You may have noticed that there weren’t any Tales of Zestiria episodes live on the YouTube channel yesterday. In fact, my plan for the Tales of Zestiria week derailed spectacularly during the weekend, leaving me with this current situation and forcing me to make the decision I’ve made and will be telling you about now.
Last Thursday I recorded a short video gameplay of the System Shock Demo to go along with my article on the Night Dive Studios Kickstarter campaign for the remake of this fantastic classic First Person RPG, though it wasn’t the one you saw the following day but another that I will never publish, due primarily to the fact that it doesn’t exist anymore. You see, the moment I finished recording it, my hard-drive had a little hiccup and it decided, in all its wisdom, that my recording folder shouldn’t exist anymore and thus deleted it.
I, naturally, panicked and tried everything in my power to recover the files but even as I ran Hard Drive repairing tools and hoped for my data to resurface—I could see it while searching through the windows explorer—I couldn’t get my files back. By the time the tools finished their run, they all reported the hard drive was in perfect shape, with not a single bad sector. I tried to get the files again through the windows search but something ‘updated’ itself and it no longer found them.
If it were a single episode of a series then it wouldn’t be much issue, as I could record a new video and be done with it, which I did by the end of that day to bring you my gameplay footage of the System Shock demo, but the amount of footage lost was staggering—at least by my current standards. I lost almost a dozen Tales of Zestiria episodes, including the final battle and ending as well as my tips and tricks on how to get to where I was, nearly another dozen Overwatch videos, some of them highlight reels of my matches and others raw footage I was preparing for a detailed guide and playing Genji and a few one-shots for stuff I was working on or thinking about doing.
Hours of footage just lost and after what I went through to get to the Tales of Zestiria final boss and beat him, the thought of recording it all over again makes my head ache. I truly don’t want to do it. As much as I enjoyed Tales of Zestiria, I really don’t want to go through all that again, at least not so soon.
I will probably record the episodes but it won’t be in the way I’ve done so in the past, because of something else that happened last week.
During the weekend I purchased and received the first set of gear to finish my audio set up for recording, a boom arm and shock-mount for my Blue Yeti, the microphone now hanging on top of my head. The setup effectively cuts down on some of the noise and echo when I record. Over the weekend I obsessed over this fact, working with audio processing tools and taking dozens of clips to figure out how much noise there was in my voice. The result is “not as much as before.”
But as I said, this was just the first part of the gear, the second—and which I’m still waiting for—is a set of panels and bass traps for sound-treating the room I’m in, to kill off some of the more annoying audio bounce I have right now. I’ve already a proposed layout for these foam thingies and will be applying them as soon as they get here.
Which brings me to the point of all this: Until I receive my panels I won’t be recording anything for the YouTube channel. I want to move away from the lower audio quality of my videos into something much better. And this also extends to properly editing my videos and delivering something a bit snazzier than a straight up Let’s Play. Hell, imagine how much cooler Tales would’ve been if I had inserted the “Limit Break” sound byte (along with some cool effect) instead of shouting it into the microphone.
I’m now going to take the time to properly edit the videos, recording the audio separately instead of having it all bundled together thanks to XSplit. It’ll allow me to make things much, much better, but it’s going to take a bit more time.
There is another point to all this and it’s the fact that thanks to my nifty little new Elgato HD 60 S capture card, I’ll soon be able to record and broadcast console games as well, starting with my next-in-line Twitch playthrough of Tokyo Mirage Sessions ♯FE on the Wii U. You can’t imagine how much I’ve wanted to broadcast console games.
So there you have it, that’s the state of the game, so to speak, what’s happened and what is going to happen. I do think that even with the very bad part of having all my videos go kaput, this is going to be a good move for The Mental Attic’s YouTube channel, for better quality in its content.
Now, before I let you return to your lives, I have a question, something I’ve been wondering of late: should I create a new channel dedicated to LawfulGeek content or do you like it all in this ‘central’ The Mental Attic channel? Let me know in the comments and the poll below!
Kevin bro Xplit might be using a lot of your computer but it is definitely the most professional tool out there. Look into channeling your audio through a professional audio tool, that will reduce massively the amount of time you spend editing. If you use Adobe tools I could help you set that up real easy (those are the ones I’m familiar with). Give other tools a go, like OBS and even regular Fraps if you are not streaming while recording. Once my Xplit sub expired I never went back but my computer was never beast enough to run xplit and all the games at the quality I wanted to play them at