Insurgency SDK Basics - need some pointers!

[seth]

I've just finished recording, editing, and uploading my first set of YouTube videos. I was inspired by Insurgency to make a short tutorial series on its SDK. I spent all of today and yesterday learning some basic Premiere Pro editing and recording with Shadowplay and my little Roland field recorder I've been using to record ambient sounds as my mic. The video quality came out great: 1080p at 60FPS, and only about 650MB for the first video and 950MB for the second (they're 15 and 11 minutes respectively). The audio quality was also pretty good as my mic records well, but it picks up everything so my mouse and keyboard are relatively loud. I will be buying a cardioid condenser mic soon (maybe an Audio-Technica AT2020, what do you guys think?), so I should be able to fix that issue.

As I'm sure you'll see, I mostly need help figuring out how to speak correctly. I don't talk like this in real life. It's just difficult to talk to a computer screen as you would a real person. How do you guys think about this and get around it?

Any other comments or criticisms you guys have on the content would be much appreciated as well. Watching it again, I realize some things are vague and I didn't go over as much as I'd like to have. I just sort of talked with no direction. Do you guys write scripts or outlines to follow?

Playlist

 

[Idolon]

Definitely write an outline/script. I've tried doing off-the-cuff stuff, and that usually tries before what I'm saying gets through even remotely effectively. At that point, I've pretty much formed an outline in my head of what to talk about since I've done it so many times, so writing it out would be just as effective (and quicker!). It'll feel more natural to talk into a mic as you do it more, but writing a script would be really useful to start with.

 

[Crash]

Scripts scripts scripts. The workflow for my tutorial videos are write the script, record the voice only of it all (doing multiple takes where necessary to get it to come out clean), cleaning up and editing the audio (noise removal/ compression primarily), then going back and recording the video portion of it separately while listening to the audio. This lets me focus on what I'm saying/ doing separately so I can keep both efficient. Then I put the two together in Sony Vegas and add in any effects/ overlays.

The downside to this is that I'm not always leaving myself enough time to do the thing I'm talking about and it relies on heavy editing, but I feel like it ends up being a pretty polished video in the end.

I use a Blue Yeti microphone, record/ edit audio in Audacity, record video with OBS, and edit it all together in Sony Vegas.