** Official Recording/Streaming Tips & Tricks Exchange **

Holy thread activity Batman! I missed it all as I was deep in an Overwatch hole I thought I'd never crawl out of... :p

Judgeneo said:
However, editing the clips together is a right pain, I've been using Lightworks, and honestly, I'm struggling. I'm not looking to do anything particularly fancy, I just need transition effects, and to be able to overlay the video with images and other videos occasionally, as well as trimming etc.

Any advice on a simpler to use software package?
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I'm not sure about "simpler" but if you're interested in trying out different (free) options you could give Blender a go - I don't think any editor which has all the features is ever going to be super simple, you've just got to stick at it until you know how to do the things you need...

Checkout a guy called "MikeyCal Meyers" on YouTube, he has a decent easy to follow set of tutorials on using Blender for video editing (some parts aren't super relevant for gameplay videos but it should be enough to get started). I've been using Blender for our channel and it's done everything we needed so far (happy to help if you need any advice on it too :))
 
Judgeneo said:
Boom, done. All feedback welcome :D
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I liked it :) For a first video especially it seems like you're definitely off on the right track, your voiceover sounded confident and it seemed like you knew what you were talking about (a lot of people struggle on these points starting out).

If I had to be critical at all (and I think feedback is generally pretty useless otherwise) I would say that maybe if you could have included some sort of background music - nothing overpowering but a piece of music from the game or something which fits the theme of the game at a very low volume in the background... The lack of it doesn't ruin the video but I think having it would enhance it slightly. But yeah otherwise - good job!
 
Judgeneo said:
Do you have any recommendations for where to find some "calm" intro templates? I've been looking around, and everything seems to be epilepsy inducing with dubstep audio. I've been playing around with Blender to make something simple from scratch, but it's going to take a good while to make something high quality as I have no experience in animation.
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Definitely try to steer clear of the very over-the-top things... I don't think it needs to be super complicated or anything... Some of the very over-used type of 3d-animation with pounding dubstep type of intros can supposedly risk turning people off of your video before they even get to the content!

As a random example if you've ever watched Nerd^3 (Nerd-cubed... not sure how best to write it!) His intro is basically just his logo on a black background, then the logo area becomes transparent (so you can see the start of the game footage through it) and grows bigger and bigger until it's gone and you're looking at the footage... Nice and simple, quick, and not too hard to do yourself...

I made all of our graphics myself - it's nothing super fancy but (hopefully) professional looking enough... Grab a copy of GIMP and get used to using transparency and layers etc. - as long as animated elements are on separate layers you can save them as separate images and then key-frame them in Blender (for instance the "2" in our logo is saved as a separate image and then I use keyframes on the "rotation" property in Blender to make it spin)
 
Gimpymoo said:
What are peoples preference of recording voiceovers live or afterwards?
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As above... I think if I was trying to do something very condensed and informative like a review I'd probably post-commentate it and try to work out what I wanted to say etc.

For regular gameplay/impressions I think I prefer doing it live because often your reactions to the things that suddenly happen in game is more genuine (but even then it probably depends on the type of game to some extent)
 
Judgeneo said:
I tried 60fps but the video and audio seemed to keep going out of sync when I put it into Blender. I'm not sure if that if because of my PC, or if it would be fixed when I do the full render, but it doesn't happen when I record in 30fps
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Apologies for this sounding patronising if it does, but have you set the project fps in Blender to 60? If you don't the video will be twice as long as the audio and sound out of sync.... Alternatively you might have recorded in VFR (variable frame rate), which Blender can't handle - what are you recording with?
 
arc@css said:
When exporting audio in audacity, what should I select in the 'save as type' box? WAV 32bit?
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I usually go with WAV over mp3 because WAV will be lossless (uncompressed) which is really what you want if you're about to put it into another editing program (which will compress it when you render the final video)


Judgeneo said:
Figured it out. I record with OBS. Basically, my PC just can't handle playing the uncompressed recording files in blender at 60fps, so the video plays slower than the audio. I did my most recent video in 60fps, and just took a bit more time figuring out where to edit it, and when it rendered it was a-ok.
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Ah I see... do you have A/V sync and frame dropping turned on in Blender? Under the "Playback" menu in the timeline there should be an option for both of these - turning them on should force Blender to try harder to keep things in sync while you're editing (at the expense of sometimes looking like it's dropping a few frames, which is no big deal)...

Some things are better than others performance-wise in the editor, but if it's really chugging you can also temporarily drop down the scaling so that it's not rendering such a high quality image... In the main scene properties (where the render button is) under "Resolution" just drop the "100%" down... I quite often change this to "10%" while I'm doing very broad editing so it runs nice and quick, and you can still make out enough to tell what's going on... Just remember to whack it back up to 100% before the final render!!! (saying that, I sometimes do renders at 10 or 25% when I want to test out a short section to see how the finished render looks without wasting a lot of time at full resolution)

arc@css said:
When tinkering with ShadowPlay, if I select 'In-game' as the resolution setting, then a bit rate of 130 is available. However, if I select 1440p then only up to 50 is on offer. The higher one looks to be the obvious choice, though I'm not quite sure I fully understand everything.
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Interesting... it seems to think that the "in-game" setting is much more expensive (you can see that as well because of how much more space it wants for the buffer in the "Shadow time" setting)... What's your desktop resolution? (and do you have any scaling on it?) I wonder if maybe when you don't have a game running it's assuming the "in-game" thing you are about to try and record is the desktop? If you have 2 monitors do you see the figures on the Shadowplay window change when you launch a fullscreen game which is at 1440p?
 
arc@css said:
I am now on 1440p, and no, I don't use any DSR at the moment - if that's what you mean?

I only have the one monitor.....well actually, that's not strictly true. I could connect up my old 1200p one? :)
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Nah don't worry about that... I was just wondering if maybe ShadowPlay is altering the resolution of the "in-game" setting on-the-fly depending on what it things the current "game" window is doing...

Poking around in ShadowPlay for myself here's what I think might be happening... I'm only on a 1080p (well 1200p) monitor, but the resolution options I get in ShadowPlay are:

360p (bitrates of 10 - 50)
480p (bitrates of 10 - 50)
720p (bitrates of 10 - 50)
1080p (bitrates of 10 - 50)
1440p (bitrates of 10 - 50)
2160p (bitrates of 30 - 130)

And then the in-game option which has bitrates 10 - 130

So I think the "in-game" one just allows you to select any of the available bitrates, since ShadowPlay isn't sure what resolution it's going to be using... maybe?
 
tcfreer said:
Now I need a new Mic, has anyone got any suggestions on a decent budget mic - Looking at a Blue Snowball?
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(Some of this is opinion, so don't blindly obey it, but it might help)

The issue with the Snowball, and also the Yeti, and the AT-2020 and many of the other mics which seem to get recommended on reddit in every single thread about mics for gaming videos/streaming... is that they are condensers which means they're very very sensitive. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but if you have a poorly treated room (acoustically) and/or any sources of background noise you can't control (kids, pets, traffic, neighbours) you may find you have trouble getting a recording that you're happy with...

It isn't impossible, but you might have to get creative... the first ~100 videos or so on our channel were recorded with a Snowball, and we found that we had to hang a big heavy blanket across the room behind us to reduce echo (where the sound from our voices was bouncing off the walls in the hallway behind us and reflecting back into the mic, sounded like we were recording in a cave!)... and we also struggled to get a good balance on the mic gain between being able to get a good signal on our voices, and the sound of controllers/keyboard/mouse clicking noise...

The alternative is to go for a dynamic mic... these are going to be a lot less sensitive and easier to get a good sound out of without any costly/impractical acoustic treatment of the room etc. When we upgraded our setup a few months ago we picked up two Shure SM-57 dynamic mics (one each) and our recent videos are all happily recorded with those; no more echo-blanket, no more background noise problems, endless tweaking of settings etc...

If there's a downside to dynamic mics - some people say that they sound less full and more like a sort of "sports broadcaster" type of sound... but if that's true I don't really hear it in our experience and recordings. You'll want to make sure you're processing the audio properly as well (compression, EQ, etc.)...

That's my 2p anyway... nothing to say you can't get great results with a condenser and plenty of massive streamers/youtubers do use them just fine, but the main thing I feel I've picked up on in my time trying to look into this is that there's a huge amount of mis-information out there (just look at /r/letsplay and the number of threads which are essentially "Help! How do I remove keyboard/mouse click noises from my audio?" and the user has a Snowball/Yeti/AT-2020 everyone on the sub told them to buy)
 
Woah lots of dicussion followed! At work so only just seen it all...

Just to clarify I wasn't trying to totally demonize condensers, just a word of caution that they can take a little work to get good results from... Also agree with dakaiez about XLR + Interface - our SM-57s are also XLR and we've also got a Focusrite Scarlett interface (the 6i6 though - bigger, bigger brother to the solo, but we specifically needed 2x mic inputs and 2x separate monitor outputs - recording 2 people at once and potentially 2 PCs is tricky!)...

Don't have any pics of our setup but been meaning to take some at some point so will try and remember to post them when I do :)
 
For the audio editing at least for starters you could try Audacity, it's properly free and can do most of the things the more expensive programs can do - certainly it'll be okay for some noise removal, compression etc.

OBS is a bit odd I've found, I have to set the multiplier on the mic gain stupidly high sometimes for it to register at a decent volume when streaming... Though when you're recording for a video instead don't worry too much if the recorded signal isn't super loud - it's much better to have a smaller signal with a lot of headroom for compression + boosting than to have a very loud signal that ends up clipping all over the place etc. (which you can't really fix)... All about balance though - you need the signal of your voice to be decently above the signal of any background noise or it makes it hard to boost it without the noise becoming a problem...

Edit: For reference, our recordings using the dual SM-57s (which have a pretty large range on them) are super super quiet - if we've recorded the mics and audio from a game separately there's absolutely no way you would ever hear the raw mic audio over the raw game audio, I use Audacity to compress/eq/etc and then raise the mic signal by a pretty large amount (easy with these dynamic mics as they pick up almost no background noise whatsoever) and also use Audacity to process and then lower the game audio by also a fairly significant amount to get the final result...
 
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tcfreer said:
Ok so - I think I have made a huge leap forward with the audio

...

Hopefully you'll agree that this a huge improvement for no outlay?
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Sounds good to me :) and not too bassy in my opinion (sorry to disagree with the other poster above!) It probably depends a little what the listener's headphones/speakers are like though...

I love VAC as well! Such a handy program :)
 
Hello! We actually have a thread for sharing/discussing videos + streaming tips for future reference (not much activity in there lately but in case there are other tips in there you might find useful :)):

https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18716554

As for DXTory codecs, I think it's generally considered that the in-built codec isn't particularly good (in terms of filesize and performance). A lot of older recommendation online suggest Lagarith Lossless, although in my experience it performs optimally for games with more retro/8-bit or "cartoony" graphics... For full 3d games with "realistic" graphics I currently use UtVideo, which seems to perform very well for me.

In case you weren't aware though - if you're buying DXTory purely for the multi-track audio feature that is actually available in OBS these days as well (or "nearly available" - currently I think it only works when using "lossy" formats to record, but my understanding is it will be enabled for all codecs soon)
 
Cromulent said:
Thanks for the info on the UT Video Codec. I've downloaded and will install it when I get round to actually using it.
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Before I forget - there's a few different color-space variants to choose from once you get into DXTory... I think I usually go with the 4-2-0 & 709 version... I can check when I'm at home

Halfmad said:
I'm actually using OBS Studio exclusively now, it records game footage, my two mics, teamspeak chatter and game audio into separate channels (4 in total), I simply remove those I dont' need later in editing which is a doddle to do.
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I'm planning to go full OBS Studio too as soon as they add the multi-audio stream output to the "custom / advanced / ffmpeg" recording panel (at the moment it only works with the x264 codec which doesn't meet my quality needs for recording)...

I used OBS for recording Dead Space 3 because the Origin overlay seemed to screw with DXTory for me, but due to the lack of multi-audio streams I had to let OBS record the sound on each game and record the 2 mics with Audacity (FYI our Dead Space 3 videos have 2 video and 4 audio tracks because we're recording the co-op from both player's perspectives... it's a little tricky to sync everything up but I manage okay!)
 
Surfer said:
My nephew is after new video editing software.

He says blender is too hard complicated. He uses and editor on his iPhone at the moment. He is now thinking Filmora is what he wants.

Is Filmora any good does anyone know? Or is better cheaper alternatives out here? Thanks
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What sort of editing does your nephew want to be able to do? The built in iPhone editor is fairly basic, so I assume he is looking for something more fully featured which will allow him to do more elaborate stuff?

Most of the "proper" video editing programs are pretty intimidating and complicated to use (at first) but in the end a good 70%+ of the buttons and settings are things you don't ever end up needing... Once you get used to the ~30% that you do need it isn't so bad. If he's willing to give Blender another chance you could check out "mikecal meyers" on Youtube - he has a really decent tutorial series for getting started...

https://www.youtube.com/user/MikeycalDOTcom
 
Halfmad said:
Any tips for voice overs folks? I'm having to do a fair bit of it an although I've a decent mic etc I'm having to use noise removal due to a lot of background noise I cant' avoid.

Been using audacity noise removal but feel like it deadens my voice. What do you lot use?
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Early on we used Audacity too but like you found it takes away too much from the audio... So for a while just did without noise removal (unless the background noise is really bad it tends to get drowned out by the game/music in the background anyway)...

But what really helped was switching to dynamic mics instead of a condenser... they just don't pick up background noise anywhere near as badly (think of a singer's mic at a gig, which has to resist the sound of all the other band members as well as possible)
 
tcfreer said:
Pre software
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfdGTx0vIQI

Most recent Video with the software dialled in
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-dOdX6CIDA

Pretty clear the difference there I think?
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What mic did you use for the recording, and what is your mic technique like?

I'm just curious because the main thing to my ear is that your "raw" recording sounds like it has quite bad signal-to-noise ratio - could just mean you need to either get a bit closer to the mic or speak slightly louder with a little more force; you might then find that the volume of your speech is high enough above the noise that you can set your levels etc. without the background noise being a problem

Don't take this as an attack - I also agree the 2nd clip after processing sounds a lot better - but there can be more than one way to get there if you get what I mean!
 
tcfreer said:
I just use a Corsair 1500i headset @rufus

I'm not a lou speaker, so I do need to boost the mic gain.

It picks up lots of white noise and static, which I use VSTHost to clean out on the low level
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Have you had a go doing a few test recordings forcing yourself to try and speak up a bit just to see what difference it makes? Having to boost the gain is what really hurts you with the background noise, and although it sounds like VSTHost is doing a better job than Audacity does it's probably still affecting the sound of your voice...

Does VSTHost have the option to "isolate" rather than "remove" the background noise? Audacity lets you do that and that way you can listen to what it thinks is "noise" - when I did this in our old recordings I could hear that there was a lot of certain frequencies of the vocals being removed and it led to a noticeably less full sound when removed from the raw recordings (pushing the noise removal further it eventually would sound even weirder like almost underwater)

A more dedicated mic with a better pre-amp will help, but it'll stil suffer from static/noise if you're not creating a big enough difference between the volume of that noise and your voice (the main cause of our noise earlier on wasn't so much talking quietly, but having the mic too far away since there were two of us trying to speak into one mic it was hard to get close enough)
 
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