The Beacon Shrine Part 3

The last part of the Beacon Shrine build is now up on YouTube.

It took forever to edit and post.  Here’s the breakdown of how that worked.

I recorded all of the footage President’s Day weekend using FRAPS, which I purchased. 

Then, I edited each episode down to length using Windows Live Movie Maker.  The first was about five minutes and the next two clocked in at 14 minutes and change. 

Then, I added in narration using Windows Sound Recorder.  After that was done, I saved it all into WMV format and then opened a new Windows Live Movie Maker (WLMM) project and dropped music in from MachinimaSound.

Total financial burden to produce YouTube videos to date:  $37.

Pros:

• Cheap
• Fun
• Creative

Cons:

• Cheap
• Time Consuming
• Frustrating
• Resource heavy

I used cheap twice because for some reason, my videos don’t have the same quality as others I’ve seen.   I haven’t figured out if it’s my FRAPS record settings or me continually making the project into a video file in order to add another layer of audio.   In any given project, WLMM only lets you add in one separate audio track.

I know a lot of other YouTubers use FRAPS to record Minecraft but not sure if they use WLMM to edit and post.  I just saw Sony Vegas 12 on Amazon for $60.  That would push my budget for an unproven venture to just about $100.  May have to mull that one over.

The other frustrating thing is that it takes forever to work in WLMM.  Sometimes it gets hung up and I have to wait for it to stop idling.   The conversion to a video file is also tedious and posting to YouTube could take a couple of hours at least.   I’ve been up late, set a video to publish and went to bed.  Then, finished off annotations and descriptions in the morning.

Now, my biggest problem is doing the actual content.  In my previous post, I stated I had a backlog of footage to edit and post.  I have three episodes done and won’t have to record new ones to work on until almost April.   I left off after recording for one day and now I have to look at the footage to see where the hell I was when I was playing.  I did some stuff on my own and recorded it for another video and I don’t remember the narrative I was working on at this point.

Also, it seems that the server I was playing on is possibly shutting down.   I can understand.  It takes money and time to run a server.   From what I gathered these were high school kids, so as the weather gets nicer, they probably have less time to devote to it.  Sucks that I donated $10 to the server and then they started experiencing issues and possibly shutting down a month later.   I’ll remember that next time I’m on one.

Until then, I will keep going, tweaking the process and letting you know because I know you’re all just at the edge of your seats on this stuff.  ;)