This is a post I previously made when I was last a member of Snuffed Out. Eve videos now are almost entirely just sped up unedited fights with the latest meme music, rather than something people have worked on.
People use to try so much harder, and create things people wanted to watch properly. It’s still possible, it just barely happens now due to laziness and desires for instant gratification.
I don’t proclaim to be an expert in this field, but I definitely know some of the keys to creating a good video.
Conaildo was kind enough to search through his backups to fish it out for me – thank you!
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Good evening, I am here today to tell you that you can all do a better job.
It’s all well and good to grab the fight clip , drop it into a timeline and grab an mp3 and slap that below it, render, upload, get 4 upvotes on reddit.
That serves a sizable audience: The audience that wants to see the frags that happened an hour ago and they don’t care about anything other than seeing the HP of that titan tick down to zero while some memeworthy music plays in the background.
But who gives a toss about that? You can get muchos upvotes (maybe as many as 20) by actually producing something rather than chudding something out and splattering it across youtube to be forgotten forever.
We have people in alliance far more proficient than that, and you can do something amazing, you could be spending some real time and creating a video that has an intro, a theme, explanation and an epic conclusion! You need to pick your music PROPERLY and actually edit your fights. You can make half an hour of video that people will actually watch more than once and then subscribe to you! Come on. The payoff is huge.
If you’re still interested, here’s a few of the first basic rules of a compendium video.
- DON’T pick your favourite music
Your favourite music sucks. Well it doesn’t suck, but it SUCKS in an eve video.
Don’t ever pick music just because it sounds good. Sure that’s an important factor, but more important than that is that it fits the feeling you’re trying to evoke.
Make sure the music has audible points in it that you can choreograph on-screen events to.
Try choosing a standard genre of music throughout the video.
- Don’t be afrid to lie
I don’t mean you should pretend certain events happened or didn’t happen, I mean don’t be afraid to pull in a close up of the wrong part of the timeline to show a sexy shot of a fleet in the middle of the battle. It’s fine, you are creating entertainment, not a sterile beurocratic record of what you filmed.
Also, please, desperately do not be afraid to shorten a fight. If the battle lasted half an hour, no-one wants to see that – even if you speed it up x4. Get out of here with that lazy boring bollocks. Show the important bits of the fight – how it began, how it progressed, how we dropped in far too many titans for the situation. Focus on the bits everyone gets horny for.
- Tell the story
You don’t have to laboriously spend four hours slicing in the correct comms for the correct part of the fight. Clip out the important bits, line them up where it appears to be correct and dull the music volume when you play the FC giving orders. It’s extra work, but it’s well worth it.
DIRTY SECRET: You don’t have to do comms if you don’t want to, but your subtitles had better be bloody good. Make sure they are short, to the point, stay on screen for the right amount of time and DON’T INTRUDE UPON THE ACTION UNFOLDING.
shove them in a corner, on a nice plain black background. Keep it readable. Half your viewers can’t read anything longer than one sentence at a time because they have ADHD.
- PACING
Just because I banned you further up there from using meme music doesn’t mean you can’t have some humor. Put in anything you like that people will actually enjoy, but keep these short and don’t use in-jokes unless the audience has something else to suck on while you self-indulge. If you put in a section that no-one outside your circle understands, you just appear to be a insuffrable void of personality. Oh also, make sure your video has an ending. with credits. (NOT just a black screen with names) - Viewer attention span lasting only 10 minutes is bollocks
People crave long, interesting videos. The reason people get bored with 10 minute videos is because 10 minutes is either not enough time to tell a story or it’s just a sped up unedited bracketfight.
So please, give us all what we want and go down in history by producing something everyone can be proud to have been a part of. You can do it. You can do it better than any that have come before. Don’t be lazy, get your reward.
Some small (but important) things to be aware of:
Recording eve in 4k is trash for eve videos, the vast majority of your audience will be using 1080p screens, and CCP has been useless at UI scaling since forever. Almost all your viewers will be unable to read the UI text, and this is a giant frustration. No-one in any good numbers will be able to enjoy your video. Please, if you’re serious, run your client in 1080p.
Do not add black bars and do NOT record in a res LOWER than 1080p either. It’s not 2004.
Render your video properly or do not bother making it at all. All the game text, never mind your own, MUST appear RAZOR SHARP once youtube has processed it. Render natively, do not cut any corners with this. Eve struggles with this more than most other video games, as eve is ENTIRELY about what is going on with the UI.
Feel free to contact me for any advice, and i’m sure some actual professionals will be ready to help with nittier-grittier issues.