Tython done

Well, last night, I finished recording and editing the last of my Tython missions for my Jedi Knight recorded playthrough. A few thoughts:

-- First off, it took me a few "sessions" to get the equipment right. However, since you can't redo missions in SWTOR, with the exception of the Heroics and a few other repeatables, I had to live with a few minutes worth of video with crappy audio, including one small section with no audio at all. Egh. Anyway, it's over with soon enough, and then I move on to where I figured it out better. But the initial start is a little bit rough from an audio standpoint, I have to admit.

-- I had considered doing some really "fancy" editing, but I didn't end up going for it. I just have cuts—sometimes, admittedly slightly awkward ones because I didn't think to record with slight pauses where I thought I'd later want to cut it. Mostly what I was thinking about doing was turning down the music volume and adding music in later manually. I ended up not doing this, and the cuts, obviously, will be pretty apparent in the music breaks. But this is less distracting and clunky than I feared, so I don't think I'm going to change it going forward.

-- I tried to eliminate most of the running around and fighting "trash mobs", although I did leave a few mob fights in to be "representational" rather than anything else. I also left just enough running around to be able to get a decent sense of what the planet looks like.

-- Rather than the audio commentary that I thought I might do, I added much more minimalist text commentary. Trying to leave the mic open for audio commentary was exactly why I was having sound issues early on and the text commentary forces me to be much more brief anyway. I think I'll stick with this for the time being. Probably, actually, for good.

-- The video quality drops dramatically when my character is moving. I don't know why this is. My experience playing the game doesn't look like this. It's either an artifact of the OBS recording, or the Microsoft Photos editing and exporting or the YouTube uploads. Don't know what (if anything) I could do about it other than have a better computer with a sick graphics card. Curiously, during cut scenes, and any scene where my character isn't running or moving, the quality quickly improves to regular HD.

-- A bit more fiddling, including the recording of a relatively shorter video on the Republic Fleet now that I'm done with Tython. The "raw" video was about half an hour, but after editing all kinds of shopping, moving of items from my character inventory to my storage locker, etc. it came down to about 5-6 minutes. I had no problem with video quality on this smaller video. I think the problem is exporting longer video files out of Microsoft Photos to mp4. This means that I basically screwed up my source files when I combined them into two hour long videos. Sigh. More experimentation gone wrong with my first run at this. Sadly, I already deleted the original shorter videos after I made the longer ones, so another ship that sailed due to my impatience. That said, I don't know that I want to have really short videos on Youtube. Maybe if I keep them to half an hour or so, and keep the shorter files for my DVD archive? Not quite sure how best to do this yet. I doubt I want to redo this character after as much time (and in game credits) as I've put into him, but I may. I'm not feeling like it represents my best, merely my prototype, warts and all. Plus, I've figured out how to make decent money by selling crafted stuff finally, so the money is less of a problem than it used to be. So... what's it going to be? Scrap my work on Taul Kajak and start over with.... Kaul Tajak or something? I just might. I'll have to think about this for a couple of days before I know what want to do, I think.

After editing all of my sessions, I was left with eight videos ranging from just under 5 minutes to a little over half an hour. I've since combined them into two videos just under an hour each. Those are what I'll load up onto Youtube as well as make part of my DVD videos when I'm ready to burn those. I had hoped to do one planet per DVD-R, but may not be able to, based on the file size. Oh, well. I'll do what I have to do, one way or another.

Anyway, as soon as my last video finishes exporting and I can get these loaded up on Youtube, I'll come edit this post to include the links. And now that I'm done with Tython, I'm considering at least kicking off another character. Maybe my sith pureblood scoundrel.

UPDATE: Yeah, the problems with these videos are going to bug me. I decided that I'll come back to the Jedi Knight later with a new Jedi Sentinel character, once I've got some new black-green crystals from the rakghoul event. In the meantime, I started a smuggler. I'll probably bounce back and forth between various characters, and try to keep them more or less at the same place. It'll keep it from getting too stale to go back and forth (I hope) while giving me something to do for months to come. Plus, I'd really like to actually create all of the characters before the update hits and makes character creation all different.

This series (and all subsequent ones) will be much shorter videos, so you'll have to watch them with the playlist feature, or just accept shorter <10 minute videos or so.

After figuring out all of my sound issues... I forgot to plug in my sound device. Luckily, I realized it right as the opening crawl started that my USB cord was sitting there unplugged so you don't really miss anything.