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    • Video for YouTube

    April 15th, 2012

    So, first things first, let's talk YouTube. YouTube reencodes ("processes") your video when you upload it, so no matter what you do, the video on YouTube will never look and sound exactly the same as it did on your harddrive. Esentially, what I'm trying to say is that you shouldn't waste your time uploading a video with a setting that YouTube doesn't support.

    For example, if you upload a video at 60 frames per second, the video on YouTube will not play at 60 frames per second. YouTube will reencode the video at 30 frames per second, so half of the time you spent uploading your video was wasted. The same goes for audio, if you create a video with 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound in mind, YouTube will force the video to stereo when reencoding it, which honestly you shouldn't expect it to do a good job of. If you've ever watched a YouTube video that sounded really weird, almost hollow sounding with all of the sounds coming from the far left and right, this is because the person uses surround sound. Personally, I don't have surround sound, so I can't really help you too much in making your 5.1 audio stereo. Just keep in mind that YouTube only supports video up to 30 frames per second, and audio no higher quality than two channels (stereo) of 128Kbps at 44.1KHz.

    Recording

    Personally, I record in DxTory, it's basically a FRAPS alternative, but it allows for a lot more freedom and customization. I have no intentions to go into helping users set up DxTory in this article, but I may write one later if there is demand for it.

    So with my final video intended to be at 30 frames with stereo audio, I've set my DxTory settings to mirror what I want my final video to be. If you use surround sound, I don't know what you should do, my gut instinct is record multichanneled audio and re-mix it to stereo in post, unfortunately I don't do that personally myself, and cannot recommend any methods.

    Editing

    So now that I've recorded my video, and am ready to edit it, let's set up my project in Vegas. You can open your project settings by pressing ALT+ENTER or by clicking the icon above the preview pane for your video, it's the little blue square with a list and a mouse cursor in it, you can also go File->Properties.

    The main thing you want to worry about here is the "Full-resolution render quality," set it to either Draft or Preview. By leaving it on Good or setting it to Best, Vegas will frameblend your video when exporting it, which you probably don't want. Frameblending is essentially blurring two images together, if you're wondering what that is. Everything else is up to you, I've personally set everything else to mirror what I want my recorded, and final video to be. Once this is set up (you can click Start all new projects with these settings to do exactly what it says), I go ahead and import my DxTory footage.

    Encoding

    Now that I'm done editing, it's time to quickly review my video. I normally save my Vegas project, close Vegas, restart Vegas and then quickly scrub through looking for any sort of imperfections (they used to be really common with the FRAPS codec, so I merely do this out of tradition). What I'm looking for is one of three things, 1) a popup about needing to reinstall a codec, 2) visual corruption or a clip that doesn't display when scrubbing over the video and 3) red thumbnails for the video clips in the timeline. If I get any of the three, I restart Vegas and scrub through the video again. If I get through the video without a problem, I render it out. Failing to do this check may lead to your video occasionally having sections in it without picture. One of the things that I've noticed that leads to this "corruption" is undoing a changes to a video clip, such as un-deleting it or un-resizing its length, so if you do that anywhere in the process of editing, close and reopen Vegas before rendering.

    Alright, so your video is clean from any "corruption," let's export it, go File->Render As, and set the Save as type: to Video for Windows (*.avi), and click Custom to create your own template.

    First things first, I ensure that I have the Include Video box checked, and then establish my frame size. Two common YouTube-supported high definition 16:9 frame sizes are 1920x1080 and 1280x720, which when progressive scanned are known as 1080p and 720p respectfully. As I record to 720p, I will be uploading my final video at a resolution of 1280x720, so that's what I put in the width and height boxes.

    For Framerate, I must remember two things, 1) I recorded at 30 frames per second and 2) YouTube will display no more than 30 frames per second, so I manually enter my framerate as 30.000. Vegas oddly doesn't have 30.000 in its dropdown opting instead to only offer NTSC, the difference is minuscule, but 29.97 isn't 30. For Field Order, put None, as our video isn't interlaced, and for Pixel Aspect Ratio use 1.0000.

    Now, for a codec you have a bit of choice in what to do, but use one that's as lossless as possible. I use Lagarith. Remember that after installing a new codec you will probably need to restart Vegas to use it. If you don't have a lossless codec, or don't care to have one, just render the video as Uncompressed, the file will be huge either way, I guess, but it will be substantially larger if you go with the default Uncompressed option.

    I now flip on over to the Audio tab, this part is relatively simple. Ensure that Include Audio is checked and select PCM Uncompressed as your audio format. Once again, remember that YouTube doesn't support above a 44.1KHz sample rate, so select 44,100 as your Sample Rate. For Bit Depth, leave it at 16, and Channels, Stereo (aka two channels). Then flip over to the Project tab and ensure that you have either Draft or Preview set as your Video Rendering Quality. Once finished, I went ahead and named my template "720p Lagarith," and saved it by clicking diskette icon.

    Okay, so now that I've rendered out my video, I need to actually encode it in something scalable. For encoding I use MeGUI, which relies upon AVISynth and Microsoft .Net Framework 2.0 or greater (install them before installing MeGUI).

    Now that everything we need is updated and installed, go Tools->AVS Script Creator. A new box will pop up with various fields, all you need to worry about is Video Input, click the [...] button and select your video.avi file, another window will pop up displaying your video. What I do now is I once again quickly scrub through my video to make sure one more time and ensure that everything's looking good. What I'm looking for is a section of the video without any picture, just a black screen, if I find one I need to go back to Vegas, restart, re-scrub and re-render the video to get a new copy, there's no way to fix this from MeGUI. If everything's good, close the video preview and click Save in the AVS Script Creator window. A preview of your video will pop up a second time, but just close it, there's no reason to look at it a second time.

    You should now notice that there is new information entered in the Input tab of MeGUI, the location of your AVS script and the location and name of your video output. I tend to name the video output as video-v.mp4 so I know that this is the encoded video file. Once you've renamed your video output, select x264: *scratchpad* for your Encoder Settings and click Config.

    Click the Show Advanced Settings button and change your mode to Automated 2pass, this is essentially encoding your video twice, so if time is of the essence, select ABR which will be one pass. I can't exactly tell you what bitrate to use as it depends on a number of things such as your resolution, the amount of motion and the colors used in your video, but I find that 3000 is a good catch-all for 1280x720 video, for 1920x1080 I would look somewhere around 5000-6000. If you'd like to play around with various bitrates, by all means render out a small ten second clip and just play with it, find what works for you. Once you've settled on a bitrate click OK, we don't need to worry about the rest of the settings.

    Now let's move down to Audio. Select video.avi as your Audio Input and name your audio output as video-a.mp4, like -v before, -a is my personal naming convention to signify that this is the video's soundtrack. For your Encoder Settings, choose FAAC: *scratchpad* and click Config.

    This part is relatively simple, the only two things that should be enabled are Normalize Peaks to: 100 and ABR: 128. The names tell you exactly what's going to happen, the audio peaks of the video will be normalized so that the loudest point is "100%" in volume, and the average bit rate will be 128Kbps (which if you remember is YouTube's maximum). You don't need to worry about the Sample Rate, because we established that it is 41,000Hz back in Vegas, and we're using the Keep Original option. You may ask why I'm not using VBR, or variable bit rate, and the reason is two fold, 1) I've had trouble with YouTube keeping the audio in sync with the video when using VBR and 2) I don't care about the minuscule difference in filesize between using ABR and VBR.

    Now that you have both of those filled out, go ahead and click the Queue buttons under both the video and audio sections of the Input panel. When queuing the video section, you will probably get a pop up about converting the colorspace of the video, do it. Once both have been queued, go ahead and flip on over to the Queue tab. This is your, well, job queue, the jobs at the top will finish before the jobs at the bottom will start. You can move jobs around by selecting a job and pressing the Up and Down buttons below the queue. You'll may also notice that you only pressed Queue twice, but there are three jobs here, that's because your video is two jobs, or one for each pass. If everything looks good, click Start and encode your video. This will probably take a little bit of time, so go ahead and make yourself a sandwich to eat, because you're awesome.

    Alright, the jobs have completed, you've eaten your sandwich, but you're not done yet, there is one more simple but vital step to be completed. You may notice that you have two files, video-v.mp4 and video-a.mp4, when you only wanted one. I'm sorry. To fix that, go Tools->Muxer->MP4 Muxer. For Video Input put video-v.mp4, and for Audio Input put video-a.mp4. I'm lazy so I normally just leave the Muxed Output named video-v-muxed.mp4, but once you're done here go ahead and click Queue. Finally, go and click the Start button on the bottom of your Queue tab again, your computer will think for a second and then zip your two files together into one nice package. The resulting video, video-v-muxed.mp4, is your final video, so go ahead a upload it to YouTube and show the internet your sweet 360 noscope montage.

    Thank you for reading, and I hope this helped. Click here for a permalink to just this article.

    Push-To-Talk with AutoHotKey

    April 12th, 2012

    Sometimes newer games made for consoles, where they have a physical mute switch on their controller, or even programs like Skype, don't have push to talk features. That's good and all, but maybe I want to talk to my friends while eating breakfast without letting them know what that sounds like. Even modern smart phones have options to mute your microphone.

    Starting Off

    To create this push-to-talk key, you'll need some sort of program that will automate the muting and unmuting of your microphone for you. I recommend AutoHotKey, it's a simple, lightweight program that you can use to automate a number of things with, and it will be what I am using in this article. It can be downloaded for free at its website, AutoHotKey.com

    Finding out your sound device numbers

    Every computer will have a slightly different setup, so to find out which device your microphone is, you'll need to run an AHK script. Go ahead and open Notepad, or any other simple text editor (don't use something like Microsoft Word or OpenOffice). Once open, go ahead and copy paste this script below into the new, empty file:

    Yeah, the formatting looks pretty bad, but save it to your desktop as something ending in .ahk , I chose sound.ahk in my case.

    After the script is saved, double click on its icon to run it, and you should be presented with a simple-looking window with a table inside of it.

    I've highlighted the relevant portion for me, what you're looking for is the device number of your microphone. Write down or memorize this number, you can even just keep the window open, the device number will be needed in the push-to-talk key script.

    Making the script

    Open up a another new Notepad file and copy the script below into it:

    There are two values you need to concern yourself with, in the script above, the first is the part where I've written ## , and the second is the part where I've written %% . The first, ## is your microphone's device number, for me it was 6, so I replace the ## with 6.

    Now here's where you need to choose which key you want to be your push-to-talk, %% is entirely up to you. This will be the key that unmutes your microphone when you press it, and mutes your microphone again when you release it. If you want P to be your push-to-talk, write P in for %%, if you want Z, write Z, but for other keys, such as Shift or Ctrl, you will need to refer to the AutoHotKey website, where they have a list of what symbols represent which modifier keys in code.

    In my case, I will be choosing my Mouse5 button, which (and I know it's not listed on that page) is XButton2 in script. My final, complete and ready to go script will be:

    Now any time that I press my Mouse5 button, my microphone will be unmuted, and then re-muted when I release it. The effect isn't permanent, you can stop running the script, or AutoHotKey at any time. Likewise, you will need to have the script and AHK running for this to work. If you wish for your key to press a button in your game/program as well, remove the ;; from the line in the second paragraph. You can even change it to a different key all together if you want, so pressing XButton2 also presses Q. Note though, if you do this with a non-letter key, such as a modifier like Shift, you will type +, instead of signaling Shift.

    Thank you for reading, and I hope this helped. Click here for a permalink to just this article.

    Firefall – Closed Beta Impressions

    April 6th, 2012

    First and foremost a shooter, Firefall is a free to play massively multiplayer online game by Red 5 Studios. Before I begin discussing gameplay and whatnot, I'd like to first touch on the setting of the game, if you'd bear with me. The setting is in the future, after the Earth was riddled by shards of an asteroid torn up by Earth's gravity. When the dust settled, people around the world found that fragments of these shards, named crystite, could be used as an energy source. After sending colonists to the planet crystite originated from, Earth began to realize the power the colonists had over them, so they began developing a ship known as the Arclight which, by using wormholes, could get to the new world in a matter of days.

    Like a number of fantasy science experiments in films, an accident happened. The Arclight failed to correctly warp on its maiden voyage and plummeted to Earth. The Earth was all but destroyed by the technology on the Arclight going critical, and large swaths of land became inhospitable. From the ashes of what were once cities, the Melding was born. With it came creatures, and a people calling themselves the Chosen.

    As a character in Firefall, your journey starts in the resort, and now fortress of Copacabana. At the moment, Firefall still is in development, and as such you shouldn't expect the world to be as fleshed out as it will be in the final version of the game, but there are still things you can do in this stage of development:

    Firstly, you can call in devices known as Thumpers, which extract crystite from the soil. While a Thumper is in operation, you must defend it, as the it attracts creatures who don't really care for all the ruckus you're making.

    Secondly, you can fight off detachments of Chosen, which periodically drop into the zone. If you've played Rift, Warhammer Online, or another MMO with public quests, fighting Chosen will be familiar to you. As you eliminate Chosen, you gain what are essentially points for your contribution to the fight. When the Chosen attack is repelled, your points are converted into funds that the Accord, who are essentially the law enforcement in Copacabana, repay you with. There are also larger invasions of Chosen as well.

    The third real way to play right now, and this is where I spend the majority of my time, is in pubs and pre-mades against other players in gamemodes you'd expect such and Team Deathmatch and the like. All three of the ways I mentioned grant experience and money towards your character, which I like, because to be honest, I'm not much of a quest-person.

    Another way to spend your time is to simply explore the world around Copacabana, and in my opinion, it's definitely worth it. Some really stunning environment work is being done in this game, and there are views I guarantee you'll take screenshots of. Jetpacks, like in the Tribe series, also plays a big role when it comes to movement in Firefall, and you'll find you'll be able to get to hard to reach places much easier when exploring because of them.

    When it comes to actual gameplay, the class system is a little different compared to other MMOs. Instead of having to "re-roll" your character when you want to try something different, readd all your friends and then rejoin your guild, you simply go to a Battleframe Station. There you'll find the various roles, called Battleframes, that you can play as. There are currently five Battleframes in Firefall, and from my perspective, all five of them are sort of analogs to characters in Team Fortress 2, if you're familiar with the game.

    The Assault role is one that excels in getting up close and personal with the enemy, armed with a weapon that does explosive damage, he could make quick work of groups of enemies. Then there's the Dreadnaught, armed with a minigun and heavy armor, he can take hits and dish out some real firepower. Closely behind them stands the Medic, the Medic does exactly what you'd assume, it heals people during combat, and revives those who have fallen. Further behind them stands the Engineer, who can place turrets and forcefield walls to help lock down an area, and the Recon, who can provide precise heavy-hitting fire from a distance. Any character you make can switch between any of these Battleframes, should the group you're with, or even just your preference, necessitate it. One thing to note is that experience gained while kitted for one Battleframe does not transfer into all other Battleframes, each Battleframe is leveled up individually.

    Gunplay in Firefall is not like other MMOs where you target an enemy and every attack does about the same damage. As Firefall is a shooter, primarily third person but also at times first person, enemies receive damage based on where you hit them. Skill is also rewarded, scoring a headshot as a Recon doesn't just do more damage, but also grants bonus experience, whether or not the headshot was a kill.

    All in all, I am excited about what the developers at Red 5 Studios have here, and I look forward to the release of Firefall. For more information on the game, how you can request access to the beta, get involved with the community and more, you can find the Firefall website at www.firefallthegame.com

    First impressions of CS:GO

    March 30th, 2012

    These are some of my first impressions from Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

    You can't spray like you used to, I heard they want people to not be so wasteful with ammo or something, iunno, it makes sense if this is their reasoning. Some people complain that it's a bit random like Counter-Strike: Source was, but there are definite recoil patterns, they're simply more complex than they were in Counter-Strike. Also, related, and there does indeed seem to be first shot accuracy, but it's not as accurate as it was in 1.6 (no issue there from me on both counts).

    You can't bunnyhop at all, at least at this point in development, which is a little shitty. This will probably not be a problem competitively, or maybe even closer to release, as they said it's something that can be changed in the server config, but right now you really can't jump more than once at a time. This was probably reactionary to CS:S, I assume, because bunnyhopping was so hilariously endemic there at release.

    The guns still need tweaking a bit, for example the Tec-9 is hilariously useless. By and large I think submachineguns as a whole could do with a little bit of a bump in damage. Fortunately they update often, so hopefully this won't be an issue for too long (if it is an issue, I hope it's an issue, please be an issue).

    Also, pistols absolutely wreck faces left, right and center. It's great.

    Fizzy Good Make Feel Nice

    March 22nd, 2012

    We were just five and playing poker when your mom came busting in.

    Took this picture while abroad.