot of music and sound FX at their YouTube Audio Library.
Now that you have your CC licensed song, well, I'll quote from CreativeCommons.org:
Can I use any song with a CC license on it?
Almost — you need to make sure that what you want to do with the music is OK under the terms of the particular Creative Commons license it’s under. CC-licensed music isn’t free for all uses, only some — so make sure to check out the terms (you can find these by clicking on each song’s license icon).
Most importantly, you need to use music that is not licensed under a No Derivative Works license. This means that the musician doesn’t want you to change, transform, or make a derivative work using their music. Under CC licenses, synching the music to images amounts to transforming the music, so you can’t legally use a song under a CC No Derivative Works license in your video.
Also, make sure to properly credit the musician and the track, as well as express the CC license the track is under. For example, you might include text like this at the end of your video:
This video features the song “Desaprendere (Treatment)” by fourstones, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.
Of course, there's more to this than just video editing and podcasting, so if anyone has a good setup for streaming or capturing game video, please share. I'm if possible even more blank on that than podcasting.
Also if y'all feel there's something missing in the OP or something to add, just at me and I'll add it in.
David_T on
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Posts
For Teenagers With Attitude, we literally just use Skype and Audacity.
You can use any communication software because most of the time you won't actually be recording the call itself.
Each person uses audacity and records their direct mic input. This way you can cut out background noise of each persons track which would be impossible if you were recording the call itself. The only thing you have to do is create sync points by doing a countdown and having everyone clap, then matching them up when doing the editing in audacity later.
For equipment, to get started you can use one of these: http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Microphones-Snowball-Condenser-Microphone/dp/B006DIA77E
or a bunch of other fairly good starting mics if you don't like Snowball. MAKE SURE YOU GET A POP FILTER, they're for like 3 bucks.
Ummmm I'll try to think of some other stuff
I'm on a webfilm-directors course right now, which is a lead-in to me spending January doing web-TV stuff for Tipsbladet, a Danish soccer magazine. Currently I'm working on my final exam project, an interview with a former soccer player turned coach, about that shift and how he had to go to Norway to escape a lot of the preconceived notions that were mostly due to his own tell-all book and is now back in Denmark as one of the top coaching prospects in the land. As far as I know (until the PR guy for the club gets back to me), the interview is set for the 3rd of December.
So in my case, I'm gonna be using a Nikon D3200 DSLR as my main camera, a Canon Vizia HF200 as my alt and a cheap Audio Technica lavalier going into a Zoom H2N for sound. I'm editing on DaVinci Resolve 12, as mentioned, with Audacity in case I need to do audio work and Fusion 8, another Blackmagic Design program, if I need to do fancy titles or effects.
Right now I'm working on an American Horror Story-style TV intro. It's refreshing to be taking on a different genre - trying to mix horror with humour is a fun challenge!
Almost every podcast I listen to has lost an episode, to avoid that would I just record onto two drives at once? Is there an easy way to tell if something's up while you're recording?
Two things to stop this: record in segments. Stop for breaks frequently.
and also, export and keep the .mp3 in two places
I'M SO HAPPY TO HEAR THIS IS A THING OTHER PEOPLE DO!
I thought I was super inconveniencing guests by asking them to do this!
No way man, its essential
otherwise a train going by or dog barking is literally unfixable
you can't extract one sound from a combined waveform, but if its multiple tracks its super easy!
Also: learned from the recording I just finished:
Make sure you check your mic every so often if it can swivel or move
my cords had gotten tangled and the mic was facing away from me for 50% of the recording
good enough that I can amp it up and it will sound fine though
As opposed to recording a Skype call, where all but one of the participants sound like they're calling on a telephone
yeah!
it can be tricky if someone claps way early or late but as long as you do a relisten you should be able to line everything up
We often have people from across the ocean and they'll have robot voice but it doesn't matter if you do it this way
Ok, so since we have multiple guests every episode, sometimes all over the internet, I wanted to try and find an easier solution than having them all record through Audacity on their end (especially since these guests are just on for one episode). I eventually found Cast, which it looks like has actually gotten out of Beta now so everyone can use it! It's all browser-based, and basically I create a room and it'll generate room links that I can send to each guest. They join, I click Record, and then Cast will simultaneously upload everyone's individual audio to the cloud while we're recording. Afterwards I can then download each individual audio file and edit away in Audacity (they also have their own editing interface in the browser that you can use, along with publishing tools, but I like having more control). The only requirements are that you have to use Chrome, and everyone needs a mic/headphones.
If you want to hear what it sounds like, here's my podcast. The Brad Muir/Khris Brown episode was the first time we did two people over the internet at the same time with Cast.
I honestly think Vimeo needs to be on this list
it doesn't auto compress your video like youtube does. It is the best choice for really high quality animation or visual effects.
Need some stuff designed or printed? I can help with that.
So a friend and I have been doing Let's Plays on Youtube since early this year. It's been an interesting experience.
We use the Elgato capture device to record our gameplay. I like their software because it records the game audio and commentary audio in two tracks, which lets me safely edit any part of the video or audio without having to really worry about synching things up properly. It makes things go a LOT quicker.
I ended up using Windows Movie Maker. The price is right, and for our style of video it does everything we need it to do. We out our stuff out with very minimal editing, very few cuts and nothing fancy in the presentation, so we don't need anything more fully-featured than WMM. If you're in a similar boat, where you just want something you can easily use to put together basic videos, it's fine.
Unfortunately, the last Elgato software update seems to have messed some things up. Now there's a hint of static to our voices in commentary, and occasionally the commentary track will just be cut out completely for a second or two. At first I thought this was an issue with the mic or cord, but I've narrowed it down to being the software itself causing the problem. I might have to switch over to using Audacity to record commentary, but I really don't want to because it creates a lot more work I have to do that the Elgato simply does for me. And we put out two episodes a day, every day, so I can't really afford to have this take up more of my time.
I do editing work in Audacity anyway, of course. Bring the game and commentary tracks into it to run some noise removal, normalize the audio, use a compressor, and so on. The nice thing about the Elgato setup is it's been very easy to just drop the audio into there, run the effects, then plug the tracks back into the video using WMM seamlessly.
It's been fun. I don't think we're very good, but we've definitely gotten better over time. We've stuck with it this long, so we're gonna keep trucking along.
I might try my hand at some more complex video editing to do a GOTY list or something. That could be neat.
My Let's Play Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC2go70QLfwGq-hW4nvUqmog
Yeah, I considered it. I think I discounted it at the time because the free Basic account seems like a real hindrance for the kind of stuff that Vimeo is best suited for. Looking at my own stuff, about half the vids I've made I wouldn't be able to upload to Vimeo on a free account. But then I guess $59.95 for a years worth of Plus isn't a bad deal if you're doing more than just once-in-a-while video. I'll look into Vimeo a bit more and then add 'em.
What are you wanting to record? PC games? Consoles?
My Let's Play Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC2go70QLfwGq-hW4nvUqmog
For PC games there's plenty of software to just download. People seem to like OBS a lot. I don't have much experience with any of it myself because I just use the Elgato for PC stuff too.
My Let's Play Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC2go70QLfwGq-hW4nvUqmog
One thing I should mention is that there's two Elgatos, the standard one and the HD60. I would go with the standard one. The HD60 allows for 60FPS recordings in 1080p, but it has less input options and doesn't support as many older consoles as the standard Elgato. The HD60 is more or less meant for stuff that hooks up via HDMI only. And the regular Elgato can still do 1080p at 30FPS or 720p at 60FPS.
My Let's Play Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC2go70QLfwGq-hW4nvUqmog
And I forgot to mention before, but I use Simplecast to host ours. No complaints!
This can get tricky if the noise you are trying to remove is quite loud on the track, because you don't want the removal to mess with the stuff you actually want there. If you are finding your mic is picking up a LOT of unwanted noise, try turning your gain down when recording. Try to get the background noise to be as quiet as possible so the removal tool can get rid of it without fucking with anything that matters.
My Let's Play Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC2go70QLfwGq-hW4nvUqmog
Is there a reason you're not hosting through Cast? It says hosting is included in the cost.
I use a Blackmagic Intensity Pro, which is a card you plug directly into your motherboard. However, I actually don't like it very much. It's very fussy when switching between different input sources, and doesn't get along well with Windows 10. Worst of all, on my motherboard at least, the only place it can go is directly next to my video card, and it has a bad habit of overheating, causing the video card to overheat, and locking up my computer
on the other hand, as far as i understand an El Gato does everything a person that wants to stream video games from home would need. It's an external device, which is way more convenient and solves the overheating problem i talked about. It definitely seems like the way to go.
http://www.audioentropy.com/
Edit: Yeah, after checking it out, it doesn't look like Cast generates a website for the podcast, which Simplecast does, only a link for each episode.
Like, a direct link to the audio file? Not even a player you can embed? Weird.
I need to get better at using tools for noise removal
Right now even with full noise reduction I still have to manually mute the silences on each track, which takes 30 minutes to an hour
and After Effects is like a fucking alien language to me.
Need some stuff designed or printed? I can help with that.
I'm tooling around in the Fusion 8 beta now and the node system is very different, but I'm taking to it quicker than AE.
I...
Dont want to talk about how many hours I've spent in audacity
My Laptop simply isn't up to snuff audacity can't record while Skype is running for example.
Any recommendations for the minimum specs I'd need?
I also have to crank the gain way up (like 90%) just to get the XLR mic levels to a normal level. I don't know if that's normal, or if my mixer isn't putting out enough power. Should I try and put the gain lower so I don't get as much noise, and then boost the levels later? Right now after editing we run the audio through Levelator, then noise reduce if we need to, attach intro/outros and then post.
http://www.audioentropy.com/