Early Access: Gut Check: Sonic x Shadow Generations

Well, I didn't think I'd have an early access video for this one. I'm in a hurry to get this out fast, so before turning in for the night, I set this to do the final render first thing... which was an obvious rookie mistake. So here you folks go: while the actual final version of the video renders, you get to see the version with a handful of tiny mistakes as per usual.

The biggest one: in my rush, I forgot to trim down the template for my credits scene, so there's like, 9 minutes of dead air at the end of this video. The other mistakes are small; the credit in the upper left portion of the frame is wrong sometimes, or displaying when it shouldn't be, or I forgot to show a credit when I should have. I also slapped a compressor on the background music since I feel like it gets a little loud here over my talking, and I'm so breathy it might make me hard to understand.

This video was a small technical nightmare to put together because I'm experimenting with new stuff. I capture a lot of my own footage when I can, and when I can't, I go out of my way to find the cleanest, highest quality version of what I'm looking for. That in itself can take a lot of time, but then I usually have to download it off of Youtube. For years, I've used a suspicious website called Keepvid (don't go there) to download Youtube videos, but recently I saw someone recommend a piece of software called "Stacher".

Stacher is basically a front end for another piece of software called "yt-dlp", which was the subject of a lawsuit a couple years ago -- basically, Youtube (Google) was claiming it was illegal to download Youtube videos, and was specifically targeting yt-dlp in the hopes of getting rid of it. A judge ruled that downloading Youtube videos is in fact totally reasonable and legal, and yt-dlp was allowed to keep existing. All of this is because yt-dlp is the best way to download Youtube videos, but it's command line software. I'm no stranger to command line (I've used FFMPEG), but I do tend to prefer having an interface to work with, which Stacher provides.

I picked up Stacher because Keepvid was starting to not work so well. Youtube is implementing new video formats and Keepvid was consistently only detecting 720p30 downloads. Stacher on the other hand will grab the absolute maximum possible resolution, which in this case was 4K60. Which is great! Even though I am downsampling to 1080p60, it still means I'm getting very sharp, very clean source footage. Except Vegas doesn't really like whatever 4K60 format Youtube is using, so I have to transcode it using Handbrake, which for even a 10 minute video can take upwards of an hour.

And then there's editing. My poor little 2015 CPU (Intel Core-i5 4690K) really struggles to work with 4K footage, which probably doubled the length I spent in Vegas putting this together. On top of the hours spent transcoding. So you can really start to see how all this adds up and delays what should have been out by, like, the 12th.