videos Neoseeker's first video review: Borderlands 2

It was a heck of a journey putting this together but I hope you guys like it. Have to thank Get Games for helping us secure a copy for this review, before we caught word of it I was honestly looking over there because they had it on sale well after Steam pulled their discount on it, happy coincidence that we got help from their team to turn this out.

If you guys have questions or anything, feel free to shoot them over.

It sounded like you were out of breath half the time. And if you added a little bit of emotion to your voice it would make the review much more believable. Its much better to have a reviewer who sounds like they care about the topic. I normally don't listen to reviews on games as they tend to be rather generic. Its much better to get info from a community that you know cares about the game. So if you add more of a personal tone but keep the content professional the video reviews could be much more successful.

I must say the review it self, on the other hand, was good and was similar to my thoughts on the game.

I third the motion for emotion. Monotone voice = indifferent/jaded/computermasqueradingashuman.

Also, not putting points into skills when you get them (I saw a 2 in one scene, meaning you had two points backed up which looks bad, like you don't know what you're doing IMO).

Also, what's with the random changes in aspect ratio? It sounds like there are two different people contributing the voice (changes depending on aspect ratio)?

Hi Shadow of Death - Thanks for the feedback on the footage, the points thing is because I was using that as a primary character and often I do debate where I'm putting my points. In the future I'll avoid any instances like that, going so far to say I don't know what I'm doing is a bit of a stretch IMO, there are people who don't just leap all the time.

The aspect ratio changes are a limit of the Borderlands 2 movie files. To help reduce jaggies the game was recorded at 3900x1920 and scaled down to 1080. Given Portrait vs Landscape I favored Portrait mode as it wouldn't be nearly as extreme of an AR shift.

Rory is our only VA for the video, not sure about the audio shift being that bad to sound like two people, toward the end there's a moment where his pitch is slightly higher entering one of the final sections but I assure you it's one person the whole time.

Nagare In the future we'll have some improved software and features to help accomplish the task, unfortunately my MP recordings were pretty poor and showed a significant frame rate shift that made them unusable. I do regret having to omit those but it was a quality control call over all else. Fortunately we've found a new recording software that shouldn't deliver such hard recording penalties and will enable us to put out even better detail in the future.

Vicarious thanks for the feedback on the intro, I wanted us to have something that was solid and didn't feel rushed or overly 2D. I might experiment with it slightly in the future but nothing too overkill.

Appreciate the feedback, it's a learning experience, fortunately on tech side we've come across a lot of solutions for future cases like recording quality. At this point we'll probably focus strictly on PC stuff but if we can pick up some momentum with companies we might be able to swing another copy for video recording and we also need an HD unit to record on haha.

One step at a time though.

quote Shadow of Death

I make a habit of saving up my money in RPGs, using mediocre equipment for extended periods of time so I can afford getting a huge upgrade

^ This, I'm pretty cheap in games about spending points / money or etc unless it's to blow up more stuff >> BL2 is no exception, I do get the idea of presenting perfection so to speak though. It's a bit awkward just throwing a character I haven't used that much in even co-op to the world at large, future videos will be watched for that or I'll make a spare save if anything just for production vs personal.

We're in different states for all of this production, I believe bluexy made the effort in one session to make sure it sounded consistent vs different times of the day or states of mind. I edited the video together based on his responses and general highlight points to match up based on pre-recorded segments I indexed.

We're using *bleep* and we're investing in *bleep* but don't let anyone else know about those otherwise our secrets are bloown D:

I was using FRAPS to record with but we'll be using DXtory in the future.

I'm currently going through a pretty long list of recorders, odd enough a lot of them have the same base hardware so it's more down to the software and quality over all else. Might look into a dedicated SSD for recording though as they've come down a lot in the past months. 120gb for about 50-60 if you shop carefully. If the only purpose is recording I think it would probably pay itself off over time.

I've had friends use DXtory with pretty much 0-1fps loss when recording, plus when FRAPS falls behind on tech updates DXtory is usually current or not impacted. Given the impressions and video results I do have a lot of faith that we'll see better results overall with it. Given the program was Japanese originally and westerners started buying it anyway he made that page to help fit both markets so I honestly wouldn't grade him on that.

Generally the clips aren't long sessions when I record, it's easier to have a storyboard idea ahead of time and capture from there once you get your feet wet. Instead I have a series of 2-5min clips that get segmented down from there. On top of that I only run for short sessions to evaluate the quality and usefulness of the captures, then I take a very short break and compress them into h.264 with ATI xcode. Saves a ton of space because I only had about 30GB free for shooting this whole thing lol.

Overall it's not a crazy process but I could see needing to tweak around with storage options when it comes to console recording, right now we need to focus on what games we will use for video reviews and securing those copies. In this case it was luck that GetGames was able to help us out in making the review happen. Unfortunately I don't think it would be fair to keep leaning on them unless I changed it and added a brought to you by GetGames logo or something in there.

VeGiTAX2 - I'll try it out then, even if it does cost a bit more. Would be great to have less overhead required, even if FRAPS has improved a fair bit in the last year or so (they had a major update that reduced CPU overhead).