New Playmaker iOS Fundamentals video tutorial series!

I've finished up a new video tutorial series for my company Well Played Games, and thanks to a special arrangement between Hutong Games (Playmaker) and Well Played Games, this series is completely free!  There are 13 videos in total, and they are rolling out over the next several days.

Check out "Playmaker iOS Fundamentals" on YouTube

Spectral Synthesis - Introduction and Approaches

A couple weeks ago I made this quick video showing how to understand and use the spectrogram in a spectral synthesizer, demonstrated in Izotope Iris and Camel Audio Alchemy.  I was inspired to make it after working with the new iZotope Iris synthesizer demo, and seeing many comments on line that made it clear spectrograms weren't completely understood by many people.

Panelist at "Careers in IT: The Real Story"

Last week I had the privilege of speaking on a panel at Bellevue College for the "Careers in IT: The Real Story" event.  It was hosted by The Center of Excellence for Information and Computing Technology at the Carlson Theater at Bellevue College in Bellevue Washington.

Franklin Donahoe, Director, Information Security and Compliance for Costco delivered the keynote talk.  Then we spent a couple hours talking to a theater full of teens about tech jobs and how they could get involved.  It was a lot of fun, and I was very impressed by the quality and quantity of questions the teens asked.  I think many of them left authentically excited about what a career in a tech related industry could be.

Full video of the event will be up next month at coeforict.org.

How to Make Video Tutorials - Part 4 - Publishing and Conclusions

• Part 1 - Preparation and Capture
• Part 2 - Audio Pass
• Part 3 - Video Edit

Choosing a Host

If you are publishing to YouTube, this is easy!  You have the advantage of reaching millions of potential viewers while paying nothing for bandwidth or hosting.  But if you want to charge for your video product, or distribute them via your own web site you will need a host for the video files.

I won't lie to you, it's a huge mess out there.  It doesn't take long to find more e-commerce services than I could count, and all of them have fairly obscure presentations about what they really cost and how they work.  You could waste a tremendous amount of time investigating all the options.  I chose to go with e-junkie.com because they had a reasonable rate, reliable up-time, and really easy to set up e-commerce software.  Just be sure to find a provider that offers a hosting rate that you can sustain over time even as your sales drop off.  Selling video files is a trade off between how much you earn from sales vs how much you pay in hosting.  If you don't do some math, you could get caught paying big hosting fees in a few months without enough sales to support them, thereby killing off your product.  You also don't want to grow too fast and eat up all your early profits on hosting space you may or may not need.

Conclusions 

• I had some concerns that I wouldn't sell enough for this to be worth doing, so I made sure to put in the effort to make my videos stand out.  I also made sure to find a focused market where the timing was right (Playmaker is relatively new and Unity3D is an extremely popular game engine).  Sales have been strong enough to support me doing at least a couple more tutorial series, which is great!

• I already had a lot of great software/hardware to use for a project like this.  You may not, and thats ok.  There are a lot of inexpensive and free software options that would have worked equally well, and I wouldn't have had any need for something more feature-rich like Final Cut Pro.  What I did was pretty much garden variety stuff, and I never pushed the limits of any tool I used.  So don't be afraid to try this for yourself! 

• I could have cut my production time in half if I had simply used a voice-chat grade microphone.  Since this is what most people do, it would have been accepted by viewers.  But putting in that extra work has really added a quality level to my videos that most other people simply don't have, and that has helped my sales and credibility a lot.  A really crappy sounding headset mic will cost you about $65.  A really good sounding microphone will cost you around $100-200.  You aren't recording studio quality vocals with a band, but you do need to sound professional, so spend appropriately on your microphone.

• The first series I produced took about three times as long as any of the following ones did, which is to be expected.  Plan for this if you are producing videos yourself, and make the smallest thing possible for your first project.

• A commercial product you hope to sell to as many people as possible is not the place to try to show off how great you think some video CODEC is!  Choose a format and CODEC that everyone can view, and stick to it.

• Now that I have my pipeline down and lots of practice, I can produce the standard short YouTube style video in very little time.  I'm looking at ways to leverage this in the future, which is a great new skill to have.

• Consider video tutorials as a way to pay yourself for doing R&D!  I wanted to work out the specifics of a few things in Playmaker and Unity3D, which was going to take a little time.  Combining those things with the body of knowledge I already had about game development has allowed me to earn some income during the early stages of starting up my game development company, and help a lot of other game developers along the way!

• Don't be stiff!  Next to the audio quality, the best choice I made was to keep these loose and conversational.  People have responded very well to this.  Also, my production time is a fraction of what it would be if I were trying to develop and read a detailed script, and then edit every little mistake.  Just make the mistakes during capture, address them and quickly move on.  Seeing you make a few mistakes and quickly recover gives a lot of information to the viewer that you didn't intend, because they are probably making those same mistakes too!  They can see you deal with them easily, and maybe even learn features of the software they didn't know where there.

I'd love to hear about what you make if you try this for yourself.  I wish you all the best!

How to Make Video Tutorials - Part 3 - Video Edit

• Part 1 - Preparation and Capture
• Part 2 - Audio Pass

Create the Extra Assets

For each series I've created an image to use at the beginning and end of each video.  You can use Photoshop, Pixelmator, or any program with layers.  I make one file with layers for each element so I can easily export images for this and any future series quickly from one location.  These plates will be used for every video in the series.

I wanted an audio stinger for the beginning and end, so I used CamelAudio's Alchemy synthesizer to quickly dial up a tone and record a techy filter-sweepy chord.  These are saved as 44.1 kHz AIFF files, authored and trimmed to fit; 4 seconds for the intro, 2 seconds for the end.

iMove Project Setup

I've heard a lot of complaining about the "magnetic timeline", but after using iMovie 11 for several projects I am hooked.  Putting together a project like this would have been much more time consuming and tedious with a traditional A/B roll video editor.

I start by opening iMovie and importing the captured video files.  I make sure to import the files for each video separately so they are easy to tell apart later. 

iMovie has a few options for importing.  I "copy" files rather than "move" them, and always leave the "Optimize Video" option unchecked.  If you do optimize video, iMovie will do a transcode of your file during import.  This can take a lot of time, and puts one more generation of unnecessary compression on your files.  Leaving this setting off will simply copy your file into the project as-is.  This is preferable since I've already saved my captures as QuickTime friendly H.264.

With all source files imported I make a new "project" for each video.  I name them appropriately now because the exported movies will automatically carry the name as well.  This step saves a lot of time and confusion later!  I drop in the begin/end plates and set them for 4sec/3sec durations, with no Ken Burns effect.  I also drop in the audio stingers.

Replace the Audio Track

In each project I drop the complete source video into the timeline.  I right+click on each video and select "Detach Audio".  Then I drag+drop the edited audio track I created during the audio pass.  I now have the original (purple) and new (green) audio tracks. 

Sometimes I get lucky and these two audio tracks line up, but more often than not they will be a little off.  If they are off it's an easy fix. 

I zoom in to maximum on the timeline and play the project from the start.  There is always some dead time at the beginning as I get going, so I let it roll until I reach the spot I want to keep.  At this point I will scrub forward/backward on the timeline to make sure I am at exactly the frame before the audio starts, then right click and choose "Split Track".  Repeat this for the video track, with the selector snapped to the audio track's split point.  Delete the first section of audio, then double click the remaining purple audio track to open the inspector.  Set the audio volume to zero.

I then play back the project again, this time listening for the beginning of the newer edited track.  When I reach the same starting location, I again scrub the play head to get the right frame, and split the clip.  Delete the front section of audio again, and click+drag the green audio file to match the start position of the purple audio file.  Bring the purple tracks audio volume back to 100% and play them both.  They should now be in sync.  (There will also be some phasing as the two tracks play on top of each other!)  I delete the original, purple audio track. 

Video Edit

It's free sailing from this point on!  I simply start playback from the beginning and watch the video.  Any time I reach a spot where I took a break, made a mistake, etc, I simply split the audio and video tracks at the beginning and end of that section, and delete them.  I make sure to turn off automatic transitions so I get a hard cut rather than a fade.  If I need a header transition between sections within one video, I drop in a text transition and a couple cross dissolves.

Export Final Video

For output of my final video I choose "Export using QuickTime" from the "Share" menu.  Use the "Options" button to choose video and audio settings.  I generally use H.264 compression set to "High" quality, with "Best / Multi-Pass" encoding.  Size = Current.  Sound is set to AAC, 44.1 kHz, 128 kbps.

If I am exporting directly to YouTube I will select "YouTube" from the "Share" menu, and choose the preset publishing size that matches my project size.

Part 4 - Publishing and Conclusions