Speaker 1: Hey guys, Tom and Sophie here. We just finished up an hour long podcast of Nerd Talk Be Advised with special guest In the Works Media, talking about how to be successful on YouTube. It's like a whole hour long, and I will go ahead and put a link to the description once it's uploaded, which shouldn't be too much longer. Anyway, I thought I would share some kind of workflow tips, kind of things that I wish I had figured out sooner about working with Vegas, making gameplay commentaries, and just making things go faster. Because let's face it, it can take a while to do some of this stuff, and anything you can do to shave some time off, make it a little easier, and actually put work towards interesting things is time better spent. So here are a couple short tips that are going to kind of help out with that. First, just dealing with videos, dealing with audio, and then dealing with rendering things out and just massive video file sizes. So let's get started. All right. But one of the big things is just if you do something once, try not to have to do it again. So that means saving it and reusing it. Reuse whatever you can. So it's like intro template type. Actually, this is actually got the ending in it too, but this is my template for most of my commentaries. I just got the intro, got the outro, and things like these little videos that go in here with the audio is muted. Yeah, I don't want to have to reset that every time because I was doing that for a while, and it's not hard, but it does take a minute or two, and I just spend my time better doing something else. Oh, yeah, I've got all these abilities to save presets and everything in Vegas. Go ahead and use them. Let me use an example here. Let's say I've got this video, and what is this recent little Damovan Peak. Looks like I'm spraying with my M60, as I so enjoy doing. It's good stuff. All right, so I may have noticed I've already got the audio set. I will note that one of the things I like to do with my gameplay audio is I like to compress it quite a bit. I like how it keeps it in the background, but you just barely hear it. That's personal preference. So I've got things like... So this is Battlefield. I'm going to use my Battlefield default color correction just somewhere I like to start. Normally, I find this to be fairly reliable. So it's not just one effect, it's two. So instead of pulling in two effects, I can just pull in one, and I guess it doesn't save me that much time, but it's easy. And problem solved. There we go. So all this stuff that you can save, I mean, you probably know how to save individual effects already. You can just use these plug-and-change. You can come in here and save as. It's really complicated stuff. This one is absolutely insane. I forget what it does, but it makes Modern Warfare 2's fuel map look decent. Just crazy stuff like that. And just save it for later. You don't have to redo stuff. It's about saving time. If you do something you like, go ahead and save it and reuse it again later. Again, there are things like, normally when you want to disable resampling, you right-click Properties, Disable Resampling. So similar to how I might go ahead and crop out the little bit of black lines in my video. So yeah, I like that. But if you happen to have a whole bunch, like this, what you can do is you can select all of them. In that case, I just shift, just like you would select files. And instead of going to Properties, you can go to Switches and Disable Resampling. And there. It's pretty important to disable that because it makes the video look like crap otherwise. So hey, there's no reason it has to be complicated. Just select everything and there you go. Alright, so one of the things that I have to do with this microphone is I absolutely have to do noise removal in Audacity. There is some background hum just associated with this microphone and I have to remove it. Otherwise, it's painful to listen to. Even though, for some reason, it still sounds better in the end than my other one. Whatever. So I have to keep all these files together so that the commentaries don't have to mess with Audacity too much trying to figure out which file goes where. My personal preference is to record in Vegas. I'll just arm for record and then I'll go and edit and commentate as I go. Once I'm done, I'm like, okay, I want to do the noise removal in Audacity and I don't want to have to go picking out all the files that I still have. So this is what I do to keep things organized so that when I get to that step, I can select everything I need to do the noise removal and bring it right back in without any additional editing. The first thing I'm going to do is every new commentary, I'm going to create a new folder. My commentaries folder down here. This is where I'm going to put all of the commentary audio clips for this video. Boom. There we go. And now, when I start recording, it will save to that folder. I can talk about blah, blah, blah. Here's my intro. Then I said, you know, wait, I didn't really like that so much. Let me go in and delete that and we're actually going to skip to over here and I'm going to say something about, hey, look at me spraying like a crazy person with the M60. Yeah, I love that sound. Chugga, chugga, chugga, chugga. All right. So, you know, say whatever my audio clips that I want, but I've still got those other ones that I deleted from the project, but they're still in the folder. So what I can do is I can go into project media and sort by use count. And I see because the track is called commentary and I'll say this stuff is recorded it, but it's not actually being used. So what I can do is I can select all of those, come down to remove from project and delete files. All that stuff that I had recorded that I didn't really want is now gone. And when I go into Audacity, I'll just open up that folder and do noise removal on all the files that are in there, save them. And as soon as I come back to Vegas, they will be in there and right as I had them except with noise removal. So that's a, that is really helped me out because otherwise that could just be even more painful than it already is. All right. So there is one kind of two more things and that is compressing these files down, saving a little bits and pieces or just compressing it. So you may notice this about six minute gameplay is roughly four gigabytes. Not quite. And that's, I mean, I got a big hard drive, but it's still taking up some space. And if I don't really need it soon, I'm probably going to probably want that space for something else. So say there's just some clips in here that I want to save like, like this. And I can select that with a loop region. And you know, what I can do is I can come in here and probably no render as, but there's a checkbox here. It says, render loop region only. And it will, it will just render that little piece out and I can save it to a clips folder for later. And I obviously want to give it some very descriptive name, but then it will render that out. Now there's another checkbox here, render using networked computers, and I'm not actually going to show you everything here because the computer would probably freak out if I tried to both record by desktop and do this at the same time. But essentially what that does is even if you don't have any computers networked, it puts it in a queue, like it just saves the project file and it puts it in a queue to be rendered. And so what I like to do with it is say this gameplay is something I want to save, but I don't want to use it right now. And I've probably got, you see I've got a whole bunch of other files in here. So I've probably got some other ones too that I want to, that I want to use for later. Maybe these two, I'm like, yeah, these were okay games, but maybe I'll, you know, say I've got this scene crossing rush game, and I'm like, uh, you know, I'll save it for later. But I don't want it taking up nine and a half gigs of my hard drive. All right, so I'll come in here and I will render this to my YouTube quality settings. For clips I normally will save to the maximum frame rate, whatever I recorded them at for, so for just bulk gameplay, I'll probably record at half that what I'm going to upload to YouTube at, which is in this case 29.97 frames per second. And I'll say, render using network computers, and I'll put it somewhere, this looks like the folder actually, where I've just got, this is Call of Duty gameplay, a whole bunch of videos, it's just like, man, you know, just in case I want it later. And this will go down to probably, you know, it looks like eight megabytes per second, which is still pretty high, but it's a whole lot less space than nine and a half gigs for a 13 minute gameplay. So I'll render this, I'll say, I'll save this, and I'll bring up this dialog box, and I can just queue these up, and I'll get all the gameplay I want to save, and just put it away, and I'll normally just let it go for the night. And then when I come back, I'll delete all the original files, and I'll have all the stuff rendered down a little bit smaller so it's not taking up so much space on my hard drive. And when I do find I want it, I can just grab it, you know, say I want a gameplay on a particular map or with a particular gun, I just, there's a good chance I probably have something that I can use that's a full-length gameplay, or at least maybe a clip, you know, because I've saved all that stuff and I'm not dealing with these massive files anymore, like magic. Even on the compressed setting, it still makes some pretty big files. Alright guys, thanks for watching, as I said, the link to the Nerd Talk Be Advised podcast slash interview within the works media is going to be in the description, go check it out if you're interested in that kind of thing. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you later.