The Rough Cut

For a long time we have been planning to start creating video podcasts for the site, however they have never really worked out. They require a lot more planning and preparation on the part of the presenters; more expensive equipment and software; more time in editing and, the thing we always seem to be missing, a good recording space.

Josh and I have already experimented with creating video podcasts in a ‘studio’, in fact it was the project which eventually evolved into the website you are looking at now (I would post a link to these videos, but we both find them embarrassing). The shows took a very long time to set up and shoot (we would often set up over night and shoot in the morning) and were not that interesting to watch.However, the 4th of the 3 shows we did was slightly more promising as we edited the show live, using a set up involving two cameras and a demo copy of Wirecast, then simply uploaded it too YouTube in 10 minute chunks.

Shortly after, we decided we had been too ambitious with the videos and chose to focus on creating a website instead. Though, we did attempt one more video podcast, a simple affair involving a single camera and some mics, that wasn’t that successful either. Up until recently, all of our major video content has been features such as the Rock Band 2 challenge.

Now we find ourselves in a position where we want to create more video content, but don’t have the time to do so. After watching some content from another video games website, Josh decided to start playing around with Usteam. Seemingly, the ability to live stream a video presented an answer to the time question as the video would be uploading as we shot it so as soon as we called cut we could move on rather than hours of editing, rendering and uploading. Therefore we decided to film Ignition and turn it into a joint video and audio podcast.

However, without a live vision mixer (incredibly expensive hardware) making a live show any better than a simple webcam feed is quite tricky, so I decided to go back to Wirecast and try streaming from there directly to Usteam. After searching around, it seemed like there was an option to do so but it didn’t help the fact that purchasing Wirecast would have taken a lot more money than we own.

I then ended up back on the Ustream website and noticed they were advertising something called ‘Ustream Producer’, essentially a desktop version of Ustream that also served as vision mixer. After some investigating I realised that this was actually based on Wirecast, it had simply had some features stripped in order to provide it for free. Unfortunately, this free edition doesn’t allow mixing between different cameras (difficult anyway) or adding titles and overlays but it will cut between a camera, your computer desktop and any media on your hard drive which is all we want it for anyway.

So, now we have the ability to edit live the remaining things we needed were: a camera and tripod (easy, though we have to use my old camera as my new one wont stream to a PC over firewire); a studio (which will be someone’s kitchen/dining room, I suspect) and audio.

In fact, the audio presents the final hurdle for this set up as we want the ability to mix in the jingles live with the feeds from the microphones (Ustream Producer does not support this as far as I know), at the moment we have the audio going through Garageband where the jingles are mixed in then using Soundflower we sent the audio to Ustream Producer to be mixed with the video. This is still not ideal as using both applications at the same time is a pain and inserting the jingles on the fly isn’t too easy either.

But, at some point tomorrow afternoon we shall be recording our first live episode of the Ignition podcast, available to view here on our Ustream Channel, tune in to see how it goes!