Minigame Discovery in VBHh #gamedev #indiedev #prism @NCHsoftware

This is a little video I knocked out a few days ago. This is important to me for several reasons.

#1 I have been struggling to create videos of the game. Every time I put what I had recorded with Fraps into Pinnacle video editing software. It made it look VERY pixelated. The main reason I think is because pinnacle could not handle non-standard resolutions.

As you can see I fixed this by using Prism by NCH software to convert the video into a standard 720p format. Pinnacle was then AOK with it.. except well....

#2 Pinnacle the video editing software I use has issues playing some video streams back all the way through properly. The initial .avi file I created for this would play properly till about half way through, and then just stop playing the video, but keep playing the audio. Gah!

I fixed that by using Prism again to this time convert to different movie formats. In the end Pinnacle really worked well with the .mov format. Phew, another annoyance averted.

#3 I was successful at recording ME. I used the laptop microphone and I am very happy with the results. To get the recording to match what was going on I had Wavepad Sound Editor open in one half of the screen and pinnacle playing the video in the other half. It worked out so great for me that this was my second take.

#4 I have been promising more videos of the game for a while now and when I have tried to create them they have been generally bad. Finally I feel like I have the method down to create the videos with enough quality that I won't be embarrassed or show the game in a bad light.

I am sure some of you are wondering why I use Pinnacle when I seem to have so many issues with it. Well I am only on version 12 (current is 19 I believe), and I love the way it works. The simplicity of it's timeline just gels with me. I can knock out great stuff with overlays and multiple audio tracks so fast. I just don't want to give that up.

Unusually for me I have listed several tools that I use for making videos of the game like this. I hope anyone else looking for these kinds of tools finds this information useful.

There is one last tool I do recommend. It is called CN Levelator. I use it on my recorded voice work as it cleans it up better than anything else out there imho.

Ok, done for now,
Have fun,
Da Voodoochief