The first step is always recording your game play. Just choose whichever recording software you like, fire it up and start recording.
Tips:
- Hit the search engine and research dimension sizes
- Record only the visible game play area.
- Record small segments and make multiple recordings (even of the same scenes)
Editing:
A good editing program can make or break your video. Unfortunately I haven't found any good free editing programs out there other than Windows Movie Maker. You will need to encode the file in order to import to the WMM library.
Tips:
- Only shows successful attempts, trim out the unnecessary stuff.
- Keep video length around or less than 15 mins so the viewer isn't struggling to find certain portions
- Annotations/subtitles/audio commentary over the video can be helpful. Otherwise you might want to mute everything and just play background music.
Using subtitles is a good way to add a logo and description's to your video's. Not only is it an alternative to using a microphone but it can be really useful if you skip using the editor and go straight for the encoding.
Tips:
- Keep the lines very short so the viewer doesn't have to pause the video just to read it
- Use styled fonts that are easy on the eyes
- Keep the duration of the lines long enough to be read comfortably
This step can be done alternatively to editing, if your original recording just needs a few trims. This step may or may not be necessary depending if the final video is in the proper format or not.
Tips:
- This is where the dimension sizes will come into play the most
- Encode your video's to H.264 with .flv container
- Use AAC for audio with 44.1 kHz or 48 kHz and the Target Bit Rate: 128 kbps - 160 kbps (192 kbps+ for content that's heavy on audio)
