I had plenty of problems with my video project too, though these were largely of my own doing. The subject wasn’t a particular problem – I’d written a review of the same game already – although speaking to camera was certainly a new experience; the sun pouring through the windows in front of me didn’t help. No, it was mostly the fact that I didn’t actually use Final Cut Pro to edit the piece, and that I left the majority of this editing until the last day, that proved my undoing. Shooting the review was a delicate process involving stacks of DVDs for a tripod, and throwing some posters up on the wall, while I stuttered through memories of the game and the reviewing process over a couple of hours. But editing it took far more time and effort than I had anticipated.

The only Mac I could find to use was in one of the journalism rooms – this after some time searching elsewhere – and when I got there, I found out that neither FCP nor Quicktime would recognise the video files from a memory stick, rather than directly from the camera. This and the horrible Mac mice convinced me to go home and attempt to use Sony Vegas Pro 11, which I already had installed, but had never attempted to use before. The general UI was fairly similar to FCP, but the interface wasn’t anywhere near as intuitive, and I spent a significant amount of time looking at plodding video tutorials online to figure out basic editing techniques. It then turned out that all of my video had recorded with horrible static, so I tried to remove that by opening the audio through Vegas in Audacity, but the result sounded too muffled, and I soon gave up trying and replaced the audio with the old versions.

Having not scripted any of the review, I’d also stopped and started a lot, as well as getting up and stopping the recording on a frequent basis, so I had to edit the footage into a usable string of clips before I could do anything else. The process of cutting this down (from 12 minutes) was a painful afterthought, as I could only work out how to delete individual segments. This meant I had to play through the whole thing and find bits which I could remove, while still making sure that the whole thing flowed and made sense. And having added the game footage and soundtrack music on top already, much of it got shifted about without my knowledge, meaning that the breaks were awkward in places and time gaps varied. The clearest example of this is at the beginning, where the gameplay video was meant to continue for a few seconds after my voiceover, with the audio raised; instead it just goes straight into me talking about the game. I had also wanted to tailor the footage (and possibly stills) to what I was saying, but this seemed too great a hurdle to even attempt.

Aside from being overly long and not particularly well cut together, though, I think it turned out ok. I feel like the basic structure, ideas and content were passable at least. I could have done a much neater job of editing it, but time and the software got the better of me, for which only I am to blame.

My audio project proved to be enjoyable, but problematic. I couldn’t get in touch with my partner until less than two days before the deadline, so the first piece especially was cobbled together. I didn’t have time to run the idea past Mark first, so the idea wasn’t originally ‘newsworthy’ in any sense; I essentially had to go hunting for stories which would provide a good lead into the piece after I’d recorded it.

I got a couple of recordings from people I didn’t know, but had to pad it out with several from people that I did, again due to the time constraints. Thankfully the editing was ultimately a simple process, and the resulting piece was relatively enjoyable, thanks in part to a brilliant coincidence, where someone talked down one game, and another (which I placed immediately after) chose it as their childhood favourite. I made the mistake of interjecting in one of the recordings, but other than that there weren’t any issues with actually producing the piece.

The podcast wasn’t as much of a problem because I had planned it in advance, and knew the people involved, so I only had to find news stories to cover within it. I had done a few podcasts with them and others for a modest games blog before, so the procedure was well established: using Skype to talk, individually recording our audio and then sending the files to me to edit. This made it more difficult to edit than if it was one file, but it wasn’t a major problem, just time consuming. The main issue was cutting the length down. We ended up talking for almost half an hour, and we had planned to cover more topics (we only ended up talking about one: the BAFTA nominations).

To complicate things, one of the participants’ audio had significant static, meaning that I had to manually edit out all of the gaps between him talking. There was also the obvious issue of lining up the three tracks so that the whole podcast flowed properly and made sense, and occasionally I had to delete  background noise etc. because silencing or amplifying it down sounded odd. I was pretty pleased with the end result though, although it was a shame that I had to edit out many of the more interesting bits of the discussion, simply because they wouldn’t have made sense without lengthy preceding sections for context.

Audio production certainly isn’t my forte, and I found it to be a significant challenge at times, but it was ultimately fairly enjoyable. I’m happy with what I produced, although it could admittedly have been more interesting and more newsworthy.

 

Slew of problems with this one. I couldn’t get a Mac to use for any length of time, so I ended up using Sony Vegas Pro 11 for the whole thing instead…after learning how to work it. I wanted to use video which matched what I was saying and images in places, as well as cutting the whole thing together more smoothly, but I ran out of time. The mic quality was also horrendous and audio editing within Vegas was tricky, so volume and clarity vary enormously. I’d also already cut it down from 12 minutes, but because it only seemed to let me delete parts, I couldn’t get rid of much more without it making no sense.

On the plus side, the gameplay video breaks things up pretty nicely, and I managed to remove the audio track and add in several from the original soundtrack of the game, giving it a certain cohesion and covering the static slightly.

Anyway, yeah! Commander Shepard’s final outing sees him (or her) realising the worst possible scenario outlined over the previous two games – saving the galaxy from the destructive force of the god-like synthetic Reapers. But with  developer Bioware’s recent efforts coming in for scathing criticism, could they deliver on the deservedly enormous hype?

Here’s a rough, demo news piece we put together earlier. It doesn’t actually, err, feature me at all – you can credit Robbie for the handsome face.

If I haven’t been posting recently – which may or may not be the case – it’s because I have a shiny new gig. Thankfully there’s some stuff that even they won’t let me hawk, including these two wonderful audio pieces.

Much like Hollywood, the games industry seems to be suffering from a dearth of news ideas at the moment, with recent, sometimes angrily-received reboots of old-timey classics Syndicate, X-COM, and for about the hundredth time, Lara Croft. To that effect, I asked a group of people what their favourite childhood game was that hasn’t yet been tainted by the brush.

Arriving as HD remakes in the near future are:

 

But that was only the prelude to a great tide of ear-exploding awesomeness. Behold, two lovingly edited versions of a podcast I did with Zack Goodrich and Tom Russell on the subject of…the recent games BAFTA nominations. Enjoy.

Short version

Super cool long version

 

What about you guys? What was your favourite childhood game, and do you agree with our criticisms of the right honourable academy’s nominations?

For a while it looked like I really wasn’t going to get anything game related. Plans A and B failed, and I sent some frantic messages while really seriously hoping that I wasn’t going to end up with my desperate Plan Z.

Thankfully, I had a saviour amongst the ranks of TheSixthAxis, in the form of games writer and podcaster Josh Hood, who it turns out is writing a series of articles ready for the Playstation Vita’s UK launch. Handily, this was exactly what I wanted to talk about.

Apologies for the audio quality on my end; my audio recorder was AWOL and Audacity typically finicky.

Playstation Vita interview

 

Edit: and here’s the super-short version, because I had to. It does also have some extra edits that I could factor into the longer one…if I could be bothered.

Because there isn’t a cat in hell’s chance of me getting a game or tech-related interview for my next piece, here’s an article on my personal blog to keep you going.

I put it together five months ago to go in an online magazine, but that fell through. I’ve just had to change the whole intro to compensate, so hopefully it doesn’t jar too much. It’s also a little bit sweary, in case that irks you.

I haven’t read it to make sure it’s still relevant, but it was totally awesome when I wrote it.

The Guardian co-produces and collates a series of insightful ‘Eurospective’ articles, in conjunction with five of the continent’s most respected newspapers, and I get stuck reviewing the interface. Such is my blogligation.

(I know it doesn’t work, just run with it.)

guardian.co.uk

The Guardian are pretty adept at using multimedia in their features anyway, so being a pan-European project (and aiming squarely at the zeitgeist) simply ups the stakes.

Indeed, some of the site’s subsections are recruited to provide articles and information. The Guardian’s ‘Datablog’ has produced an excellent Europe: Who lives where infographic and a companion article for the cause, which provide some easily accessible, though simplistically rendered insight.

The numerous commissioned or outsourced articles, dedicated to debunking national stereotypes and painting foreign portraits of European leaders, are interesting but Spartan affairs. You’re drawn in by the range of caricatures, which certainly help to cement a mental image of someone you probably hadn’t heard of until now, but the uniformly short pieces are otherwise found lacking.

Even a video or audio snippet would have injected a little more life. They purport to be educational snapshots, but without a real picture of the person (indeed, perhaps without the misinformation they address), there’s little to ground them in a political reality.

But dotted amongst this slew of opinions are some real gems. An interactive series of interviews centred around age and the economic crisis is lively, interesting…and by the look of its Twitter and Facebook shares, sadly overlooked. And the centrepiece How European Are You quiz featurette, bordered by the many faces of Fringe and Quiff, is a good bit of fun.

For something that clearly aimed to source opinions from across the continent though, and perhaps provoke something of a national debate (online, rather than in the wider established media), the project doesn’t seem to have been a resounding success.

A lot of the content could have had more depth, sure, but it deserved more front page time than I ever saw granted.

It may be too soon to hail it as the saviour of the UK games industry, but it’s a cacophony of praise that I’m gonna chime right in with. Because ridiculous as the hype has been, the Raspberry Pi is looking – sorry - tastier by the day.

It turns out that $25 of Cambridge engineering will actually double the performance of the iPhone 4S. That’s no mean feat, especially considering its relatively meagre 700MHz processor, less than most smartphones on the market.

The key is the extraordinarily powerful mobile graphics chip. A device designed for tinkering and introductory programming skills not only completely destroys NVIDIA’s market-dominant Tegra 2, but also comfortably outputs video at 30 frames-per-second, 1080p HD.

As a wise man once said:

Let’s hope that quality construction can keep up with the inevitable demand.

Pun completely intended.

ggg

- The controller is still better

- The Witcher 2 is coming out in April

ggg
ggg
That’s all I’ve got for the moment. It’s a work in progress. Just, umm, don’t tell them this.