Advice for making Youtube videos.

[69th_Mobile_BBQ]

Hello Pilots!

 

I'm interested in making some videos for youtube.  I'm totally a noob and have no clue how to convert recorded tracks to yt format.

Are 3rd party video programs required, and if so, what are the best and what are the ones that are budget effective? 

Any links I can read up on or advice would be greatly appreciated. 

 

~S~

[ACG_KaiLae]

Easiest thing to do and use is shadowplay if you have a nvidia card. I understand that AMD cards have something similar. You will need a video editing software, unless you want to upload raw. First question is what do you have?

[69th_Mobile_BBQ]

Thanks for the reply, Kai.

 

Please keep in mind that I am 100% illiterate on how to make youtube post-able video content.

 

I do have an Nvidia card, but I removed the GeForce Experience program as it didn't have enough going for it for me to want to keep it.  If I could just get Shadowplay as a standalone, I'd be happy.  I'm not going to re-install GeFEx just for Shadowplay.     (MSI GTX960 4gb) 

 

I don't have any editing software.  A budget program with no on-screen watermarks might be all I need.  I mainly want to record single player scenarios and some multiplayer sessions with occasional teamspeak comms.  I also want to be able to use in-game recorded tracks and post them to youtube as well (with or without commentary). 

 

My machine specs are pretty much high end for 2014, but mid-level now.    Intel core i7 950 at 3.05ghz  /  12 Gb ram (I believe it's DDR3) / Windows 7 64bit.  (I tried Windows 10 and it made me want to smash things, so I never upgraded. lol )  I know I could stand to get another 4 GB of ram too, but I never was interested in things like video recording/editing while gaming until now.

[Tipsi]

Mobile BBQ, Kai_Lae has given you your first step to creating a video. Go and do it.

 

I think the fact that Sadowplay (a recording software with little FPS degradation) is sufficient reason for you to reinstall GeforceFEx. 

 

Other people use OpenAL to record, but you will have to ask people what settings to use.

[Tapi]

Hi, 

I am not an experienced video creator but some time ago I  wanted to make a sim vid for YT and so I had been testing some free sw. My conclusion: Da Vinci Resolve is the best: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/

[Raptorattacker]

Shadowplay is definitely worth it. As had been said, very little loss of quality, FREE and very 'undemanding'. Another very important thing is to get used to using the replay features as well. Familiarise yourself with all the different views and how to use them (fly-bys, free cam, enemy views etc). Editing software is also a definite must-have. There are many different options on this front and so you need to get one that you are happy using (and NONE of them 'do it for you'!) and then get and practice. As we all know, practice makes nearer to perfect. It takes time so be aware, there is NO quick way to do it. The result is dependent on the input. 

I'm not saying this is perfect by ANY means but this was captured on Shadowplay so at least you know it's worth having because, like I said, IT'S FREE!!

 

Hope this helps and good luck!!

Edited November 20, 2018 by Raptorattacker

[DD_Arthur]

Hi Moblie_BBQ,

As others have said,  Shadowplay is your best bet to get started.   You can record directly to it - including voice comms - or make a recording from the ingame tracks if you like.

 

You'll also need a Youtube account to upload your tracks to.  Not difficult though.

 

At the moment I'm just uploading Shadowplay tracks directly to Youtube.  Shadowplay produces large files - the above is over a gig of data but the quality is excellent.

In the past I've used Microsoft Moviemaker to edit together Shadowplay tracks but these freebie softwares tend to compress the tracks data when uploaded and quality suffers.

 

If I didn't use Shadowplay, I wouldn't bother with the Geforce Experience thing either.

[kestrel79]

Dumb question...how do I start recording a track? All I like to do is record me flying from the phone and post to social media little clips of fun stuff like takeoffs and landings, kills. Nothing fancy but in this game I can't turn the recorder on. What is the default key or what's it called in the keyboard bindings? I might have turned it off.

[JimTM]

For video editing, check out Blender, which is an open-source (free) 3-D creation suite that includes a great video editor. Blender allows you to output your video to many of the formats that YouTube requires. 

 

Here's a series of very good tutorials on how to use the Blender video editor. The following videos in the tutorial series discuss outputting your video:

• 17.1 - Blender Video Editing (Rendering H.264 video / Testing bitrate)
• 17.2 - Blender Video Editing (Best Render with HandBrake / Lossless Rendering)
• New Video Render Options in Blender 2.79 :)

1 hour ago, kestrel79 said:

Dumb question...how do I start recording a track? All I like to do is record me flying from the phone and post to social media little clips of fun stuff like takeoffs and landings, kills. Nothing fancy but in this game I can't turn the recorder on. What is the default key or what's it called in the keyboard bindings? I might have turned it off.

 

The keybind is called Enables/disables flight recording, which is under Service in the Controls screen.

[69th_Mobile_BBQ]

Thank you all for the replies.  You've been very helpful.

[[DBS]MDS1]

Thanks for this topic BBQ, I too wish to learn "YouTube-ing" but was too scared to ask how. I have Shadowplay, and I have used it a few times - but the editing and correct formats for uploading to you tube has always baffled me a bit.This topic has been re-assuring and most helpful.

 

Thanks Guys! 

 

Kind Regards,

MDS1

 

 

[69th_Mobile_BBQ]

Well, in that case, keep the thread going for all who want to learn about making videos! 

[[DBS]MDS1]

Well, after taking advice from this thread, I have ventured into the scary world of video uploading. Here's my first, very amateur attempt at desperately simplistic video editing.

@Mobile_BBQ  I'm sure there are better/easier ways to put together a YouTube video, but this is what I did.

I firstly made a flight recording in game, saved it and then re-played and re-recorded it via shadowplay - adjusting external views and cameras etc in that second recording.

 

I used VideoPad to edit the final track, and uploaded it to YouTube. Financial outlay = £0.00. Which I quite like.  I'm still a little unsure about VideoPad, but it will do for now as a nice, free learning tool. Thanks for all the advice Folks, and please feel free to rip apart my attached Video. ?

 

[youtube]

 

[JimTM]

1 hour ago, MDS1 said:

Well, after taking advice from this thread, I have ventured into the scary world of video uploading. Here's my first, very amateur attempt at desperately simplistic video editing.

@Mobile_BBQ  I'm sure there are better/easier ways to put together a YouTube video, but this is what I did.

I firstly made a flight recording in game, saved it and then re-played and re-recorded it via shadowplay - adjusting external views and cameras etc in that second recording.

 

I used VideoPad to edit the final track, and uploaded it to YouTube. Financial outlay = £0.00. Which I quite like.  I'm still a little unsure about VideoPad, but it will do for now as a nice, free learning tool. Thanks for all the advice Folks, and please feel free to rip apart my attached Video. ?

 

...

 

 

Cool video MDS1; it must have been fun to make. I like the tracking shot when the Yak-1b is taking off.

 

The resolution is a little fuzzy at 1080p so you might see if you can sharpen it or go for 720p. Also the pilot is very dim and target fixated on the 110.  

[=KG76=flyus747]

once youve recorded the tracks how do you capture the angles you're going for?

 

I tried F11 but the camera controls are all reversed, and unless you hold spacebar, the camera flies at like mach 2.0

 

Is there a way to custom attach the camera to a point in the sky? or a point on an object (planes, ships, tanks etc...)?

[LeLv30_Redwing-]

2 hours ago, =KG76=flyus747 said:

once youve recorded the tracks how do you capture the angles you're going for?

 

I tried F11 but the camera controls are all reversed, and unless you hold spacebar, the camera flies at like mach 2.0

 

Is there a way to custom attach the camera to a point in the sky? or a point on an object (planes, ships, tanks etc...)?

 

You can switch to attached cameras on different parts of aircraft and vehicles with leftAlt+F2. I like to use F11 on ground, for example 11.56, 12.15 and 29.30 but you really have to know where to be waiting for the planes. Getting the "perfect" shot or angle is just hard work; you have to run and rewind that specific moment in your track again and again with your video program recording ( I use Shadowplay ) and out of those maybe 5-20 clips there is that one gem where camera motion and lighting is just perfect and you can attach that 10 seconds on your film. I use Adobe Premiere for editing and just started making films but it is great fun and pain at the same time. If you want to add music and speech in to your film, you easily double the pain part.

 

 

[[DBS]MDS1]

@LeLv30_Redwing that is one cool Video! very nice work. How did you get such sharp quality on the end product? I use Shadowplay for capture and VideoPad for editing -but when I upload the finished Video (in MP4 format) at 1080p it is fuzzy and no where near as detailed as the game appears on my screen.

 

Your video is beautifully sharp and detailed, may I ask how did you achieve this? (if you take a quick look at my attempt above you will hopefully see what I mean.) If internet upload speed is a factor, my upload connection varies between 9 and 10 Mbps, (download 35 -40 Mbps) which should be fast enough for 1080p - according to what I have read anyway. I would be most grateful for any tips on getting higher quality YouTube videos.

Thanks in advance,

Kind Regards,

MDS1

[LeLv30_Redwing-]

Hi MDS1,

 

I see what you mean. I think the main difference is in mission conditions; we flew in clear sky and you might have some haziness? I also feel the ground in Kuban is the sharpest, which probably is really not true but feels like it.

Quick camera movement tends to blur surface, so be very soft with your mouse when moving camera. I did have ReShade on with some sharpening when I flew the actual mission but the in-game sharpen is very close to it, not sure did I have them both on tbh ?

 

My best advice to you is to look where the sun is and find nice reflections on your planes. If you look 29.06-29.20 the sharpness comes from the angle of the camera and position of the sun. Of course it's not possible to be on the "right" side always when recording action but I really was looking for them angles, thank you for noticing the efford!

 

Oh yes, and remember Youtube bitrate and video codec when uploading https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en

 

 

[Tapi]

I have recently found out that Shadowplay records vids with variable frame rate. Though vids are of excellent quality and e.g. VLC says they have 60 fps, if I try to edit such vid and then encode it again with free DaVinci Resolve 15,  though the final vid is very good, its audio has very bad quality with frequent micro-gaps in the sound.

 

It seems the cause is, that the Resolve is not able to properly encode variable frame rate vid and the audio is therefore distorted (not synchronized properly). I solved the problem with free vid utility Handbrake that is able to encode vid with constant frame rate. Then it is possible to edit the vid with the Resolve and the final audio is good.

 

But this solution is not very handy, because it is time-consuming job: the vid has to be recorded with Shadowplay and then encoded twice.... at first in a Handbrake to remove variable frame rate and then edited and delivered with Resolve).

 

I therefore tried OBS (Open Broadcaster Sw) that is able to record vid from the game with constant frame rate. But I was not able to achieve good vid quality (I have tried many different settings) Unfortunately, my OBS vids are jerky even with very low quality settings (I have very good quality HW, so the problem has to be on the side of the SW).

 

So, I would like to ask the experiences vid creators here, what SW they prefer to record & edit the vids from the sim?

Edited December 7, 2018 by Tapi

[[DBS]MDS1]

On 11/26/2018 at 4:40 AM, JimTM said:

The resolution is a little fuzzy at 1080p so you might see if you can sharpen it or go for 720p. Also the pilot is very dim and target fixated on the 110.  

 

Hi Guys, here's an un-edited video captured with Nvidia Shadowplay and uploaded raw. I'm hoping it's a lot sharper visually than my previous attempts, but I'm still learning. I did use a couple of in-game Mods for this, namely the no fog mod, the green Moscow map, and flowers.

I forgot to press "H" to hide the in-game notifications, so you can see how desperately poor my engine management was on the I-16.Thanks to @Jade_Monkey for his most excellent single player missions, this was taken from his "Surviving the Raid" I-16  offline Mission.

 

I hope you like it, it's far from a masterpiece, (very far) but I'm hoping the visuals are sharp enough.

Kind Regards,

MDS1

 

[Raptorattacker]

There's nothing wrong with the sharpness on THAT. It looks good. Now comes the 'dark art' that is EDITING!!! That's where late, late nights creep up on you without you even noticing!! Once you get into it, it's great fun though.

GL

Rap 

On 12/7/2018 at 8:58 AM, Tapi said:

that is able to record vid from the game with constant frame rate

In short, variable tends to be better as the game invariably runs with just that. When there's loads of activity on-screen then everything drops and vice-versa so variable is the order of the day.

 

"CBR is Constant Bit Rate, VBR is Variable Bit Rate. In a CBR MPEG stream the encoder uses the same amount of bits for every second of video. So if you set it to CBR with a bit rate of 5Mb/s all of the video will be encoded using 5 megabits per second. For some sections this will be enough, other sections could have been better with more bits per second (because they are more difficult to compress - e.g. lots of motion), while others could have used less bits and still look good (easy to compress - e.g. a shot from a tripod with almost no movement in the subject matter). 
With a VBR encoding at 5Mb/s, the 5Mb/s would be the average bit rate. You would also set a maximum (and a minimum) bit rate. For the hard to encode sections the encoder will use more than 5Mb/s, for the easy material it will use less. But as the average is 5Mb/s, the resulting file will be the same size as the CBR one"

[jaygee485]

Good defense, and good fun!