Practice Let's Play

[Tehwilburforce]

Hey guys. I finally got around to doing something with my new recording equipment. The result is a practice Let's Play with some pretty good commentary audio quality. I'm honestly surprised that I got it done and done well at that. I haven't started on my first real Let's Play yet, but I'll try to do that soon enough.

[Bear]

It's looking good, but your volume needs to be boosted. I'm at 50 dB on my sound system, and I can barely hear you at all.

[Tehwilburforce]

Hmm... I wonder why that is? I think I had the voice recording up almost all the way and I could still hear the game just fine as well. Maybe I should try adjusting the volume of the project as a whole next time as well.

Thanks for the feedback, by the way! I appreciate it. I hate to think what kind of comments I'll get if some hardcore Let's Play fans find my video. I guess making videos on Youtube always comes with that possibility of hearing from jerks and trolls, so it doesn't matter.

[Bear]

Yeah, you might want to just boost the recorded sound afterwards in post. I'm not sure what program you are using, but you can easily boost the gain on audio tracks and do editing quickly and easily with a free program called .

Of course, your video editing software probably has similar functionality, but Audacity is really great for being able to zoom into the sound waves and cleanly take out little ticks or other noises you might accidentally pick up. Boosting the gain and chopping up multiple takes to give it a lot of polish is really easy to do with that program.

Also, speaking from personal experience, don't worry about trolls or negative comments. Most of the time, people won't even bother posting something negative unless you get an unexpected windfall of traffic. That doesn't typically happen unless you have a really popular person link to you OR you stuff is so offensive that people start to spread the word. Other than that, its pretty much living in obscurity until you produce something really good.

And finally, about negative comments, it takes a while to get used to; you put so much heart and soul into your creation and it hurts to hear people bad mouth it. It really feels like a personal attack and it's easy to get offended and defensive. Don't though. The way I have come to terms with it is this:

There are a lot of really amazing people out there, doing many many amazing things. And people on the net are exposed to those amazing things and are very demanding; they want perfection because they see people pulling off seemingly effortless perfection everywhere. But perfection isn't something someone gets to immediately, it's something you work hard at for a really long time and as long as you can take your lumps like everyone else, constantly challenge yourself to do better, and keep a critical eye on your stuff you'll do wonderfully.

With that said, give 'em hell Wilbur! I'm looking forward to seeing your stuff =)

[RollCasket]

It's weird but I found the volume fine, though I didn't see all of it and was watching through my iPhone, so I dunno how different that makes it.

Personally I don't find a lot of racing games interesting unless I'm playing them, or they're weird/crazy in some way. For something more realistic you might want to cut out some of the loading screens and maybe throw some quick cuts of references to other games or something. Alternatively, you would probably want a script to go by anyway, or rough outline, but you can use the load times or slower segments in the game to give some facts about the game, maybe some personal experience from it, ya know, keep it lively and such.

I don't normally watch a lot of stuff like this so I can't give too much feedback other than that, but I'll check out your next ones too at least.

[Tehwilburforce]

@Bear: I actually do use Audacity. lol. I didn't know you could clean up the audio with it after you record it. How do I do that? I thought I got great quality, but I could hear a high-pitched whine and a few bumps from when I moved or accidentally hit the mic later on. Also, thank you for the encouragement. I went into the viewer data for the video today and found that some people in Finland watched, probably because I commented about how the Finnish are stereotypically awesome at rally racing in the video and then tagged "Finland" on my video. XD

@RollCasket: That actually sounds like a good idea. I couldn't really get into the game enough to talk or joke about it because there just isn't any story in it. Most of the games that I want to Let's Play look like games I would enjoy because they have good story elements and characters in them. I love that about games most of the time. The reason I like Colin Mcrae Rally, though, is because it's just a fun, challenging game. There isn't much to talk about there and I realize the mistake I made in choosing it for my practice run.

[Bear]

I believe Mistaque is from Finland, so maybe she checked it out too?

To remove blips, you can zoom into the audio track (Ctrl+1) and select the blip (holding down the mouse button and selecting the part of the sound wave) and just hit delete. They should be easy to see because they are typically spikes in the wave. They are typically small enough where you can cut them out without altering the way the track sounds.

As far as cleaning up whines or something that comes out as an overlay to a section of the recording, that would be beyond my admittedly rudimentary understanding.

I wish I could give more advice, but I'm not too experienced with LPs. I will say this though, make sure you have a healthy amount of enthusiasm in your recordings, keep the watchers entertained by being lively, as Roll said. Same thing with a script/outline for down times.