Coming soon

Yes, she's ready. Debuting this weekend. The bad news is the morrigan I found is for Smackdown vs Raw 2006, which means she'll need a new monster heel to battle. (If anyone sees one out there...)

Spot the Difference

I got a good tip from fellow YouTuber (god, makes him sound like a potato, doesn't it?) IzunaOtoshi about recording better looking videos with the gamebridge. So, I tried it out today. First, the normal version, recorded with "Best" settings and uploaded:



Then the higher quality version, located here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_dYy3ZT2Ao&fmt=18

So, if you can spot the diffrence....? Either video should look better than the old ones I've been recording using "Good" settings, in any case. Try adding that "&fmt=18" to future videos and see how they look. (I still have a stockpile of lower-quality WAS videos to burn off first, though, so it might not have any effect on future WAS videos for a while.)

W00p

Well, here it is:



I'll save the next match for when I'm running short on videos. In the meantime, I found a CAW for Tifa, so there will probably be some new Smackdown vs Raw videos coming up as she runs the gauntlet. I can't decide if she should debut against the bunnygirl - most girls do, but I don't want her to get overexposed - or maybe against the demon. But she already lost her debut match, and I don't want Tifa to lose her debut match. Decisions, decisions!

BLAM

My bathroom's currently being renovated, which means I don't have the time or resources to record any videos - luckily, I have a little saftey net of videos that are ready to go. Woop.

Much bigger news! As far as I'm concerned, the voting's closed on the RRXX live action videos, and by a vote of 4 to 3, I'm going to post both of them. You lucky dogs, you! Since I'm in a generous mood - huzzah! - I'll probably post the next one this weekend. Saturday is the most probable time. (I feel the need to post a RRXX How to Cheese about Miss Spencer, even though everyone already knows it, so I may post that on Friday, then the live action video on Saturday - Don't I just spoil you people!)

The two videos left are Makoto vs Dixie and Makoto vs Reiko - I'll probably put Makoto vs Dixie up first. Oh, stay tuned.

No WAS this week

Well, I'm all out of sorts this week after fighting with video editing programs. (I messed around with Virtual Dub Mod last night, and I can't figure out how, if it all, to have more than one clip loaded at once to make a big clip out of two small ones.) So, no WAS match this Wednesday. emo sigh

Oh - I almost forgot. The poll's currently tied, so go ahead and vote if you haven't already. I already voted myself, so I guess I could throw my vote out. Nah.

WELL

What a day. It took four tries to finally get the Smackdown vs Raw video done, and I missed hitting Stop by a second, so one of the dumb DID YOU KNOW screens ended up in the video. So I went and tried to paste on an entrance/closing sequence, which will still make the video clock in under 9 minutes. I tried WMM first, which shrank the movie down to like 29 megs and made it look horrible after YouTube encoded it.

So then I thought I'd use some of the helpful video editing tools I have! First up was Blaze Media Pro 7, which seemed to work okay - I saved the video and uploaded it. YouTube thought for a while and rejected it for being too long, and when I looked, it had added about 2:30 to the movie and totally desynched the sound. So, I tried different ways of encoding the video - this was with FFDshow - but there was no way to both get the movie to look any better than before and not totally screw it up and destroy the sound. I finally figured that out after, oh, three hours.

Okay, so next up was Adobe Premier. I'd heard good things about this, so I had high hopes. I imported the first clip, hit play, and.... it played the same four seconds of the movie and over and over and over until I closed the program. I do have to give Adobe high points for letting me know it's totally fucked up and broken right out of the box instead of making me fight with it for a while.

At this point, I thought what the hell, I'll try Jahshaka again. I imported the first MPEG, and......... total lock! Once again, I appricate the up-front nature of this.

So the long story short is, the bad looking video's up on youtube. If there's anyone out there with a gamebridge who knows of a mythical video editing program that can actually handle the MPEGs this things puts out, please let me know. THX

Schedule

Well! The video I posted on here already has a bunch of clickthroughs. Are you people doing that just to humor me? Well, if so, it's working.
Anyways, I thought I'd mention the schedule in this post. Right now I'm trying my best to put up two posts a week - one WAS video on Wednesday, and one other game on Friday/Saturday. There was a time when I was doing three videos a week, but I think we can all agree that's a bit much. Not only do I now have a full time job, but I've also been playing Lost Odyessy and Dynasty Warriors 6 with my wife. (She does enjoy those two player WAS videos, since they almost always end in myself getting beaten up. Ow!)

Anyways, the WAS videos aren't too tough - I wait until there's enough requests and record them all in a big batch - but I'm not sure about what video to put up today or tomorrow. I have another How To Cheese RRXX ready, but I've been posting a lot of Rumble Roses stuff lately, and going WAS video/How to Cheese/WAS/How to Cheese bugs me. Yeah, it's silly, I guess. What I'd really like to put up is another Smackdown vs Raw video, all the more so because a request just came in. The requset is for Miss Boxer to knock out a taller girl, so I'm wondering if I should turn on KO and try to get one of those, or if it meets the criteria if she just pins her opponent. Then there's the tallness issue - do I put her up against the female demon I created? Does the person who requested the video want to see a monster in there, or maybe 6'1" She-Hulk (but wait, she has almost the same fighting style as the boxer) - or just a tall chick I'll create from scratch? These are the things that keep me up at night.
Well, you can check back tomorrow to see what I end up doing. I'll bet the suspense is thrilling you!

Let's embed a video!

OK, let's see if anyone clicks through to view the video from here.



I'll probably only post one or two videos that are already on youtube up here - after all, if you're reading this blog, you must be a fan. So here's this one just for now.

The question I get asked the second most - besides "Are you going to post the rest of that Rumble Roses DVD?", which we already took care of with the first post - is how I record the videos. It's all thanks to one of these magical devices. It works very simply: You plug the red, yellow, and white plugs - or in my case the red and white and the S-video cable - into one end of the gamebridge. The other end is a USB cord you plug into your computer. (And yes, I know those plugs have a name, but I can never remember if it's composite or component, and I don't want to put the wrong one down, and also I'm too lazy to look it up. Thanks.)



The gamebridge works well, and I got it in a clearance off fry's outpost.com for like $3.95, so I can't complain. The only issue I have with it is that it lags a little bit when you record or stop. It's not a big deal, but it can make the video a second too short or too long, which I hate.

Why do I hate that? Because I really don't want to crank open Windows Movie Maker to clip out that one second. Videos uploaded to YouTube already look bad, but after being passed through WMM, they look even worse. Hey, sometimes I've gone through a lot of work for this footage - I want it to look as good as possible! As you might remember from this video



I tried Jahshaka, with some unfortuate results. After that a very kind person sent me some other video editing software, which is just what I needed, so I downloaded it, installed it, and still havn't taken the time to learn how to use it properly. My laziness is going to become an ongoing theme with this blog.

Biff!

OK! Let's move on to the introduction. This blog is going to be a behind the scenes look at what goes into my YouTube channel. Mostly it'll be me explaining what goes into picking the games, picking what parts go into them, and how that's done. If that doesn't sound very interesting, well, it may not be. To be honest, it's mostly here so I can get these thoughts out. I'll probably also embed each new video here, just so I can guess how many people are viewing them.
Coming up next: How I actually record the videos. Oh, I'll bet you can't wait!

FIRSTIES LAWL

Welcome!

I'll have an introduction and a first poll up later, but for now, let's start things off with a poll. I'm sure you've all already seen this video:



There's two more matches, but I'm not sure if I should post them. Mostly, I'm worried about getting zapped for copyright. As it is now, maybe 25% of the DVD is posted in that match. If I put up the other two, 90% will be up there. I don't think ZMA is going to come along and demand that it come down - I'm more worried about YouTube, who seems happy to remove users higgly-piggly lately. So, I'll leave it up to you, my loyal viewers (who have stumbled across this blog), to decide.

More?

No Just one match Both matches

View Results Free Myspace Poll