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Topic: I wanna start a Youtube channel and had a crazy idea to use Sphere. (Read 4285 times) previous topic - next topic

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  • Mooch
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I wanna start a Youtube channel and had a crazy idea to use Sphere.
I'm a writer. It's in my blood. If you cut me, words come out. I'm working on some books, but as you may have guessed, it takes kind of a really long time to write a book. Too long for my satisfaction. As such, I write a lot of little...articles, I guess. On anything and everything.

I've never published them anywhere because, well, I've simply never taken the time to start a blog or whatever. Besides, who reads blogs, other than of already-famous people? It'd be a total waste. I do wanna share some of this stuff, though.

I've been told I have a nice voice, and I already have all these things written, so I've been thinking lately, why not start up a Youtube channel? Daily 2~3 minute videos about all the stuff I write about might actually get some attention where a blog would not. And it'd be fun!

But video editing is a skill I lack, and it's kind of hard and time-consuming. All the big Youtube channels that post daily videos have professional editors, separate from the writers and/or on-screen personalities, who do nothing but put in eight hour workdays editing, and from what I hear tell, they just barely manage to keep pace. And individuals who do everything themselves (Artifexian and Xidnaf are two language/conworlding channels I love) take weeks if not months to make videos.

As I said, I just wanna do this for fun, and I already spend a lot of time writing. I'm definitely not looking to spend hours and hours a day doing videos the traditional way. So I've been thinking about it, and I had an idea, and I want you to tell me if it's crazy or not, doable or not, advisable or not, etc.

Basically, I thought about making a program in Sphere (just because I'm familiar enough with it and it'd be too much of a schlep to program anything from the ground up) to sort of live-create videos.

How it'd work is, it'd display a main screen with my own little avatar (I'm not filming myself, this would be all digital) sort of facing the screen and giving a face to my voice, and I'd have the Sphere "game" programmed to, whenever I press a given keyboard key, display an image in some animated way (spin on screen, pop up from the bottom, whatever) or play a video clip or a sound effect or what have you.

To actually make videos, I'd run some sort of screencapturing program, record myself with a microphone reading my articles, and press keys to show images or whatever as they came up. As opposed to doing all that editing in a video editing program. Just do it all in one pass.

I'd obviously still have to do some small amount of video editing, just to produce an MP4 to Youtube's specifications, and to cut out any bloopers and maybe synch/normalize the audio, but the point is, I wouldn't be tweening or doing visual effects or anything in the editor. There'd essentially be no "post-production" whatsoever, just a very minor amount of formatting.

The turnover rate for these videos could be very brisk for one random guy doing it all by himself. Without having to learn video editing or spend hours doing such, without having to stitch together video and audio, without having to add crawls or tween or interpolate or what have you. I could just program any new effects or transitions or whatever I want once, then call them up at the push of a key.

And it'd give my videos a very distinct look and feel, especially with the visual aesthetic I have in mind.

Is this feasible? Is this a really stupid idea? Reading all this, do you have the urge to talk me out of this? Because as you may have guessed, I'm a guy who has big ideas, but is terrible at determining their reasonability, or following through on them.

Lemme know what you think.

  • Radnen
  • [*][*][*][*][*]
  • Senior Staff
  • Wise Warrior
Re: I wanna start a Youtube channel and had a crazy idea to use Sphere.
Reply #1
I don't think it takes nearly as much video editing as you think it takes. My cousin is a YouTube streamer and she was doing well and she had no formal training in video editing. She kind of just picked it up. Yes, your first videos may not be good but, hey, you build up to it. Advice: make a "demo" video as your first video. Don't publish it, and then make it a second time and go from there (after recalibrating your process).

I too am an unpublished writer! :) I am currently writing several novels... But I'm mainly sticking to a main one right now. It's a King Arthur novel (They seem like a dime a dozen, I know) but I'm incorporating some interesting elements, including characters from the Welsh Mabinogion, which fits well with Arthurian legend in some narrative vein. I have even begun creating a new language that borrows from both normal English pronunciation and Welsh/Gaelic words (native Welsh words are unkind to our humble English attempts at pronunciation).

Another novel of mine takes place between the golden age of piracy and the Revolutionary War in an era known as the era of privateering. Most notable for the Seven Years War. The story follows one Adam Wright, a son of a carpenter who goes on a glorious adventure, but with privateers, slave traders, and the American Revolution. It revolves around a special (fictional) document that predates the Declaration of Independence and sets into motion the events of people in three continents (England, France and the American Colonies). Characters like Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin and Henrietta Howard make appearances and the fictional characters of Adam Wright molds these characters in small to large parts by merely being in a part of their history. This is put on hold now since I want it to be great, but I need to do a lot more research to make it the way I envision it. Unlike code, people are unwilling to read v2.4 of the story when I update it.

BTW, your idea sounds like you should just record using a slide show presentation tool.
If you use code to help you code you can use less code to code. Also, I have approximate knowledge of many things.

Sphere-sfml here
Sphere Studio editor here

  • Mooch
  • [*][*][*]
Re: I wanna start a Youtube channel and had a crazy idea to use Sphere.
Reply #2
Well, the main advantage to using a program to make the videos is doing it all in one pass. A screencast tool will record audio and video. I just sit down, record, and boom, done. If I do it the traditional way, I have to manually stitch together video and audio, and of course, hand-do all the visual effects individually for every video. I mean, I'm assuming good video editing software has extensible scripts, so I could automate to some extent, but...

My main concern is whether Sphere would be particularly unsuitable to this odd production method. If so, I might look elsewhere, even just to Game Maker. If not I might actually give this a go.

I am planning to do "dry run" videos. Record and not release, just to get a feel. That's good advice, though, thanks.

I could not just use a slideshow program, though. What I have in mind is much more...involved.

Okay, so basically, as you know, I design games for fun. Well, one thing I've liked doing since childhood is making mockups of huds and menus and pause screens and such. I started out with Mr. Sketch markers and paper, did a few things on computer later on (all of which were lost when my childhood computer fried ;_;). I'm no visual artist, but still, it's fun.

Basically, I want to present videos on my channel like they're a (retro) game. The intro would be a command-line interface typing "C:/channelname/videoname.exe" then jumping to the intro screen proper, with a chiptune theme song (nice and short, maybe three to five seconds), then going into the video proper.

The video is essentially a "game" world, with a character as my avatar who actually talks to the screen, and he'd use the game interface of his world during the course of the videos. Pull something out of a treasure chest, walk to another screen, pull down a menu, what have you.

That would be VERY meticulous and time-consuming to do via editing (I am no animator), but exponentially faster and easier if I actually did have a "game" that I was simply screencasting to make the videos.

The graphics are going to be a problem because as I said, I'm no visual artist. And finding a way to showcase images of actual real stuff in this retro game world without it looking out of place is a problem I have yet to think up a solution to. But I don't think anyone on Youtube is doing anything remotely like this, which has a lot of value in and of itself (if done well, of course).

I worry I'm being unrealistic. You've seen how well I've stuck through with my Sphere game projects before. Still. There's no harm in trying, and in programming something this ambitious, I might actually finally properly learn coding, lol.

Let's take writing talk to another topic, because that's awesome but something else entirely.