Making Videos
I made my first OpenSimulator video recently using OBS, to explain how my scripts for cross-region, cross-grid object communications was both powerful and very simple to use. Since then, I've been making test videos trying to improve the output.
First off, I had to get rid of the hum that accompanied whichever microphone I used, or which ports they were plugged into. I realised in the end that it was an electrical shielding failure. My computer is a brick, so although a powerful computer, everything is packed into a small box. Any analog audio circuit is going to suffer in these conditions.
I resolved this in the end by doing what I've since been told many other people do - I used my phone as a wifi microphone. I tried various bits of software in attempt to get this working, but eventually found some software that did the trick very simply.
The next problem I wanted to tackle was cropping the video to remove the Firestorm window's title bar, menu bar and tool bar. Enter Handbrake. The cropping tool is ridiculously easy to use.
I also had a problem with the video once it was uploaded to YouTube. It seems that for non-subscription members like me, they strip out the first key frame in the video, so it remains blurry for a while. That is so not cool. Handbrake though, also provide a solution to this issue too: changing how frequently key frames are generated.
Next thing to tackle was to extract a single frame from the movie to use as an image that could be used on a web page. FFmpeg had me covered here. I put a query into a search engine and in seconds I had the solution neatly explained along with all the command-line parameters needed to do the task.
Everything is starting to come together.
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