YouTube/Hangouts Live Stream, What I did...

With the disconnect between Goggle Hangouts and YouTube's Live Event function I had to find another way to record my live sessions. I will miss the ability to Live Stream my sessions, but capturing the entire session on tape is my default DM notes I reference, establish canon with my players and use for verisimilitude in game session prep.  Much higher priority.

My first hit, and the only software I have used so far, was Camtasia. It sells for more than I want to spend, but with little time before the game I took advantage of the 30 day free trial and began to familiarize myself with its capabilities. It captures your computer screen and allows to edit this content and convert to video. This part of the software worked just fine. I hit record and did not hit stop until the three-hour session was over. Everything was there. Some spot editing and then I went for upload to YouTube. I believe the inevitable crash is due more to the capabilities of my laptop rather than Camtasia. Either way, it figures into Camtasia as a "no-buy" for me. Conversion from "project" to video file is expected to be slow, but it was going to be a ten-hour(?) process to upload. No way this works. But I tried a couple of times with a couple of different formats and unsurprisingly the process choked and "closed unexpectedly". I then stripped the audio from the video, added a title page, and then went for it. This time I had the format as avi. It went up rather quickly considering. Now I and the players can listen to the session replay at our leisure.

I really like the audio format. TTRPG's are theater of the mind anyways. As a fan of radio broadcasting it didn't take me long to warm up to the idea. I started dropping in images related to what was currently being described, but I'm not sold on that. Title Page, sure. If I do include images it will sparsely done.

So I get the original "tape", video and all, upload audio only. For now. And I still need to "cast" about for a more affordable option.