Arma 3 Prairie Fire Bullshittery - Update #1

Good evening folks. Thank you for participating in the recent polls. It appears that Arma 3 Prairie Fire (Vietnam) was the clear winner. I will endeavour to deliver you a Arma bullshittery - starting today. 

For those unfamiliar with my process, there are 4 phases:

•  1.) Scrubbing/finding the highlights - from the saved livestreams with their assorted .txt file notes.
•  2.) Cutting - getting various clips into a watchable compilation of an appropriate length.
•  3.) Animating & Secondary cutting - Animating the text with Adobe After Effects. The length part. Along with tighter trimming of any rough cuts.
• 4.) Quality assurance - Rendering the project and fixing errors. Or reworking segments that turned out to be not as funny.

The first hiccup was encountered on Sunday morning when I started moving the Arma 3 master folder onto a free hard drive on my workstation (about 1.7tb of footage), anticipating it as the likely poll winner. Only to wake up and find my PC fans working as though under heavy rendering load.

It turns out that hard drive had malfunctioned overnight. Appearing now to be inoperable. No idea what happened there. Very odd.

Thankfully there was no data loss. I was merely copying the files, rather than cutting. I've resumed that process this morning, moving the Prairie Fire campaign first, for scrubbing. And have made a start.

Of scrubbing work, I have three distinct gameplay sessions to work through:

Campaign Late 2021:

This was the initial play session of Prairie Fire, played with an group of about 8-10 people. It is very structured and usually consists of a small group of special forces moving through the jungle, being stealthy. With all air support being entirely A.I controlled.

Annoyingly, it looks like my infowriter plugin - the tool I use to note the timestamp of moments - hideously malfunctioned in late 2021. Meaning that this initial week sees me having to scrub through these manually, marking things of note with Premiere tags. Not the smoothest start. Thankfully though it's about 7 of the 10 streams and the rest of mike force is much better documented.

Mike Force - 2022 - 2023

The rest of the livestreams - the overwhelming majority in fact - consist of "Mike Force". A mod in which a very large number of players do large scale Arma operations. Attacking various control zones across the map and holding them against waves of Vietcong attacks.

A concern for me is the potential clash between clips that feature a handful of players, and clips that feature entire firebases of men. But it's a question I can't answer yet. I need to dive deep into the scrubbing and properly document it.

I'm also considering doing something with the intro, similar to the musical introductions I used to do before Youtube got very heavy-handed with their content ID system,

To mark this transition into this radically different style of Arma, I'm considering cutting the first minute or so to some era appropriate music, with lots of scenes of napalm falling, jets flying, etc.

As much as it's going to get the video hammered by claims, I'll do some initial tests. Perhaps one bullshittery with it and one without, so if the former gets pulled in years to come by the soulless ghouls that own licensing, it's no biggy.

So for the moment folks, I'll work to build this project file. See where the clips are. And start to build up the structure of Arma 3 Prairie Fire bullshittery. Thank you all. Wishing you a lovely week :)