The Making of a Walkthrough – Part 3

Next it's time to play all 12 video segments of my 2 hour Borderlands run in my video editor to 'proofread' them, as it were, to edit out all the coughs, sneezes and occasional mumblemouthing. And I also like to add some production value, e.g., my special 'Major Slack Videos' Peewee intro which I add to the beginning of each run and also apply audio and video filters and some other bells and whistles to make a Slack video, well, a Slack video.

All of this playback and editing takes about 4 hours —sometimes more depending on how fancy-schmancy I want the video to be.. :o)

So what are we up to now?

Let's do the math:

• 6 hours practice session/initial recording
• 1 hour assembling and repartitioning raw .avi files into 10 minute segments
• 4 hours playing the segments, editing out mistakes and adding special stuff (Major Slack intro, etc).

TOTAL: 11 hours actual work.

STILL not done.

Now we have to...

Get the Videos Ready for Youtube

Now that all the 10 minute video segments are all polished up and ready to go, they have to be compressed into a file format and file size compatible with Youtube. This compression process is called 'rendering' and since I like my videos to have the highest quality possible, it takes about an hour to render each 10 minute video.

Yep, that's right..

It takes 12 hours alone just to render a two hour long gameplay session into a high quality video format compatible with Youtube. Fortunately, this rendering process can be done on a spare computer and I don't have to sit there and watch it or anything. I just set a video segment to render and come back an hour later and check to see if it's done. So I can do other stuff, e.g., do other work on another computer while the rendering is going on. For example, I'm rendering a video at this very moment while I'm writing this article. (With so much rendering to do, my spare computer is as busy as a rented donkey, lemme tell ya... LOL...)

So that's...

1 hour x 12 videos = 12 HOURS JUST TO RENDER THE VIDEOS.

STILL not done.

Now it's time to think about...

Going Live

Okay so now all 12 videos in my two hour Borderlands run are finally ready to upload to Youtube. Each video averages about 500 MB, an acceptable file size.

So how long does it take to upload a 500 MB video file?

Probably about a minute or two, right?

(*BUZZER SOUND*)

WRONG.

I have the extreme high speed internet package with my local ISP which means super high upload speeds of around 900 Kbps. But the fact of the matter is it still takes about 1½ hours to upload a 500 MB video. So if I want to upload 2 videos per day, that's 3 HOURS A DAY JUST TO DO THE UPLOADING. Now once again, uploading can be done on one computer while you do some other work on another. (You can even work on the same computer but I don't recommend it.)

And how long to upload the entire 2 hour run? Well, do the math...

1½ hours x 12 videos = 18 HOURS JUST TO UPLOAD THE VIDEOS.

Let's Tally Up the Damage

So all totalled, in order to produce a single 2 hour Borderlands run, it takes 11 hours of actual work and 30 hours of computer-running-in-the-background work.

And that's not even counting the time it takes to write up the video descriptions, create video responses for easy navigation from one video to the next and set the videos in playlists. And this is not to mention all the time it takes to play the game through a couple of times in order to learn it well enough to do a walkthrough in the first place.

So now you know what it takes to produce my Borderlands walkthrough or any of my video game walkthroughs for that matter.

And hopefully some of you now have the answer to your questions about why I only (*cough* *choke*) upload 2 videos a day.

And can you imagine? After all that work, some people still have the nerve to post comments on my videos complaining about one thing or another. And I have to take it all in stride because the lengthy description you just read doesn't fit into a Youtube comment reply box.

:o)

So to you, friend, I thank you very much for taking the time to read this.

~ Major Slack - January 15th, 2010