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Why not cheat and jump ahead to part two?
After months of watching some great YouTube directors upload great video game plays and commentaries, I finally have my chance to try my hand at breaking into the video game play commentary racket thanks to the miracle of Christmas.
Whoa! Whoa! Getting ahead of ourselves! But looks sweet right?
A capture card was out of the question. My desktop PC was practically a younger brother to me in terms of age. It hasn't been upgraded since the day I bought it and its measly 40 gigabyte hard drive was already cringing under the weight of somehow fitting Team Fortress 2 on it. And it runs on a custom script that has it run on the absolute lowest settings.
Connecting my TV to a camcorder? I know a lot of electronics are expensive but I'm not some nouveau-riche entrepreneur. Plus the whole process is a bit roundabout. Cameras are meant to record what's in front of them, not what inputs are connected to them.
So I decided on the most elegant answer for someone of my particular tastes. A personal video recorder, or PVR. Many popular YouTube directors who stake their claim in video games use them and they're pretty simple. Just record and go, assuming everything's connected correctly.
Of course finding a PVR is something different entirely. How many people do you think walk into an electronics retail store and ask for a PVR? Every store associate pointed me to the DVR section and suggested services like Tivo and so forth. Have you guys really not heard of this thing? Surely you understand what I mean? I want to record video game play off my TV to my laptop as video!
Finally, as I made a detour to look for a laptop as a Christmas gift for my father, I see a PVR stowed away in the back along with other devices like the Slingbox and Apple TV. Leave it to computer shopping to solve my problems.
Of course, I'm starting from scratch. Even with an HD-PVR recording my native 720p, a microphone, a heart full of dreams and a suitcase full of aspirations, I still need to learn how to work even the barest of video editing software. Thanks to some experience in college, I wasn't going in cold but it was still experimentation all the way through.
Even then, just starting up was a nightmare. Upon unboxing my shiny new device and connecting all the self-explanatory cords, surprise! It didn't work! How could it not work? I connected the cables that even the most technologically illiterate person (my dad) can work. They're color coded for God's sakes! I'm not a part of that rather large 8% of color blind men. I even have a color blind friend and I still coached him through Tetris Attack with hilarious results. I know for a fact I'm typing in black and the background of this web site is green.
It never even occurred to me that the problem was a hardware failure. Yes, after hours of Googling for similar troubleshooting cases across the Internet, it occurred to me that it wasn't me but the machine's fault. The component cables my PVR shipped with were faulty and it's not hard to see why. The cables were extremely long and bulky and despite that they were stuffed into a box that needed them coiled five times just to fit. The stress of being so tightly coiled probably damaged the important wires inside the insulation, thereby denying me any signal and justice.
These stupid cables…
Luckily, I had spare component cables which were actually better suited to the task, being shorter and smaller. Thank you, Roku, for sending me everything I needed to make your Roku box work despite my already owning HDMI cable for it. I'll now be putting your components to good use.
And like everything else I've done in life, I jumped right into it without thinking too hard on a plan. I simply booted up the game I was playing most, this being Tempura of the Dead, and started recording just to get a feel for the video rendering and uploads. I got my hands on some video editing software (Sony Vegas) and sent it off to YouTube like a proud father.
[embed:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kY4FWrOzaN8 ]It was a rather smooth and painless process. Of course, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. The video itself was only 5 minutes and 44 seconds long. Recording had actually gone smoothly (something that wouldn't happen all the time in the future), and I didn't even have to worry about adding a voice track. It was just render and upload, bada bing, bada boom.
So closes the first few days of being in charge of a video. It's quite an exhilarating experience putting so much effort into a video that's now public for all the Internet to watch and judge. Little did I know that all the ideas I had floating in my mind weren't going to be as simple as pushing the record button and uploading it to YouTube.
Next time, recording commentaries, the magic of doing it live, and the nightmare of long videos.