Games Wednesday: Delving into YouTubing

So when I bought my new gaming PC one of the other areas I had it built for was game recording and video editing.  Recently my fiancée has started working which means that she is now working until after I get home from work.  This has given me the opportunity to start recording some game footage/commentary because before I felt both self-concious and embarrassed about doing it in front of her. 

For my first Let's Play I have decided to play through one of my favourite RTS's of all time, 'The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle Earth'.  I've played this game many times when I was younger and I felt that it was the perfect game to get my YouTube channel off the ground as there are so far only a couple of other people that have done so.

So the recording program I am using is Fraps.  So far this has been a good program to use as the set-up and recording is easy to do and there is relatively little system slowdown that I have noticed (especially as I am using an SSD to play the game from and a HDD to record to).  The problem with Fraps is that when it records it does so in an uncompressed manor so 20 mins of game footage equates to about 40 GB of space spread out over 10 different files.  To combine these together, add audio and compress them down you need to use video editing software.

The editing software I chose to use is Sony Vegas 12.  From my relatively limited experience with video editing I can so far say I'm enjoying using Vegas and putting together my video.  I'm still getting the hang of it as the first few times I've rendered it has either had black spots in the video or hasn't compressed and produced a video that was 130 GB in size and I was wondering why YouTube wasn't accepting the file!!

So far I have recorded two episodes of the game and started the editing process with both but I still do not have a fully rendered video....yet.  My current plan is to keep recording footage while my fiancée is out and then spend some time editing the video later on.  The first video should be uploaded in the next few days and I will also post a link to it on my blog.

Thanks for reading everyone and if you like the blog then please subscribe, post comments, share and distribute it please!!

P.S.  I will be doing a Science Friday post this week even if it kills me!!