Guest post: Recording vidcasts/podcasts with appear.in
Many of our users have asked us about the possibilities for recording appear.in conversations. Unfortunately, the technology is not yet mature enough to allow us to offer this as a feature, but we saw that the guys behind the vidcast Loading Savestate had done a great production job, and asked them to write up their experiences. Â
Here is a guest blog post by Chris Edwards from Savestate, which hopefully can serve as inspiration and provide useful tips for how to make your own podcast/vidcast:
Hi there! My name is Chris Edwards and I am the founder of Savestate. You might be wondering what Savestate is, or more importantly why Iâm here writing a blog article for the fantastic guys at appear.in? To put it simply, myself and another Chris created Savestate as a means to promote games released by Indie Developers. We write news articles, review/preview articles, as well as produce a myriad of video content to help promote these developers and their games. We invite developers, media personalities and everyone else to chat with us in the hopes of being able to spread the word about games that may not get much attention to the people who matter the most, the gamers!
So what does ANY of this have to do with appear.in you ask? Well as part of the above we also do a weekly Podcast/Vidcast that we release every Friday in which we discuss the previous weeks topics on gaming and games culture and give shout outs to upcoming titles. Where appear.in comes into play here is that we utilise this awesome video communication system to not only get together and chat, but also to record and release our Vidcasts online. For this reason weâve been informed that there may be other people out there who want to record Vidcasts via appear.in as well, so the point of this post is to try and help you out with getting yourself ready to use appear.in for your very own content.
So weâll start with the nuts and bolts of how we produce and record our Vidcasts. The very first thing we did was obviously set up and claim a room to prevent unauthorised access by those we donât want to making an appearance on our cast! Once we had the room set up we obviously then get our participants to access the room with their camera and microphone active, weâve had guests from other parts of Australia and even overseas and the video quality of appear.in has been flawless every time, which is perfect for what we do. Each week myself and the other Chris are generally present and we usually invite one or two others to join us (no more than 4 for our particular setup) for our 30~ minute weekly cast.
So does gear matter? Yes and no. Griff and myself both use a RODE NT-USB Microphone that we specifically purchased for Podcasting and have found the sound quality to be top notch. We also both use the Logitech C920 1080p Webcam for our video feed which is also fairly flawless. That being said, our guests donât always have professional equipment, thatâs not an issue that weâve found with appear.in. Even lower quality microphones and cameras still come through clearly and whilst some video feeds may be a little grainy, that is 100% the quality of the camera.
So thatâs the gear that we use, but how do we âactuallyâ record it? Well, as Griff and I both do a lot of recording of game footage, we both own an AverMedia Live Gamer HD PCIe Capture Card. Because of this we are not only able to capture game footage, but we can also record our screens, so we simply get our appear.in session ready with everyone hit F11 to make the window Fullscreen and then start recording our screen. Our particular setup records both the Video Footage as well as all audio, with the recorderâs Audio as a separate .mp3 file. There are MANY ways to record Audio/Video using Appear.in however this is the way weâve set ours up. So after the recording is finished and weâve got our raw output files there we of course need to edit the footage, add our Intro and Outro and apply an overlay to really make it our own. Both Griff and I have a subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud giving us full access to the Creative Cloud suite that we use for this purpose. We created a special Intro and Outro to add to our footage in Adobe After Effects and use Adobe Photoshop to create our transparent overlays. We put this all together in Adobe Premiere Pro to make sure the audio and video sync up, that everything looks great and render it out to upload!
It can take a while to get the hang of using the above software, however there are hundreds of video tutorials out and about that can easily help with learning how to do specific things. I, personally, had never used Adobe After Effects before and with the help of some tutorials came up with our Intro and Outro sequence in about 3 days. I learnt how to do keyframing within Premiere Pro in order to make sure everything was synchronised correctly and that we have a nice end result to upload to YouTube. This is merely the basics of what we do, I could write multiple pages on every step of the process from start to finish, but perhaps Iâll leave that for another time.
There have, of course, been challenges with setting this up. We needed to find a layout that was suitable for us and of course the viewer. Previously we used Google Hangouts, but we found that the video quality just wasnât up to scratch, and whilst the facility for full screen video was handy, the poor quality just made it look out of place. So, in storms appear.in and (so far) it has managed to fit our needs perfectly. Whilst there is no facility for automatic fullscreen video switching (depending on who is speaking) it did give us the opportunity to play with other layouts that look and feel right. If youâd like to check out our content we put up our weekly Podcast/Vidcast recorded here on appear.in over at Loading Savestate, or up on our YouTube channel and audio versions via iTunes.
We also have our other content there to check out! If youâve got any questions, suggestions or perhaps would like to see some detailed guides on how to use appear.in for your own vidcast please feel free to let us know via email or our social media platforms and if there is enough interest I shall look into creating a Video and Written guide to help out! A very special thanks for the entire team at appear.in for not only creating an amazing video platform, but also giving us the opportunity to write this post to perhaps help out some other people interested in starting up their own vidcast using appear.in!