Being a game developer we always need to find a way to create and distribute visuals telling the story of our game, or in the least, the process of making it. I’ve always done my own screen recording, audio recording and editing to produce videos for YouTube. For the last few years I had been using the Camtasia Recorder for the screen recording, and Adobe After Effects for the editing. This year I decided to finally upgrade to an SSD boot drive and reformat everything. My work stays safe saved to redundant hard drives.
With this fresh start I asked myself a few questions: Did I need all of the programs and software I had amassed on my boot drive? Was this the minimal set of software I would need to get what I needed done for game development? The answer was a resounding, no. So I decided to not only minimize software installs, but to save costs this year. I started to search across the web for proven FOSS (free and open source) software related to what I needed to do at the moment, which was create video content for YouTube. I’m mainly writing this little article to share a set of open source software that are all [FREE] and all are working well on the latest installs (as of Feb. 4th, 2018).
My main three needs for creating YouTube content were as follows: Capturing 1080p 60fps full screen video of my projects and desktop. Capturing audio (my voice) as I narrate through some of the demonstrations and capturing any of the “in-game” SFX or music. Lastly, I needed software I could use to import this video into, bring in the audio track(s) and overlay and graphics, illustrations or text bubbles. I settled on three pieces of software for these tasks and at least for me they have proven robust and get the job done.
The first piece of software I tried out and am very pleased with is OBS Studio __**https://obsproject.com/download**__ . This software captures all of my project video in glorious 1080p HD, 60 fps glory. The second piece of software I’ve installed is Audacity https://www.audacityteam.org . It’s amazingly simple and robust. I use it for recording my audio narration, layering soundtracks and more. Lastly to bring it all together I’ve installed OpenShot Video Editor https://www.openshot.org . I cannot sing the praises of this software enough. It’s easy to use and has enough advanced features for more interesting editing.
It’s amazing to be alive in a day and age where all of this high end and very capable software is available to us free of charge. There are always good [FREE] alternatives to the big and well known software packages out there.