{"id":49355,"date":"2020-02-26T06:00:53","date_gmt":"2020-02-26T11:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=49355"},"modified":"2020-02-25T20:22:53","modified_gmt":"2020-02-26T01:22:53","slug":"gaming-footage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=49355","title":{"rendered":"Gaming Footage"},"content":{"rendered":"

Now that I’m producing video content<\/a>, I’m thinking a lot about video game footage. Previously, I just smacked the screenshot key when I wanted to save a still image for the blog. Once in a while I’d save some important cutscenes. These days I need much better video coverage of the games I… uh… cover<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I also find I need footage of games I haven’t played in a few years. What happens if I’m writing a script and I suddenly realize I need footage from a cutscene near the end of Last of Us<\/em>? I’d have to play through most of the game to get that. Or what if I need some footage of Fem Shepard with Ashley Williams during the suicide mission in Mass Effect 2, and all of my footage is of Male Shepard<\/a>? I’d actually have to play all the way through BOTH of the first two games to get that footageThe default femshep gets Kaiden in ME2, which means you’d need to import a ME1 save.<\/span>. What if I want to make a video on branching endings and I want to compare all the different endings of Dishonored 2<\/a>? I’m pretty sure you’d need more than three trips through the game for that!<\/p>\n

This can kill an essay. I don’t have time in my schedule to play 60 hours of a video game just to grab 2 minutes of relevant footage.<\/p>\n

Maybe your first suggestion is to just quietly go over to YouTube, find a raw no-commentary LP, and download that. Well… <\/p>\n

Laying aside ethical concernsIf someone used my game footage, I wouldn’t think of it as theft \/ copyright infringement. But the thing is, lots of people WOULD. Even if copyright \/ fair use is on your side, you REALLY don’t want to create bad blood and drama with a bunch of random YouTubers.<\/span>, this isn’t as easy as it sounds. Lots of channels have watermarks, logos, or scattered popups with your typical “Like, Share, and Subscribe” calls to action. Also, unless there’s a secret site out there, all of the existing YouTube download tools are extremely<\/strong> sketchy, covered in the most questionableWe detected 10 billion viruses on your PC. Please download our totally safe and legitimate anti-virus and we’ll fix everything for free, we promise.<\/span> sorts of ads, and are often extremely buggy and plagued by size limits that prevent you from getting large high-quality video files. (Which is certainly what you need if you’re trying to download gameplay footage, which is often posted in hour-long chunks.)<\/p>\n

Taking it all together: Unless you’re talking about a AAA game from the last few years, then it’s going to be very difficult to find footage that:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Features the game you need with good quality footage.<\/li>\n
  2. Features the scenes \/ gameplay \/ playthrough style that suits your essay.<\/li>\n
  3. Contains no watermarks or other distractions.<\/li>\n
  4. Is part of an active channel where you can still contact the owner, and that owner is a reasonable person and not a random internet lunatic, and they will grant you permission to use their footage for freeOr for acknowledgement in the credits.<\/span>, and that the two of you can work out some way to exchange gigabytes worth of files, and they deliver on their end of the deal in a timely manner that doesn’t ruin your production schedule.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    It seems like a simple thing, but a process like that could end up eating hours<\/em> of time.<\/p>\n

    Also, footage takes up a lot of space. I’ve only got 1TB of data to worry about now, but it’s growing fast. The rate of growth will increase as resolutions and framerates climb. So what happens if I do this for another couple of years and I wind up needing to store 10TB of footage? That’s not cheap, particularly since you’d also want to have a backup somewhere so a drive failure won’t annihilate years of (practically) irreplaceable footage.<\/p>\n

    This is one of those things that seems<\/strong> like it should be super-simple, but turns out to be a massive pain in the ass.<\/p>\n

    So I was thinking… why isn’t there a way for video essayists to share their footage via Creative Commons? I’d gladly donate all of my collected footage if it meant I’d gain access to someone else’s footage. Heck, even if it was just two people, the system would still be a solid benefit to both of them. And the more people involved, the more useful it would be to everyone.<\/p>\n

    This idea seems so obvious that I assumed it must already exists somewhere, but various Google searches have turned up nothing.<\/p>\n

    Sadly, I don’t know how to set something like this up. I guess I could throw everything on an FTP somewhere, but I don’t know. Maybe there’s a better way of doing it.<\/p>\n

    I mentioned on the podcast last week<\/a> that I was replaying Tomb Raider 2013. I spent about three hours with the game so I could grab ONE CUTSCENE<\/strong>, and I’m still not there yet. (I thought this scene happened way sooner in the game, and now I’m stuck riding the sunk cost fallacy to my ruin.)<\/p>\n

    I know there are sites out there where you can share and download freeOr for link \/ attribution.<\/span> stock photos<\/a>, textures, models<\/a>, source code, libraries<\/a>, and even games<\/a>. But nothing for gameplay footage. I realize gameplay footage is a bit of a niche need – the number of video game video essayists in the world can’t be more than a few thousand, and there are probably less than a hundred with this particular need. I understand why nobody has been crazy enough to build a business around this, but it seems like something someone, somewhere should have created by now, even if it’s just a Discord and an FTP.<\/p>\n

    The other possibility is that maybe I should just hold off making more videos until I have a large enough footage library. The videos are doing well, but they’re not driving a lot of traffic to the site, which is the whole point. I don’t know.<\/p>\n

    Anyway, it’s an interesting problem that I thought would make for good discussion.<\/p>\n

    Bonus discussion: How often do average non-critics, non-streamers actually care about capturing footage? I see lots of games with built-in recording and capturing features, and it always feels weird to me. Do people really use that stuff?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Now that I’m producing video content, I’m thinking a lot about video game footage. Previously, I just smacked the screenshot key when I wanted to save a still image for the blog. Once in a while I’d save some important cutscenes. These days I need much better video coverage of the games I… uh… cover. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=49355"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49355\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49362,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49355\/revisions\/49362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=49355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=49355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=49355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}