GeekOut YouTube Channel – Where We’re At

Cast your mind back just two weeks ago and YouTube was a foreign concept for GeekOut. Occasionally, we may put a video up, but nothing to the frequency of what we’ve been doing recently. Read on to find out what we’ve got planned as well as how the process has been going so far.

In just two weeks, we’ve rejuvenated the content that goes onto our YouTube channel, releasing 3 videos per week. Oh what’s that? You’ve only seen two this week so far? Don’t panic, I’ve not gone completely mad – The next video is being released tonight. Whenever I make a video, I have to use several programs. Because I’m a Linux guy, my programs are more limited than Windows which has some seriously good software for recording.

The software I use is simply called ‘Audio Recorder’ to pick up the in-game sounds. This records as one file, so I can fix any issues with the sound as quickly as possible. Normally these are saved as .wavs and they are generally alright with little to no need to edit them. The video is recorded with a program called Simple Screen Recorder, where I disable sound and focus purely on recording the images on the screen. It’s really lightweight so it is nice and easy to run. Finally, to record vocals, I use Audacity which picks up a mono track for my voice and I spend about 15-30 minutes each time editing this out. My microphone is really cheap so the power of Audacity is a must.

A cheap microphone will pick up a lot of noise around you. The raw recording of my vocals will come out buzzy (best way to hear what I mean is to listen to the 2nd episode of GeekOut Plays Stonekeep video, which is in our side panel as of the time of writing this article. If it’s not there, check out the Stonekeep Playlist). I end up selecting a sample of the buzzing (usually between 5-10 seconds in length) and I’ll use this as a sample using the Noise Reduction tool. I then apply the reduction of that buzzing to the whole raw vocal file. This removes all of that and allows me to amplify the sound so it’s loud enough to be heard.

I pass through all of my files (vocal file, in-game audio file and game footage file) through a program called kdenlive. This is a free and open-source video editing software suite which allows you to edit and do some basic video and audio manipulation. Once it’s all put through and cut, with effects added where required, I then go on to render the video in an mp4 file format and off we go to upload to YouTube! It’s not hard, but it’s a lot of extra work.

A while back, I recorded a video on Theme Hospital, which featured gameplay of level one minus any commentary. After chatting to a few of my close friends and a few of my colleagues, I mentioned this video to them and I was also told by people that a video series on the Bullfrog classic would be welcomed. Whilst my main Let’s Play series will be Stonekeep, which we now have a playlist for, we’re looking to do more videos. As such, we’re now doing a GeekOut Plays series on Theme Hospital. Check out this link for our playlist and the next episode of GeekOut Plays Theme Hospital will be uploaded later tonight.

We’re going to keep going with 2 episodes per week for the GeekOut Plays Stonekeep series and hopefully I’ll be able to record one episode per week of Theme Hospital too… but we’d also like to do some more modern games. We recorded the new game Steredenn recently, which was great fun. In the mean time, let us know what you think of our videos so far and let me know what you’d like to see in the future. As always, comments below, or over on Facebook and Twitter.