The time is almost upon us! Tonight, starting at 7pm Pacific (10pm Eastern), eight of the world's best SOULCALIBUR V players will be squaring off for over $10,000 in prizes. Be sure to check it out live, courtesy of Team Spooky.
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.
In case you didn't know, HuBBs (and the Gaming Vision Network) from PA has a biweekly "Monday Night Gaming" in which he invites players from around the tri-state area to play various fighting games, usually from Namco's catalog. Right now they streaming Soul Calibur IV and you should be watching! These "Monday Night Gaming" sessions usually have some of the more active players in Pennsylvania.
Also, 8wayrun.com has it's own official Justin.TV channel. JTV has a special feature called "guest hosting"; where with a guest key, anyone can stream as a guest to our channel. So if you have a stream coming up, and you would like to stream your event on the official 8wayrun.com JTV channel, just let me know in advance. You would stream it exactly the same, except instead of streaming to your channel, which may lack "reach", you would be streaming to ours, and gain all the benefits of our system. High defintion quality, producer status and unlimited international viewing!
