For the final episode, I actually had much grander plans for how the last few minutes would play: a montage of Richter Mode with the "thank you!" voice over. But, oddly, I had tons of time between the endings playing out and I Am The Wind's interminable running length. In an effort to keep this episode to a respectable running time, I thought the montage would be overkill, so I scrapped it in favor of tightening things up. See? You guys told me that you didn't like silence, so I kept it to a minimum.
It tugs at me, though, that the finale of the video series winds up with I Am the Wind, but it just doesn't make sense to elongate the episode. Sorry if you may have found it slightly anticlimactic, but I hope you understand the reasoning now. If anything, this is the only episode where I wished I had more to talk about. Maybe it was just the grieving process for it ending starting to take hold or something, but I really wracked my brain (and my notes) to include anything else I possibly could, but everything left was stuff obviously read in-game (like how large the dev team was, which is clearly indicated in the credits that you would be watching).
And there we have it. One major project in the books. To answer some questions that I've gotten about this all happened, here's...
How Some of the Sausage Was Made, Part 1
The voice recording was done with a Blue Snowball microphone. I have a friend that freelances as a voice actor and some other pals that podcast, and they unanimously recommended it to me for the quality it delivers at the price it sells for. It really did a hell of a job for a USB mic, and I can't say enough good things about it. I'm sure I could have done more research and found something better, but I'm not an audio engineer, so it was perfect for me.
I recorded all of the voice overs using Audacity, which is a freeware program that anybody can download and use. At first, I found it kind of obtuse, but since I wasn't really doing anything super fancy with it other than recording, editing, and then exporting into .mp3 format, it did the job. I would generally write a script first and then edit it a bit (not a lot, which is a flaw of mine that other editors probably hate about me) before launching into the recording, and then I would edit the recording immediately after. The recording process probably took a little over an hour per episode based on how many mistakes I made that needed to be corrected. I'm not a professional narrator or anything, but I've taken a handful of acting classes when I was in college (English majors could do that as electives, you see), and recalled some of the golden rules when I needed them most. The best, in this case was "slow down," because, like everyone else, the faster you do things the more likely they are to turn out rough, and this includes reading a script that you wrote yourself.
Generally, after editing the sound, I would walk my laptop over to my PlayStation 3 and jump right into the game footage capture, which was done using an Elgato Game Capture HD and Elgato's capture software. This was generously loaned to me by a friend, and not a moment too soon. At first, as I was trying to do this whole thing on a budget and decided to simply emulate everything. The problem is that I'm using a laptop that's a little more than three years old now, and wasn't even close to top of the line when I bought it. Though I was still using a disk to play Symphony using ePSXe, the frame rate would drop at very inconvenient times, and after doing a test run of the game, I just knew in my guts that it would be compromised if I did the final videos this way. Thanks to the good will of a good pal, the Symphony footage in the series was taken off of a PS3.
Everything else you see is emulated, though. Even though I own all of these game in one form or another (except one of them. No, I won't tell you which) (ok, it's Kid Dracula) (Kid Dracula sucks), I didn't have the Elgato handy during the early research period, and found it best to just download roms off of the internet. At first, though, I still didn't have a clear idea how to capture the footage. After a little research, I settled on FRAPS, which is a free software specifically for game capture, but a small fee gives you a few extra bells and whistles, as well as the removal of a FRAPS watermark on every video. It may sound kind of snobby, but having a billboard for computer programs all over most of my videos was not something I was happy about, so I spent the $37 on the full version of the program.
This is where things get stupid, though. When the laptop was new, it was loaded with the horrendous Windows 8 with the promise of a free update to 10 sooner than later. Since I never wanted to deal with 8, I never did a lot of experimenting with it, and when 10 finally came, I had no idea that the on board Xbox software had native video capturing, so most of the older games and side bits of Symphony were captured using that when I finally realized it was there. FRAPS was still useful, though, as some things didn't play nicely with the Xbox software, so the money was still well spent.
Lucky for me, though, I never throw anything out, and boxes full of old-ish stuff really helped me save a bunch of cash on this. A few years ago, a friend of mine gave me his old PlayStation 2 (I had traded up for a backward compatible PS3 when they were new. When it died a noble death, I was stuck with a mountain of unplayable PS2 games for years), but with a busted controller. I went ahead and hunted down an OEM PS2 controller, and just happened to have a USB adapter for it that I had bought on a work trip to Cincinnati when I wanted to play Final Fantasy VIII on my work laptop (maybe around 2008? I can't remember). As my wife and I are people with thousands of compact disks sitting digitized on a hard drive, we looked slightly ahead and bought a 1TB external drive to back everything up a few years ago, and this is where all of the captured video was stored.
All of the video editing was done using Sony Vegas Pro 11, which is now a pretty old version of the program. This was also gifted to me by the friend with the Elgato, and it took some work to get it to do what I envisioned with this series. The learning curve was steep, but not as bad as it would have been without YouTube and the ocean of tutorials on it. I've come to find later that while SVP may not be as ubiquitous in the editing community as the Adobe suite of products, it worked great. I've also found that it's very affordable for what it can do (at least, for what I used it for), so it gets the thumbs up from me.
Finally, yes, I was using the copy of Symphony that my parents gave me for Christmas just after my 18th birthday. It will never leave my possession if I'm still of sound mind.
Tomorrow, I'll post what is a photographic tour of how this all came together.
Thanks again for watching!
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