PPF Returns: Sailing to Scaraba & Home Sweet Home Combo, Preview of Outset Island

[ Ok, apparently if I upload a video as unlisted and then publish it at a later date, I will be shat upon by the YouTube algorithms, so I guess I’ll just have to post a link to Home Sweet Home on my Google Drive and then upload it to YouTube when I’m ready to publish it:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ijEvWwg0P_SlIVJrV4tRQVQvGdE2d6vl/view?usp=sharing 

Also, I chose not to distribute “Buy Something Will Ya” and “What A Great Picture” because they were really short, so here’s a link to those if you wanna download them:

http://www.mediafire.com/file/abqgyh17s936pmq/BSWY_WAGP.zip/file ]

PPF is back, and he has returned with two new offerings inspired by the Suggestion Box.  At the time that I was rummaging through the box, the highest rated suggestion was “Something From Earthbound.”  A lot of the music in Earthbound is pretty short, so instead of choosing just one track to arrange, I decided to choose a handful of tracks and stick them into one update.  These are the two videos I ended up with!  They took a lot longer to create than I thought they would, so this is probably the last time I try to work on 4 arrangements at the same time, lol.

Also, I apologize for the prolonged absence!  Over the past several months my YouTube channel has gotten increasingly popular, and I was having trouble keeping up with all the comments and messages I was receiving, so I decided to take a break to prevent myself from getting overwhelmed.  When I first started my channel, I was able to respond to pretty much every comment I received.  As my channel grew, I decided that I would only respond to actual questions, although I continued to read every comment in my inbox.  Recently, however, I’ve had a hard time even reading all of my comments, let alone responding to them, which kinda sucks because I really do enjoy interacting with my audience.  So I’ll definitely have to figure out how to improve the way that I manage my comments, but in the meantime I’ll try to focus my efforts on at least responding to comments on my newly uploaded videos.

Anyway, on with the update...

New Work Flow

So I’ve decided to try to adopt a new work flow this time around.  In the past I’ve only worked on essentially one project at a time, but this time I’m going to try to have several projects going at once.  By working on several things at once, I’m hoping that I’ll be able to improve the efficiency of the audio recording process.  For instance, if I’ve got 3 projects pending that need a melodica part, I can set up my microphone to record a melodica and record all 3 parts at once.  I’m hoping this new workflow will minimize the amount of time I spend moving the microphone around and swapping out instruments from my shelf.  Here’s a peak at the new spreadsheets I’m using to manage my projects!

On the left side of the spreadsheet, I keep track of whether the audio and video has been recorded for each instrument, as well as whether I’ve synced up the video to the audio in my Resolve project.  On the right side of the spreadsheet, I keep track of which lenses I need to use to film each video as well as where the tripod needs to be standing.  This information helps me film instruments in batches to minimize how often I need to move equipment around.  Also, you’ll notice that the instruments are color coded, which helps me to identify common instruments between different projects so that I can record instruments in bulk.  All of the color coding in the spreadsheet is achieved with conditional formatting so I don’t have to think about anything when I’m preparing the sheet.

New Computer Build

I also decided to build a new video editing PC!  My old build was about 4 years old, and it was having trouble keeping up with the demands of DaVinci Resolve, so I figured it was time for an upgrade.  I originally just wanted to replace my CPU, but doing that meant that I would also have to replace my motherboard and my RAM and buy a new Windows license, so I ended up just basically building a new computer.  I decided to only use my Patreon account for the CPU, and I covered the rest of the expenses with my personal account since this system was going to serve as my personal computer as well as my YouTube workhorse.  Here’s a shot of the final build right before I closed up the case:

The only component that I haven’t upgraded yet is my GPU, but even with my old R9 270, Resolve is running unbelievably well.  It’s my understanding that Resolve primarily uses the GPU for rendering color grade edits and applying effects, and by the time I’ve gotten to the color grading stage, I no longer need to playback my video, so I might be able to get away with not upgrading my GPU at all since Resolve appears to barely use it for basic edits.

Finally, one last important addition to my new build was a small SSD, which I have dedicated as a scratch drive for Resolve.  One of the things that Resolve uses the scratch drive for is rendering video thumbnails, which used to take ages since I had so many video tracks on the screen at one time.  And the thumbnails have to be re-rendered every time I change the zoom level on the timeline, so I used to spend a lot of time just waiting for the thumbnails to finish rendering before I could proceed.  Here’s an example of the mess of thumbnails I’m usually dealing with for each project:

With my new setup, thumbnails are loading almost instantaneously, and my CPU is barely breaking a sweat during the editing process.  I used to spend a lot of time waiting for Resolve to catch up to all of my inputs, but now I’m finally able to edit almost as fast as I can think.  Overall, I’m very happy with this new build, and after having used it to edit my two most recent videos, I’m very excited to use it to edit more videos in the future!

Outset Island Preview

Here’s a preview of Outset Island!  I’ve avoided recording this one for a long time because the original piece uses a bunch of orchestral instruments that I don’t have, and I didn’t think I could faithfully reproduce it.  But eventually I just decided to try arranging Outset Island with “silly” instruments instead, because why not.  This one took me forever to record, mostly because I couldn’t get the tone right for the lead part, so I ended up going through two fifes, a flute, and a soprano recorder before I finally settled on an alto recorder.  Anyway, here’s the link to the preview:

https://soundcloud.com/user-789983357/oi-premix/s-q0oUO

That’s all for now, and be sure to leave a vote or a suggestion in the Suggestion Box!  The suggestions you’ve left so far have been very thoughtful and a lot of fun to work on, so I’m excited to see what else makes it to the top of the list in the future.  And as always, thank you for your support!  I had to make a few repairs to some equipment that had broken since the last time I posted, so I’m really thankful that I have this extra money to spend on things.  Until next time, may the farts be with you.