So here we go.
My personal goal for my professional work this year is to figure out the mysteries of video. I’ve been dabbling in video for the better part of a year now, and you can compare my very first Game Boy World video to the most recent entry and get a sense of how much I’ve taught myself when it comes to video production, both creatively and technically. I will never be mistaken for a Hollywood or broadcast producer, but I’m doing OK, considering that I’m trained as a writer, and also an old person.
Still, retrospective videos are easy. The past is all right there, ripe and ready for explanation. Trying to adapt this discipline to more current topics, however, is a considerable challenge. But that’s my goal this year. We’ll see how it goes.
I admit I tackled a pretty heady argument to start with, and by no means is the case I’ve presented intended to be gospel truth. On the contrary, I’ve enjoyed reading all the comments both in support of and opposition to my speculation. In any case, I realize this first effort — a companion piece/truncated version of an accompanying editorial that more fully fleshes out a lot of the arguments in the video — offers a lot of room for improvement. Perhaps it might be interesting to track those improvements over the course of the year?
If you subscribe to USgamer’s YouTube channel, you can watch me rise to heaven or sink to hell in 2015. Just saying.
Nice video. I look forward to seeing if the big publisher end of the video game market can correct itself over the next year. I think the smaller publishers and developers are still putting out great things, like From’s Dark Souls and Atlus’ Persona/Etrian games. Right now it feels like the indies are saving gaming since I probably played Rogue Legacy more than any other game this year and continually go to Steam World Dig for a pallet cleanser.
What are you using, out of curiosity? iMovie?
I recorded a few audiobooks a couple of years back in Pro Tools. The software was borrowed and I’ve had to return it (there was a dongle so even if I kept it on my computer it wouldn’t be functional anymore) so I tried Audacity, but it turns out the Mac version of Audacity is not fit for purpose because it doesn’t support realtime passthrough on a Firewire mixer (meaning I get a delay between speaking and hearing what I’m saying in my headphones). So I tracked down an old copy of GarageBand (I’ve got a 1,1 Mac Pro and can’t run an OS newer than Lion on it, and Apple has helpfully moved everything over to the App Store and completely refused to make old versions available — I swear the App Store is like someone looked at apt-get, thought “That looks pretty great,” and then gutted out everything that makes apt-get great) and I’ve poked around it a little bit — I don’t have the interface basics down like I did in Pro Tools, but it looks like it’ll get the job done. (Do/did you use GarageBand for podcasts? Or something else?)
Of course, the next problem is that my voice is too hoarse from allergies to do any recording work I’d want to put in an audition. But that’s a whole other problem I’m working on.
Anyway, that’s a huge (and pretty self-indulgent — sorry) tangent. But all that to say, it’s interesting using a new and highly complex piece of software — and it keeps me humble. It reminds me that this is how my parents and grandparents must feel all the time when they’re using their computers.
iMovie? This kind of video would be impossible in iMovie… man. I get a headache just remembering that piece of crap program. No, I’m using Premiere, which has a learning curve similar to Photoshop. But hell, I taught myself that, and Illustrator, and Quark XPress, and InDesign… I’ll have Premiere down sooner or later, too.