As some of you probably know by now, I've all but abandoned Wirecast in favor of XSplit as my primary streaming program. While yes, XSplit has far less features than Wirecast, it just does so many things right that I felt compelled to use it. Unfortunately, with all the things it does right, there is one thing it does wrong.
That of course would be the title card system. Sure, Wirecast's title system wasn't that simple, but once you set your XML files up correctly, it was very easy to update and adjust as needed. XSplit made it easier to set up your title cards, but in turn, its very cumbersome to update and change your titles. The built-in title plugin for XSplit is a complete catastrophe. So in an effort to make it easier for myself, I've written a program to handle title updates...
I'm not going to pretend in this post that I'm anything more than a scrub in Soulcalibur; whether I was good at one time or another is irrelevant. This month, for the first time ever, I find myself in a leadership position in the community during the launch of a major revision to the Soulcalibur series... And of course, as with anything I do, its not without some drama.
But drama is not foreign to our community; in fact, it probably goes hand-in-hand. In addition to that, to outsiders it looks as if our community is "quick to ban". Now, Soulcalibur V is about to launch and we find ourselves already being forced to make decisions relevant to bans. So before I go into my decisions for SC5, I'm going to do my best to recall a history of banning within the Soulcalibur community. Poor recollection after the break...
And now we finally get to the meat of the matter. In truth, everything I explained so far is simple; how to record your games in part 1, and then how to add commentary in part 2. This is all simple stuff, even part 3. Streaming is easy: its easy to do things right, and at the same time its easy to do things wrong.
As I've stated previously, I have been releasing videos online for almost a decade now. Back when I started, bandwidth and space wasn't nearly as fast and abundant. So you had to learn "tricks"; things like "b-frames", "QP", "trellis" or "umh/esa/tesa" became the norm. Ever wonder how fansubbers release episodes in high quality with low file sizes? Sadly, most of these techniques can't be used in the world of streaming; but much of the knowledge can still be put into practice.
Building a stream setup is an incremental process. First you need to put together a system to record your games, then you need to add vocal commentary, and finally you take all that it do it live. Last week, I went through the basics on how to record your video games. The first thing we accomplished was a setup able to handle the recording of video from your console to your computer.
However, just recording video games isn't enough; you need a way to infuse commentary into your recordings. There are many ways to add commentary; if you were just dealing with recordings, and not a live stream, you could simply add a voice over in post-production using a PC microphone and a video editing program such as Adobe Premiere or Sony Vegas. However, since the end result of these articles is to have a live stream, this just isn't good enough.
Fighting games are getting more popular, and as fighting games get more popular, the number of tournaments increases. Something we've witnessed in the SF/MvC community is that when there is a glut of tournaments, the tournaments without a live stream of the events often feel "less important". Thats not to say they in fact, are less important; but they get less exposure and consequently often feel less credible.
As most of you know, we have our own live stream. And while the lack of Soulcalibur on the stream is credited to the decline of popularity in the game, I have still incrementally improved on my equipment so that when Soulcalibur does get popular again, we'll have something special. I often get emails and private messages from people asking what kind of equipment I use; so I figured I would use this column to outline whats needed to give a decent quality stream.
