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[Lupin6]

Hi everybody. I'm back again, and this time NOT with a technical support problem, thank goodness.

I've been thinking lately about making YouTube videos, maybe discussing some old cartoons I remember watching, maybe a Let's Play of an online game. Of course, in order to do that, I'd need software to record and edit the videos, and I don't know what to use. Someone once said they used Open Broadcaster Software for what they did, but I wanted to ask around anyway.

Let me make a few things clear: My video editing skills are basically non-existent, and I don't think they'll improve dramatically, so I'm not looking to do anything super fancy. I also WON'T be working with video clips, if that makes a difference, first for the reason I just mentioned, and second because I don't want to bother with copyright stuff. If anything, I'd just use still shots when applicable, placed against a generic background, or maybe a background that's also a still shot.

Is Open Broadcaster Software good enough for all of that? Am I being clear enough with what I want? I just wanted to ask you guys before I did anything, just to be sure.

[feelotraveller]

Not my thing, but since a couple of days have passed...

OBS is the only one I have heard mentioned by youtubers and twitchers enough that I remember its name. 

[MorleyDev]

OBS is for recording or streaming video and audio from your machine (like with a Let's Play), with support for webcam overlays and whatnot.

It didn't support Windows at the time but I've used kdenlive for video editing before. This is about 7/8 years ago now, so it's changed a lot since I last used it (Open Source constantly worked on and all that). But for free it was the best video editor I found at the time. It does support Windows now, but can't vouch for how stable/good that is compared to any alternatives.

If you're just wanting to do still images, something like Audacity is probably all you need to record any audio you can then layer over the images.

Kdenlive should work for the editing fairly well and leave you room for moving into fancier tricks later, but honestly the Windows Movie Maker if you're on Windows 7/8 or Photos App if you're on Windows 10 is probably all you need to get started for that. Just not as much room to grow what you're doing within the app beyond that.

[Lupin6]

The Photos app can do video? Huh. That's quite a misnomer, isn't it? Why didn't they title it "Photos and Video?"

Anyway, thank you so very much for the advice. Would I be correct in saying that while the Photos app can make video, it may not be able to record sound?

You also mentioned layering audio over the images I use. What program would I use to do that? Would that be Photos or Audacity?

[MorleyDev]

You'd use Audacity to record the audio, and export an audio file like a mp3 or flac file out from Audactiy. You should then be able to import the audio file into a video editor or Photos and put a video together with images you then export to a single file.

(I don't know if theirs a better more modern tool to use than Audacity for the audio recording side of things, I'm going off old experience here, if anybody does I'd be interested in hearing about them).

[Doomblade187]

I don't have video experience, but Reaper is a good Audio editor with a generous free trial. It also allows minor video editing, with a special mechanism for editing video audio.

[brewer bob]

I also vouch for Audacity for recording and audio editing. It's pretty much all you need.

Windows Movie Maker if you're on Windows 7/8 or Photos App if you're on Windows 10 is probably all you need to get started

This was enough for basic stuff for a person like me who has no video editing experience. However, syncing audio and still images was a pain in the ass and not as precise as I needed. So, I went and downloaded Blender, which has a built-in video sequence editor. It's free and a rather versatile program, but is rather hard to learn in my experience (also rendering videos is slow). You might want to give it a try, if you're willing to spend time learning how to use it.

[5crownik007]

If you have an Nvidia graphics card, you can use Shadowplay for recording video(and ingame audio, and your microphone)
For audio editing, Audacity is good enough.
For sequencing, Adobe Premiere is good(but not free).

[dragdeler]

You could record what you see on your screen with shadowplay, fraps, OBS or a combination of OBS + NDI (namely scanconverter).

If you're doing a commentary channel focus on getting decent audio and content, you can allways add visuals and learn skills once you recorded an actual script. Audacity is free and popular, but I was never a fan... you can try out most professional DAWs, like Pro Tools first, Cubase LE or Ableton Lite. Oh Resolume has also a free trial version, it's VJ software but it could be used creatively to do a lot of stuff, especially since it supports NDI.

[Lupin6]

I've actually gotten OBS and Audacity, and I even found One Shot as a video editor (in addition to using Photos).

Although now I have a related problem. So I was using OBS to record myself playing a Flash game online, you know, like Armor Games. I got a good recording, but after I was done, I realized that the ads from the webpage were still on screen, and those couldn't stay in the video. I've been told I can either try zooming in with OBS or creating a banner to cover up the ad sections.

I played around a little bit today with creating a simple banner to use on my existing footage, but I didn't know how to overlay it. And as far as OBS... well, if I have to re-record things, that would be annoying, but not impossible. The problem is that I don't know HOW you'd zoom in so only the actual game is being recorded.

Anybody know how to do this stuff?

[dragdeler]

Im not a 100% because my signal is all ready when it arrives trough hdmi and  OBS has to only encode that... but have you tried dragging and dropping the red borders around your scene?

[Lupin6]

I forgot to update this thread. I managed to figure out how to increase the size of the game area. But now I've run into a new problem.

I already said it before, but I'm doing an LP (which I mentioned here: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=174785.0) and things have been going fine so far. But when I recorded last time, the phone rang and I had to take it, resulting in a minute of near silence. I figured I'd just edit it out, since I'd discovered how to cut footage in the editing program I used (OpenShot). But I ran into problems today, and I'm hoping you technologically savvy people can help me once again. 

I imported the unedited footage, and used the Razor tool to cut the video at the beginning and end of the bit where I was away from my laptop. Then I removed the clip with the unwanted bit and put the remaining pieces together. No fancy transitions or anything. Once I did that, I exported the video.

Now here's the thing that frustrated me. This video, minus the bit I took out, should be around 33 minutes, and should also be around 300-something MB, similar to other videos I've done. But when the edited video finished exporting, it was 3 GB.

As I said, I messed with the settings some, and I got smaller file sizes (none under a gigabyte), but those were all corrupted and unwatchable.

I don't understand how the video could be so large when exported. This should be simple, cutting out a minute of footage. Is anyone familiar with OpenShot? If so, can you tell me what I might be doing wrong? I admit I'm not very good with technology, but this just doesn't make sense.

[taat]

a 3GB file for a 33 minute video is not that unreasonable, if it's in a high resolution like full hd (1920x1080). An aggressive compression might get it to 1.5GB while in blu-ray format it would take 12GB.

If it's much larger than the original video, then there's something really broken with the video editor (or it only works with completely uncompressed video)

I'd suggest lowering the resolution more than any other trick to lower the size. Some export settings may break the video while others don't.

[Lupin6]

Okay, so I experimented some more. First of all, the unedited footage, which I converted to an MP4 file with OBS, is 261 MB. It's 35:22 minutes.

What I used to exported the edited footage in OpenShot were these settings:

Target: MP4 (h.264)
Video Profile: SVCD NTSC (480x480)
Quality: High
Result = 694 MB, time: 33:50.

Now this video has a LOT of empty space on the sides that usually isn't there. I managed to upload it to YouTube, and I can download it from YT as a 177 MB file with quality 480.

Can anyone familiar with OpenShot suggest some better or alternate settings other than these? Or perhaps recommend an alternate video editing program, if it comes to that? I'm making progress, for sure, but I'd like to see if I can get this to something more reasonable.

[dragdeler]

That's weird, if you use the same format and bitrate it shouldn't deviate much in size, at least for me it didn't in OpenShot... check the second tab (advanced) in video options, and set a same'ish bitrate than your source material. (right click, properties, details on file in windows to check source material), also make sure the profile (also in advanced) is set to the right resolution and aspect ratio.


I don't get how you managed to put black bars by just trimming and merging stuff, but it would appear YT easily figured out what went wrong and fixed it with their encoders that are quite clever. (oh maybe the default profile is the desktop resolution, that might explain it)