Hello everybody, welcome to another edition of the Magic Show. This week we’re going to highlight a comment from the forum and talk about just what goes in to making the show.
[The following is a transcript of the show.]
S-s-s-something from the forums:
Risky writes: “By this time next year I expect at least a half dozen other YouTube writers to have propagated, and at least one of them is sure to be better than you in content and / or production value. By all means, take advantage of your uniqueness while it is unique and go for broke.”
I don’t know if you caught the delicious backhanded comment I got there, but I tell you it is much better with salt and pepper. Seriously.
The video production game is not one for the faint of heart. No, dare I say it is one of the most difficult things one can do. Now it is not that it is impossible, but rather, the difficulty comes in creating consistent video content.
A year or so ago, when StarCityGames.com still had unsolicited submissions, there was a little page that detailed what would make your article successful and get yourself published. A big one was “don’t write one big monster brilliant article and never write anything else.” With video, this is actually pretty easy. You’ve got an idea, you want to see it to fruition. You take weeks culling the footage or the script or the production materials and then you shoot or edit it together, and voila! You have yourself a video that is worthy of the Magic community’s time.
But alas, to create another video would take another month or so, and on it goes. Just how difficult is this stuff anyway? Well, let’s take a trip into video production.
To begin a Magic Show, there are two options: live or scripted. For the latter, you must (obviously) write a script. Now live shows, on the other hand, are not completely without written content. For those you must either write coverage yourself while filming the matches or prepare questions for interviewees. Either way, words have to hit paper at some point.
We’ll cover these separately until they converge in the encoding process.
For the scripted shows I create slides, 800×600 jpeg images. To figure out what I want on these slides, I read over the whole script and then write an Excel spreadsheet with a line for each slide I wish to create. I try to convey not only the mood but also sometimes an idea for a joke in this list. Now of course when I get around to making the actual slides the content can differ vastly. Sometimes I get taken by an idea and have to create another slide during editing to make up for my foolhardiness.
An average show, which is about 1,700 words and 10-12 minutes long, takes about 60 slides. Now each slide takes at least a few minutes to create, so you’re talking 3-4 hours to create them if you take 3-4 minutes per slide. So you can see where this type of commitment can wear on a human.
Next up, you take your script and you read it aloud several times. This is actually the easiest way to edit any paper, as you catch things with your ear that your eye can miss. This does not, unfortunately, help you with bad pronunciation. You have to figure that out in a very trial-by-fire basis from your readers or look up every word you’re not 100% on.
After you’re comfortable with the words coming out of your mouth, you record the whole thing. You can use any program for this, from the free and excellent Audacity to the Narration function within Camtasia Studio, which is what I use.
After the narration has been recorded, you import that and all of the created slides into Camtasia. You then line up the slides with the correct talking points, add some music, and you’re done!
Live shows, on the other hand, are time consuming because you must first import the video to digital, which you must do in real time, as there is no “quick transfer” from videotape.
A few hours later it’s done and you import it into your editing program. Again this is Camtasia Studio for me. You then begin the long and tedious process of editing. You follow along each match with the coverage you have, and create what are called “Callouts,” that is, text on your screen, whenever something happens. You can get selective here, as I don’t always highlight land drops or Sensei’s Divining Top activations, but you get the idea.
You can imagine that following along a 50-minute match play-by-play can take quite a while – and you would be correct. At least 4 hours of your life will flutter out the window when editing only 3 top 8 matches as you keep track of life totals, ensuring the callouts are matching the coverage, and so on.
After all of the play callouts have been made, you then trim the excess time between plays, bit by bit. This is what shrinks the video and makes things work in a “Cliff Notes” fashion.
At the end of both of these processes, there is the encoding. Now encoding is ridiculously annoying. I mean pull-your-hair-out and hope to die annoying. I’ve lost hours upon hours of my life encoding and re-encoding segments to get them to adequate size, which is less than 100MB. Now there are other services out there in the world, such as Google Video and others, which may not have that 100MB limit. But pretty much wherever you go, it is the accepted standard.
This is the reason I had to split up different shows into parts 1 and 2, such as the recent Planar Chaos prerelease video. Now with video, you can vary the quality to squeeze things as necessary, but codecs are very finicky. You’ll be getting beautiful images one minute, and splotchy messes the next. DivX encoding isn’t as fantastic as it’s made out to be, at least in my experience. And when I say I’ve tried a lot of configurations, let’s just call that an understatement of Floresian proportions.
Finally, there’s the uploading and the sending of final drafts to editors. It’s a warm, fuzzy feeling, and it’s also a feeling of great relief. You’re so happy that it’s over you don’t think of next week, you think of what a great weekend it will be and how fantastic it will be to just relax and sit back…
… then you remember, you have responsibilities and chores and a family and other things, and to start as soon as possible. Tuesday and Wednesday nights are absolutely filled with production work for the show, so you try and get the thing written by Monday night at the latest. And each minute you spend writing is another minute you don’t spend creating cool content.
But when it’s all done, and you get the feedback that I enjoy, well, damn, it makes it all worth it.
I hope that the “slide” method isn’t all that I can do or top-down match coverage with some interviews is as high as I can go. Someone mentioned, for example, covering some friendly games nearby, letting the audience soak up the culture of the game, as it is my favorite aspect. I try to talk and feature as many different people at prereleases because of this. Where kitchen tablers can sit next to PTQers who can sit next to World Champs. I find it fascinating.
This game and other CCGs like it are so fun and endearing because of the company we keep and the fun we have. And while this is a small pond in the myriad of activities one can involve oneself in over a lifetime, I’ve experienced for myself what CCGs can do for a person as a teenager, and over the years I’ve done my fair share of professional work on other games. I love CCG development and design, watching metagames grow and change. Watching pundits try and knock other pundits down, the name-calling and the egotistical rants. They’re all fun. They’re all cool. We’re all in on the same joke.
We are all here for the same thing. We’re here to play. So let’s do more of that.
And for God’s sake, let’s do it honestly so we can move on and simply cheer for the winners, rather than try and dutifully explain the way the other guy got screwed.
So until next week, when I do this all over again, this is Evan Erwin, tapping the cards so you don’t have to.
Evan “misterorange” Erwin
dubya dubya dubya dot misterorange dot com
eerwin +at+gmail +dot+ com
Written in the dead of night.
Music Credits:
Title: “One Crowded Hour” by Augie March (Thanks Ridic Hat)
Floresian Proportions: “Time” by Tom Waits