The Revolution and You(tube)

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Dogface
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The Revolution and You(tube)

Post by Dogface »

** UPDATE **

There is now a wiki for this project which includes guides on how to record and share footage with us. Click here!

*** *** ***

LET'S MAKING VIDEOS. I propose that we get as many people as we can recording footage from their session, converting the good missions to Youtube res (MP4 ideally), uploading it to an FTP server that I can provide if needed, then making a roster of volunteers to assemble the footage into full-feature, multi-cam, annotated (and perhaps even commentated!) videos of each noteworthy mission, using a method of our devising. This would also make it easy to pull out a highlight reel, and shorter videos of any particularly interesting events. Then we upload this to a central Youtube channel (i.e. Folk ARPS?) in a regular, Youtube-show-ized format. Why?

* It would basically make awesome TV, I think.

* I and hopefully you would find it fun to do.

* Allow people to share editing work, i.e. particularly enthusiastic editors can get out the raw footage that others might not have time to work with.

* Provide a full, high-quality record of our doings, both for comrades who missed a particular session or who want to see their performance in glorious technicolor, and for the general public and prospective recruits. Also more fodder for the YiR videos.

* Attract a sizeable Youtube following by taking full advantage of the medium and setting ourselves apart from the increasing swell of Arma videos.

* Set ourselves up to take advantage of other things potentially. Live multi-cam streaming and commentary? New spectating options and other things in Arma 3? Doing more things with the larger Arma/video-game-game-video community?

* Grow bigger. Have more people in sessions, more mission-makers, volunteers, donors, cross-clan play, etc. Take over the whole world(???)

That last one in particular is of course something that would need to be addressed by the party as a whole if it's felt it needs to be approached with caution. Also, perhaps people wouldn't like to feel they're 'on camera' all the time? We can take steps to ensure that only game-related talk is shown (e.g. finding a way to record TS seperately?), and I would hope that people would feel comfortable getting into the mission on its own terms with the recorders just adding to the awesome-factor, but perhaps people will feel differently? Thoughts?

Anyway, in terms of technical things: with PCs being what they are nowadays, we already have several comrades able to record video and I'm sure we could find several more. Shadowplay and DXTory seem to be good recording solutions but there's always FRAPS or various free options. The conversion can be done, I believe, in Handbrake, or in Premiere or other software. So one first step to take would be to write up a quick guide for anyone to capture videos and preferred formats.

For hosting, I'm happy to pay for an FTP server to keep things simple - any recs for cheap hosting? Alternatively, we could maybe do it through Youtube, either the main Folk ARP channel or a separate one. Super, Host-type people, how possible would using the official one be? I have the option to download the MP4 of my videos in the video manager, and you can add multiple managers to a channel, and you can upload videos privately, so I presume we could share the files that way? Also any comrades with video editing software could knock an ident at the front and back before uploading, and we could make only those public, labelled as '$NAME's view, such-and-such mission, something like that. Or would running it through YT multiple times have quality implications? Anyway.

Then we'd need to do the editing. I'm sure I could manage at least one long mission a week plus some highlights and probably more - is anyone else interested in doing the same? If so, we should probably share our techniques and presentation ideas, maybe put together some rough guidelines for how to handle it.

So yeah, I'd love to take this on and see what we can do with it, anyone else? I have plenty more I'd like to hear all y'all's thoughts on, but for now let's get the issues above settled and starting making this happen! Unless anyone sees any major problems.

By the way, this isn't meant to in any way dislocate anyone who's already doing such fantastic work on the Youtube front. Anyone would of course be free to use their footage to make their own videos as well! I just think there are some new ideas we can use to make even more cool stuff by working together in the true spirit of the agrarian revolution.

SO:

* Who's interested? Can you do recording, editing, or both?

* Would Youtube work for video hosting, do we reckon? If so, can/should we use the official channel, or a separate one?

* If not, who knows of some cheap FTP hosting? Or AkKind, would your FTP server perhaps be able to handle that, if we chipped in for costs?

* Does anyone have any other thoughts?
Last edited by Dogface on Mon Jan 20, 2014 7:37 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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Dogface
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Re: The Revolution and You(tube)

Post by Dogface »

In the meantime, about our footage of the V+ session on Sunday 10th, thanks to the use of AkKind's FTP server I now have:

Shady harvest: WrathzRevenge's vid.
Bolshevik Raid: My vid, AkKind's vid.
Random Engagements: My vid, AkKind's vid.

Unfortunately I wasn't there for Shady Harvest, so I can currently do the latter two - does anyone else have any footage to upload? :)

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IceRaiser
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Re: The Revolution and You(tube)

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Pr3sario
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Re: The Revolution and You(tube)

Post by Pr3sario »

Hi Dogface - thanks for pulling some ideas together. I for one have always had a hankering for multi-cam mission videos but never had the time to try and pull people together. I think overall its a great idea but we need to get the infrastructure in place work out what the expectation will be from the volunteers. A few thoughts I had:

- Format? For me 720p MP4 makes sense because its quick to encode and results in a reasonable file size.

- The method. I think we need ask people to upload their entire mission footage to the FTP or YT account. Why? It will make the editors job a hell of a lot easier. In Vegas, you can make use of the multicam feature. Allowing you to stack all received tracks on one timeline, sync them up and then flawlessley cut between views as appropriate. I'm assuming Premiere will also have a similar feature.

In order to aid with syncing of the video tracks, I suggest a single gun shot fired in the air in close proximity once everyone has started filming, which will allow the editor to sync using the wave forms in the audio tracks of each video.

- How many can we do? I think one per week is optimistic. While we live in a world of fantastic download speeds what will let us down in pursuit of this is upload speeds. The time it takes for everyone to encode and upload may be a few days? I think aiming to achieve one of these per month is realistic and gives the editors time to do other things.

Maybe what we do is provide all footage to one of the volunteer editors and let them just get on with it with no timescales for completion attached. Some will have it done in a few hours, others will take a bit longer.

- Styles? Styles will differ between editors and I think this could be a good thing. It will add to the variety of videos produced. Putting a style guide out there might restrict an editors creative vision.

- Pooling the footage? I think using an FTP would be the easiest and (hopefully) the most reliable way. YouTube's upload and download speeds are often all over the place.

- Naming convention? As there will be lots of footage going up onto the FTP (or agreed upon sharing solution) I think we'll need a naming convention that makes the files easy to identify. I'd suggest using the mission naming convention as a basis for this?

- Coordination? How do we decide what missions we are going to film? Do we film all missions from start to death at each session? Then how do we decide what editor takes the work on?

A few possible solutions would include a dedicated Skype chat or forum section for volunteer contributors and editors.

- Splitting audio? Dxtory and Virtual Audio Cable are pretty useful for this. You can split TS, game audio and your audio into three different tracks. Sony Vegas will recognise these tracks when you import your files, Premiere requires you to extract the audio first.

- Where do we upload the footage? Personally I think it should go onto the editors personal YouTube account and the official Folk ARPS account. Within the description of the video the editor should provide thanks and links to contributors YouTube channels.

Anyway, that's me for now - hopefully something to go with.
I make videos starring you lot. To see yourself live or die just click here

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harakka
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Re: The Revolution and You(tube)

Post by harakka »

Pr3sario wrote:- Pooling the footage? I think using an FTP would be the easiest and (hopefully) the most reliable way. YouTube's upload and download speeds are often all over the place.
Can you give any ballpark estimate on how many gigs of working space you'd need on an FTP for this purpose? Very hypothetically speaking. Just in case it might be possible to arrange something.
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fer
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Re: The Revolution and You(tube)

Post by fer »

This sounds really exciting - especially the idea of multi-cam videos with annotations / commentary. It would be good if there can be a discussion with SuperU and/or other members of the Politburo to agree the editorial / release policy before getting fully underway.

AkKind
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Re: The Revolution and You(tube)

Post by AkKind »

First of all I have to say I love this idea. For me it's a good way to contribute my footage as I suck at the editing part.

I think we should go for 1080p in darker missions you can't see anything on youtube unless its 1080p and even then you barely see anything.
Also I just tried out Handbrake and have to say its pretty amazing. Sorry for that huge files I was uploading before Dogface :P. Wont happen again now.
Splitting audio may also be a good idea, increases the possibilities of what the editor can do.


Regarding to the FTP as for now I can provide my server, but that should not be a long term solution which has different reasons. It's actually not made for that purpose and so has only very limited diskspace. Also I'm not familiar with hosting FTP servers and for some reason the download speed from the server is limited to 2mb/s, while I disabled all speedlimitations and the server actually has a higher upload.

For the method, that multicam feature looks very promising but I see a problem with that. On adversarial missions you would not hear the gunshot from the enemy team and so can't sync the tracks based on audio files. I would suggest to write a message in global chat ingame on which one can sync the tracks.

Naming convention should be made. We could make a folder structure like this:

date.kindofsession(FA, FAV+, et.) -> missionname1, missionname2, ...

In missionname we would then have the videofiles uploaded called:

actorsname.sideinmission.roleinmission probably even the name of the mission in the videofile again to prevent mixing them up.


A skype chat for coordination would be the best idea I believe.

The amount of videos that we can make would depend on how many editors we can find, that are willing to sacrifice their time for this.
The editors should be able to define their own style, as different styles while attract different people and the more people the better, in my opinion ;).

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Pr3sario
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Re: The Revolution and You(tube)

Post by Pr3sario »

AkKind wrote:I would suggest to write a message in global chat ingame on which one can sync the tracks.
Very good point indeed. Usually - there is something that happens, whether on side chat or a visual/audio event. Ensuring we'd still be able to sync up video from both sides.

EDIT:

Examples would be the kicking the mission from the map or the debrief at the end of the mission.
I make videos starring you lot. To see yourself live or die just click here

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Dogface
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Re: The Revolution and You(tube)

Post by Dogface »

Fantastic! I'm glad to see people are excited about this too. :) I would definitely be interested to hear the take of Super and other Official Videographer types (who?), too, and will seek them out for a discussion if they don't see this.

In the meantime, to address a few of the questions/issues:

* For sharing footage, let's use AkKind's server for now, which I was able to download from at a good speed - you can PM him for the details. In the meantime we can set about organising a dedicated, party-run server for this purpose, and some experience will tell us how much disk space and bandwidth we use/would like to use. Just as a reference point, a converted video of a full mission comes to 2-3GB for me. With several missions potentially on the go at a time and several viewpoints for each, I'd imagine we'd want a bare minimum of about 20GB, 50GB to be more comfortable, and ideally 100GB+, so we don't have to spend too much effort monitoring exactly which footage is allowed to stay on the server for how long.

* Regarding formats, etc. Yes, I agree that recorders should upload the full, unedited footage, ideally including the planning and scoreboard parts, which should be enough to sync the footage but a global message at the start would also be helpful for this. For resolution, you can mix source res in Premiere, and presumably in Vegas too, so for now let's say people can record in the highest res they're able to, but a minimum of 720p. If we run into bandwidth/time problems, we can limit this to 720p until we work out some solution - after all, it's easy enough to convert down-res, but you can't go up-res. :) Format: H264 MP4 seems best.

* Naming conventions: Unless anyone has any objections let's stick with: [ISO-date]_[Mission-name]_[Recorder-name], e.g. 2014-01-10_Random-Engagements_AkKind.mp4. This will sort things by date and mission. I think there should be few enough files for any given mission - at least at the start - that we can get other information like the person's role, session-type, etc, from watching the video, rather than making the name format too complex.

* Styles: Yes, I agree it's probably easier to let people edit in their own style; as time goes on, we can share/learn techniques from eachother and maybe eventually settle on an at least rough house style, but yeah, probably best not to be too proscriptive at first.

* Commentary: This will be a little ambitious, so for now, let's just stick with the editor can add commentary if/as they see fit, and once we have some experience, we can see about doing it collaboratively.

* Uploading: Yes, to the editors channel and the official channel seems a good scheme.

* Organisation: First regarding schedule, yes, rather than try and force people to stick to deadlines, probably best if someone claims a particular mission, and gets it done as and when they can. For keeping a roster of editors for missions, rather than a real-time format like Skype I'd favour something permanent like a forum thread that people can check on different schedules. We could use this one, or I could make a new one and keep this for discussion. Having said that, a dedicated space for discussing this in realtime, when we can together, would also be useful. Could someone organise a Skype.. thing? Or a Steam... thing?

* I was envisaging that everyone (technical issues allowing) records every mission they can, announces what they have, and if someone claims a mission which they have footage for, then they upload it and presumably after a while discard anything that wasn't used.

I'll alert Super as to this thread and in the meantime, if everyone gets themselves set up to record footage for the upcoming sessions and we can have a go at doing this for realsies. :P
Last edited by Dogface on Mon Jan 13, 2014 2:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Dogface
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Re: The Revolution and You(tube)

Post by Dogface »

Also, I propose that we call this initiative/the finished product: Folk ARPS TV.

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