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Video

On this page you can find information about how the videos in the metauni YouTube channel are created. One advantage of virtual lectures over in-person lectures is that they are (generally) more convenient to record at high quality, especially if speakers make use of cheaply available, highly quality microphones. As of this writing (September 2022) we have recorded over 200 hours of seminars and lectures.

Workflow

The workflow for recording a seminar (not as speaker) are as follows:

  1. Prep. Make sure you have enough disk space to record (somewhere between 20-30Gb per hour, depending on your settings, to record both your local audio and system audio and screen), microphones and devices are plugged into power, etc.
  2. Start Recording. Make sure to record both the microphone on the local machine (for your voice), system audio (which is what will capture the voice of the speaker coming through Roblox voice chat or Discord) and the screen. It’s a good idea to test your settings before recording a live seminar. You may want to run a keepalive script that moves your character every X minutes, in order to avoid having to manually interact with Roblox during the recording (the game will kick you for inactivity after 20 minutes).
  3. Join Roblox and (a) Attach as Listener to the relevant Orb (b) use Shift-C to get into Orbcam without the Roblox UI.
  4. Editing: most of the time in preparing videos lies in the editing process, and most of this lies in editing out background audio of your own voice track (which is not audible to others during the event, if you’re muted). Generally it takes me somewhere from 3-6min per 1hr of video to process.
  5. Uploading. Depending on your Internet connection, uploading a 1hr seminar to YouTube may take an hour or more.
  6. Processing: adding titles and descriptions, choosing a thumbnail and playlists. While YouTube autograbs potential thumbnails (and does a surprisingly good job) you will probably want to upload higher quality screenshots. Tag the videos in the description with the recording date (which is generally going to be different to the upload date) to maintain sanity later.

Tools

The tools used to make our recordings as of September 2022:

For one hour seminars the final MP4 file is somewhere around 5-10Gb.

Notes

In the early days quite a few seminar recordings were lost (a crime!), principally due to

Some other remarks:

Places for improvement

Here are what I think of as the current margins to improve on the quality of metauni videos:

Recording seminars in OBS

MKV if you need multi-track audio, FLV if you only need a single audio track. On a crash with either of these you may lose a second or two at the end. It’s why they’re the default format, and why an orange warning message pops up when you switch to mp4 warning you not to record to mp4. MP4 should NEVER be recorded to directly. As you’ve discovered, it is not a recording-safe format, and many editors have problems with the mp4 files that OBS creates when recorded direct anyway. Just record to MKV, then go you OBS’ File menu, Remux Recordings to convert them to mp4s. You can also automatically remux at the completion of a recording by ticking a checkbox in Settings->Advanced.

Adding summaries and titles with ChatGPT

The summaries for YouTube descriptions and titles can be automaticaly inferred by ChatGPT and then edited by a human. Here are the steps