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Live Video Production or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Broken Brain

Live Video Production or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Broken Brain

In 2014, I started a little gaming show with my friend Tim. Originally it was going to be just a little series about this obscure game that had little-to-no YouTube presence named Vangers.

Cut to a few years later and I was running thin on patience having to edit every episode we put up. It was still fun recording, but the laundry list of things I was responsible for outside the show had now accrued to a point where sustainability was now a concern.

Streaming was not a new technology or phenomenon, but I still was ignorant of it beyond watching GDQ whenever that came around. The thought process behind a switch to streaming was that it would save me time, as the show wouldn’t need any time in post. The key point being that it was an effort to save time, a thing we should keep in mind for later. After doing a little research, it was apparent people seemed to be coalescing around Twitch as the platform de jour for Gamers™️. In addition, almost every streamer seemed to use a program called Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) to do it. Equipped with these two pieces of knowledge I set out to transform Tim and Matt Play from a slickly edited package into anything goes, live, beacon of chaos.

Our quinceañera was on Jan 11, 2018.

An inauspicious start if there ever were one. The template was basic, dimensions were off, and our capture card was not fantastic. But we were out there baby!

And that very well could have been the boring end of the story, however, much like this post, I couldn’t leave well-enough alone. I started doing what I always do, messing with stuff. My bedtime prayer is always the same one, “Lord, forgive me, for I have tinkered.” It always starts innocently enough, just some light tweaking, maybe adjusting a dial here or there. A sprucing up, shaving off the rough edges, then you have so many cables going to so many things you look like you are the protagonist in Serial Experiments Lain.

(Here is a little warning to skip this next paragraph if you find it too much)

First it was being able to hook up multiple consoles without having to mess with hooking and unhooking cables. Well, I needed switching gear for that. I wanted to move my main PC to another room, a dedicated office, so those cable runs would be a little too long, so I’ll need a dedicated streaming PC. I know where there are cheap PCs, Purdue Salvage. Great, great this is so much easier. And while I’m at it, I’ll have to transfer all the templates I made for OBS to the machine. Well, I’m going to have to rearrange and re-cable the entertainment center to accommodate the streaming PC. Truth be told, it’s not big enough so I’ll really have to upgrade that, and wire racks would work well. But wire racks can’t hold a TV, so I’ll have to build a custom TV mount for the rack. Ok great, great, this is really coming together, this is so it. But the audio quality is kind of butt, I wonder how much it would be to get our own mics. Oh, my cousin has some USB mics, these will work great. Wow, this is really something, sound quality has really increased. However, these mics keep disconnecting. I think we are hitting the limits on these USB ports. No, it’s a power issue, I need a powered USB hub. Why does OBS keep changing the mic inputs on every Windows update? Well, with these additions the computer is kind of chugging with the graphics card it has. I wonder how much a new one would cost. Oh nice like $50 and it can encode on the card, that should free up the CPU. Well, it could really use some more RAM, too. Oh, 4k is coming out, I should make sure I can support capturing that. Well, I’ll need new switching equipment and a capture card for that. That’s going to be pricey, I wonder how I can do this cheaply. Oh, this is looking crispy. Fuck, Covid, what the fuck is Covid? Well, let’s make this work remotely. How are Tim and I going to be able to play together and capture it all live on Twitch. Well, I rigged something together. Well, now we wait it out. Wait, there is a cheap old capture card that some eBay sellers are getting rid of at bargain basement prices that can capture RGB 444 for multiple input sources. Well, I would be stupid to pass this up. Wow, this is a big visual upgrade. But I need to figure out how to extract HDMI audio and capture it digitally. Well, there are some expensive options, I wonder if this USB card from AliExpress would work. No, that’s no good. Wait, this old card I can order from the middle east might work. Welp, the first one got chewed up in shipping. I hope the next one works. Well, they don’t make drivers for it anymore, I wonder if these Windows 7 drivers work on Windows 10. Alright, they do! Audio has been solved. Well, this CPU is being pinned at 100% now, I wonder if I can upgrade it, wow for $30 I can swap it for a 4 core 8 thread one. Ok, let’s do it. Well, that leaves more headroom to do more. Wow, this cool video shows how there are HD standards for analog cameras, but they exist for security cameras. How could I incorporate this? This might be my key to multi-cam and longer cable runs. Coax cable is dirt cheap. I wonder if I could capture this over HDMI, oh there is a converter perfect. I bet if I get an old piece of broadcast equipment with serial, I could reverse engineer it and control it via software. That would give me a way to automate the camera switching. Oh, it totally works, this is so sick. I want people to be able to join the show if they want. How can I route this audio correctly? Voicemeeter potato looks really complicated. I wonder if I bash my head against it enough, I’ll get it. Ok, ok, it’s not too bad, just a steep initial learning curve. Wow, we can have people “call-in” to the show if they join the discord and we can talk to them. This is great. But when I mention to people “call-in” they think with a phone. I wonder if I could do that. Oh, I bet using VoIP stuff I could actually make a real call-in show, too. But I want everyone to hear each other regardless of what they are using to call in. Voicemeeter can probably handle this, but I need to get creative with it. I also want to easily answer and hang up using my stream deck knockoff. Oh, this software can handle telnet, I bet I can make a simple web server that translates it to telnet commands. Oh, hell yeah, I can’t believe it works. Well, now OBS keeps crashing, I think I’m overloading it, but I don’t want to give any of it up. I’ve been looking into tv production and vMix looks pretty solid, but its workflow is pretty different. A learning curve, but I think I’m getting the hang of it. Now I have to port all my automations to work with it. Wow, that’s really working well, but my CPU is still spiking. I probably need to start looking into upgrading my stream PC as it’s starting to show its age. Maybe multiple PCs to handle different tasks.

Here is where we are today, something that was OSTENSIBLY supposed to save me time has now ballooned into something that is legitimately starting to resemble a real live production space. Something I had no intention of happening. The previous paragraph has been left tedious and disjointed on purpose. At the risk of being overwrought, I tried to capture what the slide felt like looking back, and what it’s like to exist in this mortal coil. It’s absurd to the point of comedy.

It’s not done either. I know this. It’s a challenge to put something down. My brain runs rampant with alterations and ways to improve the final product. I feel like I’m constantly racing against myself to put something out. If I ruminate too much on a project, it will grow to such complexity as to render its implementation approach the impossible. If I can finish it before my addled brain catches me, I can slip one past the guards as it were.

This post is a prime example of what I’m talking about. This was supposed to be about the first full game I finished on my solo stream, and how it was neat. HOW DID WE GET HERE?! I can’t tell you exactly how we got here, but I can say that it’s where we are now, and how it’s exhausting dealing with this.

Firstly, check out the playlist. It was a lot of fun, and I think it really turned out well. You can really see the progression of solving problems as they come up across the episodes.

Really, I tricked you, the point of this whole damn thing is a reminder to myself to stop trying to fight against how you process information and how your brain works. I’ve spent my whole life trying to cage and tame this; mash it into a box it will never fit. I will never be someone who can just plan things and let them be how they are. I will always try to make it better and get lost on a tangent while making that happen which will lead me somewhere else. In the process I’ll learn how RGB color works, how TV production works, how a video codec functions, and how VoIP telephones work.

That is cool. That, actually, rules, in fact, and is sick.

Also, I tricked you again, this is actually about why Tim and Matt Play is constantly plagued with audio issues.

Categories
Personal Technology Video

Passion Part 1

Prompt: Write about something you are passionate about that people don’t know.

This is a tough one, I generally don’t shy away from my passions. You can just take a gander at my Instagram story to see all the way-too-technical that goes on there.

I mean honestly when something becomes an interest it usually doesn’t stay hidden, I want to share it like a little kid talking about Pokémon to their parents. A bit of a confusing metaphor. Let me break it down. The little kid was me, Pokémon was Pokémon, and the parents were my parents. So, a bit of a stretch, sure, but you get the point.

One issue I have, in general, and have been unable to square is that there is so much I find interesting. I constantly feel like I’m being pulled in ten different directions. I am interested in *all* of it, and I want to take the time to explore it all deeply. Therein lies the dispute. There is a finite amount of time in each day and saying I overcommit may be taking some liberty with the word.

I think I’ve mentioned this before on this cursed website, but If I haven’t let’s retread. When I was a kid, I loved one thing above everything else, and that was video games. From the first day I picked up an NES controller, I was hooked. Well, that was the second thing I loved, the first was oddly enough, vacuum cleaners. That’s a story for a different time. Anyway, one day my dad brought home his work laptop (one I currently own again, but I’m so easily sidetracked as it is) and offhandedly mentioned that my precious NES was also a computer. Now, I don’t know what I thought a video game console was, but I didn’t even consider it was just a specialized computer. Once I learned that, I was like, oh computers are the best things ever and I should dedicate the rest of my life to figuring them out. Here is the really nasty bit, too, you know all those little worksheets and stuff you did as a kid that was like “What do you want to be when you grow up?” (Pernicious capitalism!) Well, mine were all answered either computer engineer and/or computer programmer, and that’s what I am. I have the documents to prove it, too. My sister was the same way, too, but with becoming a veterinarian. What kind of freak kids just answer those things and do not deviate from them. Honestly and truly disgusting.

Computers have been the genesis of a lot of secondary and tertiary interests; sometimes in, offbeat ways. I always liked the idea of making movies. I don’t know exactly what spawned that beyond watching a lot of TV and movies as a kid. I have some great examples of this still saved, and If I ever devote the time and get over my perfectionism, I will show them off. However, I sort of abandoned really pursing it until one of my older cousins started playing around with video production and editing. He showed off a movie he made that was a loose retelling of some Christian stories with a Star Wars motif. Cringy, of course, but I remember with absolute clarity when he said he edited in all the special effects on his computer. I was just blown away. I knew you could smash together clips on a personal computer and what not, but not this sort of this, not without some seriously expensive equipment. He just had a normal PC equipped with a FireWire port and a DV camera. I probably was the absolute most annoying person to be around after that because I wanted to know like everything about how he did it. What program did you use? How did you make the light sabers? How did you get the video into the computer? Did you need a special card or processor?

He was, sadly, vague at best, and I was mad about it. I wanted to know how to do this. It was probably possible to find resources online at the time to figure it out, but speeds and technology were still too rudimentary to give a thorough lesson. That’s what I needed. So, I sat there for years. Trying and, for the most part, failing to piece together information on how to digitally edit videos. It wasn’t until I got to high school, and, oddly enough, Japanese class. We had a video project to enforce our Japanese grammar. Essentially, we had to make a video showcasing our new grammar skills in a skit like format. Well, we could at least have fun with it right? A detail that is important in this, too, was I was in the process of making new friends. You, see I went to Catholic school from K-8, and now I was at the big public high school. Half my class was at a whole different high school, and I was determined to meet some new people. I love making friends, as absolutely cheesy as that sounds. Anyway, these very cool new people I met were in Japanese class, and we had this video project. I wanted to impress, I needed to impress. I didn’t have a MiniDV camera or even a way to capture it, one of the people in our group however did, and he was going to let me borrow it. I had to go out and buy a FireWire card, and I still couldn’t get it working. I ended up buying a way to capture it using analog composite (the little yellow, red, white plugs). Still! I had it in my computer and a pirated copy of Adobe Premiere on my Pentium III. I sat there and figured out how to edit, just purely by making mistakes and trying all the tools. I barely got it finished. I was up all night, but I was *so* proud of that. I’m embedding it below just to show what I was working with.

Watch at your own peril

Check the date on that video. Real old people hours. It’s gotten copyright stricken so many times, so I have no idea if any of the audio is even there anymore. I did use a lot of copyrighted music to be fair. I miss the days you could do that before the corporations got involved.

I kept re-watching it and showing it to everyone I knew. Coincidentally, I was looking for a way to easily show this to people without having to carry around a VHS tape. A new website called YouTube was starting to get some traction, and so I made an account and uploaded my first video. This was the start of a yearly tradition. I craved these video projects. It was my favorite thing to do, fuck around with my friends and spend countless hours and sleepless nights deep in the timeline. Editing is and was meditative. A movie is not made on set, a movie is made in the edit. I kept improving my skills. Getting a truly digital setup and learning how to do tricks and techniques. If you can’t tell with me gushing about this, it’s one of the things I enjoy so incredibly much, and almost never get to do it. Most of my video production has switched to live streaming, which was a result of hosting more events, the pandemic, and trying to always produce more with less. My setup is a bit absurd. But it is not the same as editing. I still want and need to do more of it.

Obviously, I wrote a little too much on this, so a part 2 is incoming. I tried to tell you I have a lot of things I’m passionate about.

Categories
Personal Technology Website

2021 One

Hi, hello.

Welcome to a blog post.

We are all doing blog posts again in 2021.

More and more people are saying this.

Firstly, and foremostly, I’ve wanted to write on this thing in forever. I’ve been putting it off for a while because, truthfully the web stuff I manage was getting too out of date and I didn’t have the time or energy to update it. Writing on the site just reminded me of all the potential security holes it had.

Honestly, it probably wasn’t as bad as I made it out to be. It was only about a year out of date, but the way I set it up didn’t lend itself to change easily, even if this was originally the goal of the whole thing.

WELL, IT’S 2021 AND WE ARE LEAVING THAT IN THE DUSTBIN OF HISTORY.

This site you are now on is now properly containerized. I spent a bunch of time banging my head against the wall to get all my configuration files correct and now I can spin up a WordPress site with proper certs in a single script. All my other sites that I manage I’ve moved back to a more managed host. They will load slower, will run on older versions of software, my total control over all the aspects of the back end is gone, but with that, I don’t have to worry about them. They will just hum along without much of my input. It’s a huge mental relief because some of those sites were just completely offline for too long.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Sorry, first thing, that popped into my head when I tried to type “So we…”

I plan on trying to split up some post ideas I have into many smaller posts because I tend to blow these things way too far out of proportion and they never end up posted.

In that, let’s do some quick re-caps and get the hell out of here 15 minutes early.

Like, many, I’m sure, I’ve been on more Zoom calls than I can count this past year, but I did manage to do some good things within them and in spite of them.

Dimescon happened again, albeit online this time. This has been a yearly tradition where we do small presentations on just about anything. The numbering of events has skipped a year as Dimescon 2020 never happened because 2020 doesn’t deserve a moniker. This year mine was about one of my favorite things, posting. It has been lovingly edited and posted below. I’m all blurry because the source media file is taken from a Zoom recording and my picture was all teeny tiny in the corner.

TECH SIDEBAR: I recently have been trying to figure out ways to augment my main computer as I have many that could provide use. In that I figured out a way to get remote rendering with Adobe Premiere. That means I can have my little server box work away at a final render of a video and not be locked out of my main computer while it cranks through all my insane effects in three and four dimensions. I did this by installing Adobe Media Encoder on the server box and setting a watch folder. This watch folder is network shared. That way when I transfer the Adobe Premiere project file over in the folder, it sees it and starts rendering sequences in the root folder in Premiere (not in a bin). The one hiccup is I have to make sure I transfer my media files over BEFORE the project file, otherwise Adobe Media Encoder tried to start rendering without the source files and messes up. Otherwise, it is very cool. More on the shared computing stuff later.

Remote rendering on my server box viewed from my main PC

My improv group did a holiday show, that I quite liked, we did a riff on a Hallmark movie that I thought went very well. Here is that show:

OK, this has been a solid first post of 2021. I’m going to call it here and continue on later. In conclusion, 2021 is a land of contrasts.