As you might have seen on our other pages, we recently completed our very first battle report (and just finished filming our second!). We learned a lot from the experience and we can tell you that one thing is certain. Playing a match and filming a match are two totally different beasts! We tried to borrow some elements from a few popular sources to make the video fun and appealing to viewers while also catering to our strengths and limitations (equipment and people). Nick is a HUGE fan of Tabletop Tactics. He loves their in depth analysis and discussions before every and after every match. My favorite batreps are from Phil the Glacial Geek. I really enjoy how he can do all the filming, playing, and explain whats going on by himself. Plus he’s a devoted Dark Angels player, which is obviously the most important factor!

Some of the challenges we ran into was due to our equipment. I used a Sony Alpha a6000 Mirrorless Camera with a 16-50mm lens. The camera worked great, but its clearly designed more for photography in mind than filming. This thing DRAINS batteries FAST. Nick and I had to rush through a lot of moments where we would have taken our time because the camera was perpetually low on juice. We often had to set it down to charge during our movement phases. Which then caused the camera to begin overheating, so we had to set it down in cool areas when it was off. A delicate dance of filming, charging, and cooling took place. I remedied this after we finished filming by getting a second battery (this made things much, MUCH, easier for our second batrep). The lens protector also kept getting in the way during the match and was quite the nuisance. Overall though, I think the camera performed really well and gave us some pretty solid video which translated really well to YouTube. The sound came out pretty well too, I didn’t think that little camera would hear us as well as it did!

For those curious, PFunk did all the editing using Powerdirector. You can tell he had a lot of fun with it! He did complain to me that there were one or two short clips that were either missing or corrupted, and that created some challenges for him to overcome. Additionally, he’s new to the software and video editing in general and found the sheer amount of tools and options available to him were overwhelming at first. But once he got the gist of everything, it was relatively smooth sailing for him. Currently we live several states away from each other and needed a service that could accommodate the surprisingly large amount of data (from several hours of HD digital footage) being sent back and forth. To do this we used Dropbox. This gave us 3TB of space to work with and was a great way of keeping my computer from geting to cluttered with all the video files.

All told between filming, editing, and loading this labor of love took about 20 hours and Youtube clocks the download at about 3GB. As was already mentioned here, we’ve just finished filming our second batrep and PFunk is excited to get his hands on it. So stay posted for another great match by Nick and I! Hopefully our second attempt will go even better than our first!