Streaming vs Let's Play on YouTube

Question

I want to start my own YouTube channel for various games that I play. I've watched way more than I care to admit from other YouTube gamers. The ones that I really like and find most engaging have 30-45 minute videos of a play through. However, it's often edited to remove the "boring parts" - think of this as the planning time in some games where you can pause it, set stuff up and the unpause it. There is a short jump and everything is set up - the channel creator describes what was set up but didn't show the 15-20 minutes that it actually took to do so. It keeps the video and game play moving forward.

When I'm looking for longer playthroughs, I often find live streams on YouTube. This, obviously, shows everything.

My question is, what kind of set up would I need to do the first option? My computer can run the game, but what do I need to know about recording the gameplay and my voice, editing the video, and stitching it together?

Answer 1

I think your actual question is for a list of resources to get starting making gameplay videos (Let's Play is actually owned by Roosterteeth as a title).

But I think your premise is wrong, you shouldn't go into the game play planning to do "boring parts". Today, creators usually stream for a long format "livestream" video, then they cut down that footage for a "gameplay" video, and then they will sometimes do "trailers" or "highlights", and this is a good business model.

By all means set up cool stuff and show us what you want, but you'll notice, for single player, that it will feel more organic to just play through.

They also require the same resources, as your first option is a subset of the 2nd option.

I recommend OBS, it's free and works great. In theory, you need twice the graphics capability of the game to capture it cleanly. It will stream or just record.

Past that you really just need a headset with microphone, any headset will do, but spring for a Snowball when you can, great quality and affordable. I can help (sometimes) to have voice recorded separately, but most times it really doesn't matter if you're having trouble with it.

Once you feel ready, find an affordable webcam, and you can do face cam straight from OBS, whether or not you create a second instance of OBS to record it separately.

Eventually you'll need some basic lighting, and maybe a green screen, but leave that down the road until you're already super serious.

Once you get to a point where you feel like editing, you'll need GIMP (basically free photoshop) or any picture editor you have handy that will let you work in LAYERS, very important.

And of course you'll eventually want to actually edit, I recommend Da Vinci for your first free editor. It has most of the functionality that Adobe Premier Pro or Sony Vegas has, but it's just not very intuitive.

I highly recommend you keep an eye on HumbleBundle, I got Sony Vegas for $20 through them because they occasionally do software bundles, and it's a good deal to find games (check out Monthly, it's fantastic).

Hit me back if I managed to leave anything out.

Answer 2

You have a lot of different options for something like this. At the most basic, NVidia shadowplay can capture your gameplay and the audio from your mic to a video, but this is somewhat limiting of your options for changing stuff later on as the game and voice audio are pre-combined, you are limited to the quality of shadowplay and some computing resources have to be used to do the data handling for the encoding.

To move things up a step, you could use a stand alone recorder for your voice and only capture the video game audio with Shadowplay. Another further step up would be to setup an external recorder that could offload the entire capture process to dedicated hardware. This rapidly gets more complex and more expensive, but allows for the best overall output quality and least load on your computer.

There are many different capture devices out there, some consumer, some professional. Some require you to use a distribution amplifier or a cloned output from your graphics card to feed your monitor and the capture device separately. Some capture devices have a pass through output that lets you plug the monitor in to the capture device and capture everything going to the monitor. It really depends on how much you want to spend and how complicated you want to get.

Once everything is captured, it's no different from typical video editing. You go through, review your footage, identify the parts you think will fit your narrative and assemble it.

Another option with post produced videos like this is that you can do your initial playthrough with no voice over and then add the voice over after you've finished your editing. This can allow for your voice over to better flow with the editing and how you tell the story of your gameplay.