Hi! Hey, hi.
So previously there was a stream for the 10th anniversary of the channel’s creation.
However, today’s the 10th anniversary of the first vidoo being uplooded, which was part one of the
Shadow Man LP.
And if you saw that one, you might remember that it had subtitled commentary.
So I thought I’d just stream some consciousness in these subtitles while the beginning of Shadow Man plays.
About what? I donno, I guess I’ll figure that out as I keep typing.
The first thing that comes to mind is how different recording videos is than it was 10 years ago.
The original Shadow Man video is in 480p, 30fps. This shiny new one is at 1440p, 60fps.
The
re-release of the game (on Steam) can’t seem to go all the way up to 4k, at least on my machine, so 1440p it is.
But man, it’s so much EASIER to record videos now. What with your
OBS’s and such.
Back then, I was recording with
FRAPS, and who knows how those videos would come out.
FRAPS produced lossless AVI files which had massive file sizes. Just huge, Zach.
If your hard drive wasn’t fast enough to keep up with the amounts of BIG DATA that was being generated, then your video would have all kinds of frame dropping and audio sync problems.
Oh, speaking of audio sync, probably the biggest time-saver when it comes to making videos is that a bunch of the capture programs support dual-audio recording now.
Do you know what I would used to do to record separate game and audio tracks?
So, I would record the game audio with the capture program, like OBS, Action, Elgato HD Capture, or whatever I was using.
I would record the microphone input with
Audacity, which was running while I was playing the game.
At the beginning and end of the recording session, I would put my headphones up to my microphone, and play a BEEP sound on the PC.
Those of you who used to come to the stream probably remember hearing that sound before I started talking.
So, after the recording was over, I would then import the game recoding in an AVISynth script, then load the script into VirtualDub, and extract the game audio track as a WAV file.
I’d then load the game track into the Audacity file with the microphone track, and then try to sync up the BEEP points at the start and the end.
Sometimes they wouldn’t match.
Like sometimes I’d match the BEEP points at the start, and the BEEP points at the end wouldn’t be matched.
Because the timings of the game capture program and Audacity were SLIGHTLY different, and a lengthy multi-hour recording resulted in audio tracks of different lengths.
Or sometimes the audio would desync multiple times throughout the audio track at different places, with the game audio sometimes being before the microphone’s, and sometimes after.
It was weird. I still don’t really get why that would happen.
But when it did, I would spend a couple hours after the stream fixing up the audio and trying to sync it up.
But now that’s all unnecessary, since I can just have OBS record the game and mic audio tracks separately, and they’re always synced up perfectly.
I didn’t mean to type so much about that, but I guess the point is that doing this kind of video game recording and streaming is a lot easier now.
And that means that a lot more people can do it, which led to streaming being this kind of socially accepted thing and that’s still really surprising to me.
I never thought that it would become so popular, back when we were struggling with Flash Media Encoder to get a stream up on
Ustream.
Oh my god, Ustream. I can’t believe that Ustream is still around. It was always the worst streaming site.
I guess there’s a market for being the streaming site that just DOES NOT CARE if you’re streaming movies or whatever.
But I don’t know how you make money from that.
Money is also a really weird thing.
When the concept of monetizing video of yourself playing videogames became a thing, it seemed like something that must be a mistake.
Especially when direct support through things like Twitch donations and Patreon became accepted concepts.
It’s been a bizarre thing to see this business just kind of rise up out of nothing but loud reactions and facecams.
“Pseudohobby at best,” remember that?
And then it starts making all this money and it’s weird.
But the longer something exists, the easier it is for people to accept it.
So someone who starts watching LPs and streams now wouldn’t think anything about it.
It’s not that I’m against the idea of people making a lot of money doing this weird thing.
I’m all for people finding alternate ways of making a living.
It’s just amazing to see that spring up out of what was originally a bunch of bored teens/young adults talking while playing videogames.
Talking. Originally, I never intended to talk during my LPs. Hence, the subtitles.
There were a bunch of subtitled LPs on the SomethingAwful forums when I started.
If you want to know the primary inspiration for doing subs for the Shadow Man LP, it was the LP of
Clive Barker’s Undying by Vexation.
It’s on lparchive.org if you want to see it.
That was the LP I was watching when I was preparing for the Shadow Man LP, and the main influence on how I did it.
The reason that subs were a good idea at the time just had to do with me being a pretty poor speaker.
There were also tech issues to be resolved, like buying a microphone and figuring out how to use it, but speaking skills were the main issue.
But you probably figured that out watching the
ILLBLEED LP.
My speaking style was very stiff and my improv ability was zero.
One thing that LPing has helped me a lot with over the past decade, is public speaking.
It’s like a night and day comparison.
Though the primary thing that really helped me improve was doing the weekly stream for a few years.
That was a situation where I just had to talk for hours, unscripted, about games that I probably never played.
Which was a big difference from LPs like ILLBLEED, which were completely scripted.
I think I’ve mentioned that before.
When you watch the first episode of ILLBLEED, I’m reading word-for-word from a script I wrote, while pre-recorded video plays.
That’s the extent I had to go to in order to speak on a microphone.
I think my lack of speaking ability was probably why I spent a lot more time editing my videos than I do now.
Since I couldn’t carry a video through speaking, I did so through editing.
But these days I enjoy talking in these videos a lot more than I do editing, which is why there’s more unedited stuff now.
I suppose the content of the videos just depends on what I’m enjoying doing at the time.
So that might mean doing a blind run of
The Witness, or a
year-long playthrough of Nier Automata, or maybe it means playing
some of the worst horror games ever made.
In the past couple of years, it’s meant doing these bumbles.
That could change; I think frequently about if the current formula is getting stale, if I need to change things up.
I’ve liked how the bumbles have gone, but things will eventually change again. We’ll see.
A lot of how things change also has to do with how much free time I have.
Traditional LPs tend to take up a lot more time to do than bumbles, depending on what’s involved.
I really like doing the current
Silent Hill LP, but you may have noticed that it hasn’t had all the bells and whistles of something like the
Killer7 LP.
The Killer7 LP had a whole lot of
supplementary material that took me a whole lot of time to put together.
Actually playing the game was the fastest part of making the Killer7 LP.
So while Silent Hill certainly does have a lot of extended universe material, I haven’t been doing supplements for the LP just due to time.
Time. Time’s always what I come back to. Not enough of it.
Well, making video game videos for the past 10 years has been a fun use of time.
And I certainly never would’ve expected doing this for so much time when I started.
(I originally intended to stop LPing after finishing
D2, then
Deadly Premonition caught my attention.)
But speaking of time, Mike’s almost at the church, which means we’re out of time.
There it is.
Well, I’ve just been rambling on my keyboard for the last number of minutes; I hope you enjoyed whatever this was.
I just wanted to put up an updated Shadow Man video and think about the differences between doing this then and now.
I hope you enjoyed watching this and enjoyed watching in general.
And if you have, thanks for letting me know about it, through Youtube comments, stream chat, Twitter messages, Tumblr asks, or the very rare e-mail.
Thanks for the artwork you’ve drawn, and the occasional
Bully Demise arts/crafts/cosplay you’ve sent me.
I started doing these videos just as a way to talk to people about the videogames I like, I suppose.
So thanks for listening.
