GPLP: Cursed Crusade

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Re: GPLP: Cursed Crusade

Postby Graham » 12 May 2012, 11:06

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Re: GPLP: Cursed Crusade

Postby Jaebird » 12 May 2012, 11:13

Graham wrote:New episode online!

I shall celebrate this occasion by doing the Dance of Joy:

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Re: GPLP: Cursed Crusade

Postby JayBlanc » 12 May 2012, 11:26

Ah, the lost middle ages technology of the high explosive crossbow bolt.
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Re: GPLP: Cursed Crusade

Postby Jaebird » 12 May 2012, 11:50

I remember playing the demo for this game, and ended up dual wielding maces.

Edit: Can anyone else hear Brad over the game?
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Re: GPLP: Cursed Crusade

Postby DPLP » 12 May 2012, 12:19

1. Thank you for doing LPs! I watch pretty much all of your stuff and the LPs are high on the list of favorites.
2. You guys = interesting to listen to. The game, not so much. So please add another vote for a remix to raise the mic levels a bit?
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Re: GPLP: Cursed Crusade

Postby Undersol » 12 May 2012, 12:38

I'm liking this one. Very fun to be along for the ride and enjoy the skullbashy-facestabby fun and to poke fun at the random bits that stand out as weird.

Jaebird wrote:Edit: Can anyone else hear Brad over the game?

I can hear him fine with headphones. If you aren't using some, I would suggest it.
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Re: GPLP: Cursed Crusade

Postby Jaebird » 12 May 2012, 12:47

Undersol wrote:I'm liking this one. Very fun to be along for the ride and enjoy the skullbashy-facestabby fun and to poke fun at the random bits that stand out as weird.

Jaebird wrote:Edit: Can anyone else hear Brad over the game?

I can hear him fine with headphones. If you aren't using some, I would suggest it.

I somehow doubt it, because Brad and the game seem to sound like they're on the same level. Then again, he may not be speaking up, which is a problem I have with everyone everywhere.
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Re: GPLP: Cursed Crusade

Postby Geoff_B » 12 May 2012, 13:13

Jaebird wrote:
Graham wrote:New episode online!

I shall celebrate this occasion by doing the Dance of Joy:

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Dance of Joy you say?
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Re: GPLP: Cursed Crusade

Postby General Michi » 12 May 2012, 13:53

I like to think that the spear kill cam is really just him saying
"Oh, hey you've got something up your nose, let me get that *thrust* nope, it's a little further back *further thrust* oops, pushed it back into your brain *brain thrust* theeeeere we go, got it, let me just pull it out now *pulls out slowly* *guy falls down dead* huh, I guess he's sleepy *turns to someone else* Oh, hey!"
We put the brick on the accelerator.

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Re: GPLP: Cursed Crusade

Postby Kapol » 12 May 2012, 14:56

Near the end, I couldn't hear anyone over the actual game. I would catch bits and pieces but nothing really substantial. It might be the speaks I'm using (they're garbage). I'll try rewatching with headphones and see if that helps.
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Re: GPLP: Cursed Crusade

Postby Trevor » 12 May 2012, 15:08

It's kinda hard to tell who's supposed to be the good guys this time around. Because during the siege on this castle, it didn't really seem like your characters were.

So that's realistic then.
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Re: GPLP: Cursed Crusade

Postby Graham » 12 May 2012, 15:16

It seems like Brad should've been sitting closer to the mic. Sorry!
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Re: GPLP: Cursed Crusade

Postby Kapol » 12 May 2012, 15:48

How are the GPLP's currently recorded anyways? Using a program that records the voices, gameplay, and gameplay audio into one primary file or using one program to capture the spoken audio while having another capture the gameplay and game's audio? The latter seems like it would allow you to adjust the audio levels to get a better balence after it's finished (since re-recording is impossible, especially with Brad gone).
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Re: GPLP: Cursed Crusade

Postby Jaebird » 12 May 2012, 16:51

Graham wrote:It seems like Brad should've been sitting closer to the mic. Sorry!

No worries, man. I'm not one to complain about free entertainment AND education.
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Re: GPLP: Cursed Crusade

Postby Graham » 13 May 2012, 00:34

Kapol wrote:How are the GPLP's currently recorded anyways? Using a program that records the voices, gameplay, and gameplay audio into one primary file or using one program to capture the spoken audio while having another capture the gameplay and game's audio? The latter seems like it would allow you to adjust the audio levels to get a better balence after it's finished (since re-recording is impossible, especially with Brad gone).
We've tried both, and the problem with recording in a way that allows post-record level adjustment is the time it takes to re-encode the videos REALLY slows down our output.

Compare Dante's Inferno's release schedule (and I use the term loosely) to X-Men's. We were able to get X-Men out so much more quickly because we didn't have to mess around with post-processing.
Sadly it also means we have no option to do post-processing.
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Re: GPLP: Cursed Crusade

Postby Dave-O_Boy » 13 May 2012, 07:22

I say this as an audio guy, it's always better to have everything recorded separately then mix them together later. Then you can mix, pan, edit, compress, what-have-you to fix any issues (like a quiet Brad). I know it takes longer to get out, but your fans would hopefully appreciate the bump in quality that it should give the videos (or more precisely the audio of the videos).
Even just having the mics and the game audio as separate files should be a enough. Then just doing a little compression, maybe lower the game audio 3dB. Nothing super fancy. It seems like the room that you record in doesn't have a particularly terrible sound. It's not overly reverby, background noise, or any weird bass build up. At least not that I can tell. It is a bit "roomy" but that's most likely due to the distant you guys are from the mics. Some stuff like that can be masked by the game audio however.

If you really want to minimize the amount of post work you need to do then try to make the recording room as dead and sound proof as possible and maybe record with either two room mic (these can be shot gun or cardioid) arranged in a sort of X aimed at you guys, or if you can mic each person separately and try not to move around so much. If you do that first option it's advisable to use two of the same make and model that you bought together. Otherwise you may encounter slight variations in the signal that could end up causing some phasing issues or other audio artifacts. But! You might not even be able to notice those unless you know what to listen for.

Judging from the recorder that you use for the podcast (which looks like a Zoom H4n portable recorder) you can plug in addition mics into its XRL ports on the back and actually make it into a little 4 track recorder (or so I hear, I've never actually used one.) What you can do with that is place the device in the center of the group with it's on board mics facing you guys, then have two mics on opposite sides aimed more at the outer members. This is assuming you all site on the same couch or in a row next to one another. Basically the outer mics would act sort of like a safety net to capture any dialogue that was said slightly outside of the area of the center mics. Of course this would require addition time spent making everything level before recording.
Also, if you don't already, have at least one person wear headphones that contain the mix of the mics and game audio.

Sorry for going all "Audio guy who things video guys don't know anything about audio" especially since that could easily be reversed if I was the one recording video, but I'm just trying to be helpful. Poor audio seems to be the number one problem with web series. There are pretty user-friendly video capture devices and programs out there, but capturing great or even decent sounding audio is not something that can be so easily simplified.
All that said, I actually didn't have any major complaints about the audio of either episodes and could make everything out fine.
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Re: GPLP: Cursed Crusade

Postby Vigafre » 13 May 2012, 07:42

I don't think the rendering time is going to lower much with a better audio setup. An HD video that's 20+ minutes takes hella long to render.
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Re: GPLP: Cursed Crusade

Postby ecks » 13 May 2012, 09:42

Firstly - enjoying the new series (as usual), and although I wouldn't complain if the game volume was down a titch in places and Brad a bit louder in places 99% of it was fine for me.

But why would they need to render/encode video? It depends on the container, but I'm pretty sure with mp4 (which I'm guessing is what is used) and definitely mkv and avi you can deal with the audio and video tracks independently.
So you would demux the audio, mix in the other tracks, encode the mixed audio and then remux it with the video - never actually needing to touch the video data. Of course audio mixing pretty much requires listening to the whole thing again (at least), which isn't exactly fast. Also, this is assuming your capture equipment doesn't output some obnoxious format.

Again though, not necessarily saying this needs to be done, just not sure why the video is a factor.
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Re: GPLP: Cursed Crusade

Postby Dave-O_Boy » 13 May 2012, 10:48

Vigafre wrote:I don't think the rendering time is going to lower much with a better audio setup. An HD video that's 20+ minutes takes hella long to render.


It won't. You misunderstood me. The only way that it will lessen the time is if they are putting the audio and video together while recording. Basically getting everything decent and well balance before you record. Unfortunately there is no absolute way to ensure that and you have to figure out the optimal settings and positions for the room your in. What makes it harder is that this will change slightly over the course of the year due to temperature, weather, and heating/AC. Generally you want the noise floor low and the level as loud as you can without peaking.

Of course cleaning up audio is actually really easy and you can get pretty surprisingly good sounding stuff from using free programs like Audacity. But I can understand not wanting to spend the extra bunch of hours that it mixing and mastering the audio, getting it synced with the video, then exporting the video, making sure everything is gravy (technical term), then uploading it. Exporting and uploading can easily be 2 to 3 hours, and its' not like they don't have all that other work to do.
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Re: GPLP: Cursed Crusade

Postby Graham » 13 May 2012, 16:22

Okay, I don't have time today to get into it, but I was talking about our specific, hack-job recording/processing setup.
For the tech geeks like myself, I'll go into full breakdown later, but trust me that this is the best option right now, because we simply don't have time to do it the other way.
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Re: GPLP: Cursed Crusade

Postby Jaebird » 13 May 2012, 16:36

Record everything on vinyl :P
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Re: GPLP: Cursed Crusade

Postby Kapol » 13 May 2012, 17:09

Graham wrote:We've tried both, and the problem with recording in a way that allows post-record level adjustment is the time it takes to re-encode the videos REALLY slows down our output.

Compare Dante's Inferno's release schedule (and I use the term loosely) to X-Men's. We were able to get X-Men out so much more quickly because we didn't have to mess around with post-processing.
Sadly it also means we have no option to do post-processing.


I hadn't considered that. Suppose it makes sense. I've never really done any of that type of capture myself, so I wasn't sure to be honest. While it does lead to having annoying problems, it seems like it's much easier to do it the current way in any case. I'd rather not have the whole thing become a big ordeal where you have to set up and record a different way, since that'd likely take the fun out of it.

In any case, thanks for letting me know. I had been curious about the details and that at least helps me get a bit of the bigger picture. :)
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Re: GPLP: Cursed Crusade

Postby Vigafre » 13 May 2012, 21:24

@Dave: Ah, I see. My bad.
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Re: GPLP: Cursed Crusade

Postby vxicepickxv » 14 May 2012, 13:35

Graham wrote:Okay, I don't have time today to get into it, but I was talking about our specific, hack-job recording/processing setup.
For the tech geeks like myself, I'll go into full breakdown later, but trust me that this is the best option right now, because we simply don't have time to do it the other way.
I'll see if I can't find a few tips and tricks for cleaning things up for streamlining processing, such as setting specific dB inputs and outputs(Probably around -96 for the system and -88 for the headsets), and fine tuning signal/noise ratios for both the microphones and for the game systems.

I've noticed that game systems don't have single streamlined audio at the same volume, and it's even worse when you consider that each development team changes their actual audio settings between games, even if it's the same studio. The audio out for ME2 on 360 and PS3 with the same sound system, cable, and settings is a difference of about 10 dB(actual air medium dB, not sound production dB).

As for the non-tech geek stuff, I'm pretty sure that dual maces would have led to silly named stuff like skullcrusher and bonesmasher comobos.
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Re: GPLP: Cursed Crusade

Postby Yeti » 15 May 2012, 00:09

Has anyone else noticed that the guy who voiced the Spanish soldier also does the voice for the main character in Just Cause 2?

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