The making of: GamesByte

This is not summer!

Do not ask me why but for some reason the weather in my area is being absolutely horrendous, despite us being in the beginning of August. I mean you'd expect at least a tiny bit of sunshine?

Alas it is not meant to be, so I have to spend my time on something else. What is that "something else" I hear you asking? No? Don't be rude.

It's GamesByte(!) of course.

So in case you were not aware I am the co-owner of a YouTube channel called GamesByte. Essentially the channel is about all things gaming and I'd dare say that me and a very good friend of mine put a decent amount of effort into it  (Unlike certain other YouTubers).

How hard can it be? Well it can actually be quite taxing at times. We aim to put out 3 episodes per week and an episode takes pretty much an entire day. Yep, you heard me, an ENTIRE day. Now let me snap you out of your potential shock, because it doesn't actually take the entire day because my friend and I are smart.

We divide and conquer!

It's Simple
Really, it is. We meet up via Skype every episode day at around noon. Here we exchange information (Various news worthy articles/videos we've found since the last episode was released) and together we sift through all of our content, dismissing the less important articles for the "worthy" ones, essentially creating a skeletal structure of that days episode.

From there, I take the reigns (For a while). You see I am the resident scriptwriter of our little business, I read through every single article we've decided to include and watch every single video we are going talk about, one by one.

Once that is done, it's a matter of writing. Writing and writing and writing. We usually have 5 sections within our scripts, each dedicated to different topics. On a good day, the scripting will take roughly two hours, start to finish, including proof-reading. On bad days it's taken way longer though, but that is a story for another blog post.

So once I am done writing I send the script to my buddy. Together we go through it and make revisions, if that one sentence sounds a bit odd, we discuss it and change it.

The script for today ended up being this long

Now comes the recording part.

The glorious sound of your own voice
gets a little bit tiring after listening to yourself repeating the same sentence over and over and over in attempt to cut out bits you'd rather not want.

Also having to re-read that one sentence time and again because you just can't say "months" without sounding like a complete spas gets on your nerves after a bit. Let me tell you though, getting it done properly and listening to yourself sounding like a pro in the final product is rewarding like nothing else.

Audacity, I kinda love you and I kinda hate your guts.

That is essentially it for me, compiling news, scripting, discussing and recording.

However,
the wheels do not stop churning here - This is the part where my skilled buddy takes the reigns and starts editing together a video. Which I can promise you is a lot harder than it might sound (I speak from experience, but that is another story all-together).

To do this he uses

SONY VEGAS PRO 10

There, now you all know what I am talking about, right? Right?... What do you mean no?

Alright I'll explain, jeez.

So Sony Vegas is a program that allows you to cut and paste your video into teeny tiny bits and essentially create one large video from all the bits, placing them where you want them. There is so much stuff to explain about this program that I won't even bother explaining (I don't know half of it myself). Just know that this is the program we use.

Take note however, this program at times seem to have a mind of its own and will do everything technically possible to piss you off. Have some quotes from todays editing session as proof!

"GOD SONY VEGAS WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT FROM ME!?"

See what I mean? Essentially, if you've ever worked with a word document that kept going weird on you, imagine that times 10 and you've got Sony Vegas (Sometimes, most of the time it functions flawlessly).

So after my friend does all of this, he has to sync up sound, overlays, segment transitions and the rest of those fancy technical words. So it's quite the process.

I'll be completely honest,
My friend is the guy responsible for most of the awesomeness that is our episodes, because even though I write and formulate everything we say and we both attempt to gather news, GamesByte videos would not look as awesome as they do without him.

TL;DR (Too long, didn't read for those of you unfamiliar with Internet lingo).

GamesByte is a pretty intense process that leaves the entire team behind it (two guys) both exhausted and satisfied once it's done. Considering that the total amount of work hours behind each episode easily tallies up to 6-8 hours depending on length and that we do 3 times per week, it gets pretty hectic at times.

So that's the creation process in a nutshell, i've yet to even touch on web distribution, feedback recollection and statistics counting, which are all essential parts of making GamesByte better and well-known, but those are stories for different times, I will leave you with a picture of the Danish GamesByte office.