Creating new episodes

Hello. If you are interested in becoming a host of the series, this article is for you. It will tell you about my experiences from creating the first 9 episodes.

The following article just describes my personal experiences I gained from learning-by-doing and is not based on any scientific research, so even though I'm writing about stuff in a way that it seems I would have a “real” clue, well, I don't.

First of all, you need to get an idea what you want to tell in an episode. This wiki is a great help in this regard, as you can first take a look at the planned episodes where content has already been suggested and described in a bit of detail, or you can have a look at the ideas section of the main page.

Then, what I did, was writing the „speech“. So, yeah, when you listened to one of my episodes, I was in fact reading text from a text document. The speech contains what you want to say in the episode, more or less literally. Writing such a speech has several advantages:

• if you are not speaking English natively, it helps if you spend more time to build proper sentences that are grammatically correct
• btw, you can still build sentences in a way that they sound as if they were spoken (e.g. in my own speeches, I did write words that act as fill-ins, such as “well”). The worst thing you could do is to read them like in school when the teacher forced you to read … so when you read the speech, please don't make it too obvious that you are actually reading this
• more time spent on such a speech helps to reduce the total amount of words it contains, as it helps you identifying unneeded parts of some sentences, or you can remove unneeded details
• the speech is a great indicator for the length of the episode (in minutes, when reading it). As you know, most of the time you are talking into the microphone anyway. In my case, if I have a speech text document opened that fills 2 pages, I know the length will be about 10 minutes. If the episode needs to be shorter, you can fine tune the speech to match the desired length very easily.

After that I created the slides. (either already in the „final“ format, or just in a text-editor). The reason is: it's important to think about the content again from another perspective than the speech from above, but to summarize it (remember, the text that belongs to the bullet points is in a big text size, they need to be short). What often happened to me was that I found out a new way of how to present particular information on a slide very efficiently. However, this also meant that I had to adjust my speech while creating the slides, which was a good thing most of the time anyway, as the speech became shorter by this.

Maybe it can also be done the other way round, first creating the slides, then the speech. I have no idea :P

Now, imo, there are 2 general approaches to this once your speech and slide is done:

• creating a classical presentation: e.g. create the slides (and the content of it, e.g. text and screenshot) using a typical presentation-software, such as Microsoft Powerpoint or OpenOffice Impress. Then you'd use a screen capturing software that simultaneously captures the content of the screen and the input of your microphone, so this procedure is actually a virtual version of your class-mate/work colleague who films you and your presentation with a camcorder. A general tip is to print the speech on a piece of paper, or when you are a brainiac, learn the text properly
  • Pro: when you are good at presenting, are able to remember the text well and do little mistakes during the presentation, this kind of workflow can be very efficient
  • Cons:
    • requires a powerful computer, as I'd prefer the episodes to be in HD quality, which means a screen resolution of 1280x720px and 25 FPS. I don't think many PCs can keep that recording speed up.
    • even if it can, it takes a lot of disk space.
    • also, fixing mistakes afterwards, e.g. in a non-linear editing (NLE) program, is a bit of a mess, I think.
• putting the presentation together individually. Thats what I did. First I recorded the audio (really just the audio, I had the text of the speech on my screen and just read it). Then I created the slides in the final format, in my case as Adobe Photoshop images. Then I put my audio into a timeline of an NLE program (in my case: Adobe Premiere) and synchronized the slides to it.
  • Con: this is a time-consuming method
  • Pros:
    • if you do mistakes, they are easy to fix. First of all, if you do mistakes while recording your speech, you can fix them in the audio file (using the audio recording software) directly - and then synchronizing the slides to the speech doesn't cause any problems anymore
    • it allows you to be as flexible as possible
    • also it takes little disk space on your HD and it doesn't require a monster machine of a computer either

Just a few general hints when it comes to recording audio:

• I guess many of you will just have normal consumer equipment at hand, e.g. a normal microphone that came with a headset that you use for playing the game. When you record audio with such microphones, the quality will be bad no matter how good you are at fixing it. You'll know what I mean when you listen to my episodes with good audio-speakers, you can tell that I have edited the file quite a bit, and it sounds bad nevertheless. One important tip in this case for you is to avoid background noise whenever possible while recording your speech. E.g. try to record it when there is little traffic noise on the streets (in case you have bad windows, nooo, I mean the real windows in your wall dude), or another thing I can recommend is to turn off additional computers that you don't need while recording, such as laptops that come with 40mm fans that produce a high-pitched background noise
• try to maintain the same distance between mouth↔microphone when recording (to keep the loudness equal, and also don't put the microphone too close too your mouth as this can produce bad sounds, like when someone spells the letter 'P' into the microphone)
• establish a routine of how you process/enhance your audio after you recorded it, which involves techniques such as removing the background-hissing using the filters your audio-editing program provides, or using compressors to make your voice sound more even. The important thing is to find out the order of filters/effects you apply that works well and also write that order down (or save them as presets if the program allows that), so that you can process your originally recorded voice of different episodes to sound always about the same after you processed/enhanced it

Why did I tell you all these things? The point is to be able to fix a speech afterwards (e.g. the day after, a months later, or also immediately if you find out a particular part was bad and has to be replaced). You really don't want to have situations I had, where you inserted/replaced one sentence of a speech that was one week old (and I had no clue anymore with which compressor and equalizer settings I had the final version of the speech processed) and the sentence I pasted had a noticeably different pitch, loudness and feeling. So all things I mentioned above, the reduction of background noise, the distance of mouth↔membrane and the filter settings have a more or less big influence of how your speech sounds after it has been processed.

The tool selection is a general problem for both creating the presentation, speaking of slides, and the audio. Finding tools that are good (and free of costs at the same time) is difficult. For Windows users, I can recommend CamStudio for recording your screen and microphone input simultaneously. For recording just audio (or editing audio you recorded with other programs), Audacity might do a good job, at least it's the best free tool I've heard of (it works on several platforms, also Linux, Windows, etc.).

Personally, I used Adobe Soundbooth for recording my audio, cutting and enhancing it. Then I used Photoshop for creating the slides, and at the end I used Adobe Premiere for putting the slides and my speech together. Now you might think that this tool selection is absolutely over-the-top for this purpose, and you are right. I used these tools nevertheless, because:

• they are actually GOOD (I mean, if you just have a look at some of the free linux NLE tools, you're gonna cry, but OTOH of course, Adobe products cost a fortune unless you're a student)
• they allow me to work as flexible as possible: I can do a lot of things with much more detail (or, in general, even have many more possibilities) than other tools allow me to do it. E.g. in Photoshop I can create slides in any way I like, edit the distance between text, use my own bullet points, use my own shadows or layer effects that NO presentation program such as Powerpoints offers, etc. Yes, sure, it's a lot more time-consuming to create a slide in Photoshop than it is in Powerpoint, but I can make it look just the way I want in Photoshop. Or when I have a look at Premiere, I can do many neat things with it, such as using luma-keys to show the white console text (of the Nexuiz console) directly on the background of the episode by filtering out the black color - can I do that with Powerpoint? I don't think so.
• apart from the aforementioned reasons I also wanted to improve my skills, particularly in Photoshop and also Premiere, so I wanted to include them into my learning-by-doing process anyway

I hope I was able take a bit of uncertainty away from you when it comes to creating video podcasts. It would be awesome if you want to help out creating episodes, otherwise the series will stop after 9 episodes or so, as I lack the time to continue creating them, due to several reasons having to do with my studies (studying computer science).

Keep in mind that the work of creating episodes can be split. For example, someone could figure out the content and write the speech and slides, a native speaker could proof-read the speech and slides for spelling mistakes and at the same time he could record the speech. Someone else could then put the slides and the speech together. So teams are absolutely possible and might distribute the workload. So if you think you have a few friends who are also interested but no one wants to do everything himself, that's a good solution, too.

About the content I can provide for you: in case you appear to be a trustworthy person to me and you know how to use the tools you'll need for putting together the slides and the speech (or the tools you need for recording everything at once), I can provide you with these files:

• Intro movie used at the beginning of the episode
• Compilation of background music loops used at the beginning or the end of an episode
• A huge Photoshop .psd file that contains samples for normal slides (including items and sub-items ), the background, the TOC (sidebar), the level of difficulties boxes, samples for the “hint”-boxes, etc - structured in groups

I won't be able to provide much support-time when it comes to using the tools, but I'll try to answer questions as good as possible, and I'd also like it a lot if you show me preview versions, in case you want to know my opinion and suggestions. You can contact me via PM of the Alientrap forum or ladder page or you can contact me via irc at #nexuiz at QuakeNet!