Back from the in-laws. Anne's in bed with a box of Lindor choccies and an iPad game, James is (checks Discord status...) apparently playing around with Ableton Live on his PC, and I have a comfy armchair, a small pack of Hotel Chocolat caramel chocolates (ok, the wrappers and tray from...), a MacBook which now has OBS installed, and a brand new Elgato Stream Deck.
Basically, it has 15 completely configurable buttons with individual colour displays, and the idea behind it is you can customise it for your own gaming or streaming video, or whatever, setup to replicate arbitrary key presses, do scene/camera changes, send Tweets, etc etc...
In 15 mins of playing I already have it doing the last two of the above. This thing is freaking COOL.
Now I just have to find the case containing my two MS LifeCam Studios and my Firewire audio interface, and the fun can really start.
Not really connected, except that I wouldn't have discovered the latter without a dose of the former rendering me incapable of stringing many coherent thoughts together.
But hey, I vanished down a YouTube rabbit hole yesterday (as this requires very little brain) and came up with something that's both about ancient history and boardgames. Good enough for here, no?
The Royal Game of Ur, for those not aware, is generally held to be the oldest playable board game in existence. The latter appeared on a cuneiform tablet in the British Museum, and were the subject of some serious research by Irving Finkel, who's one of the museum curators. The video in question is from blogger/YouTuber Tom Scott (of whom I'm a fan), who actually took on Finkel at the game.
What actually makes it interesting is that, despite (in the form they were playing it) being a very simple game (you can explain the rules in under two minutes) it has a fascinating combination of luck and strategy, has dice that are basically ancient D4's (well, technically D2's!) and is a game with an interesting self-balancing property where the further ahead you are, the easier it is for your opponent to catch up (given a bit of luck and optimal play).
A fun game: I shall have to grab a copy to add it to our copy of Hnefatafl.
Just finished editing the video from yesterday, so I was hoping by the time I'm done typing this I could link it at the bottom.
Note (as I say on the video when it eventually makes it) - I'm not a great painter (my eyesight precludes any ambitions in that direction), and this isn't a demo. It's me recording my impressions of the new paints as I work my ham-fisted way through a few Dark Ages warriors from Gripping Beast. It's not by any stretch of the imagination (however warped yours may be) a tutorial on how to make them look good, merely good enough to rank up from 2' away.
Really.
If you want to waste 30 mins listening to me burble, that's fine, but don't expect to learn much about proper figure painting from it :D
Also, you will get to see and hear the paint shaker in action, because Contrast paints need some serious agitation. Apologies for the noise, and also for the not-brilliant framing of the video, as I'm not used to filming myself paint and I need the figure closer to me than is really good for the camera view :D
Sadly, it's taking forever to upload, and I have to be up for church, so I'm going to leave it to its own devices and do that last bit in the morning....
Today's a bank holiday. I had, given the chaos of the last couple of weeks, completely forgotten this until last Friday, when the Ukrainian QA lead at work wished us a good long weekend... At least she's on the ball!
I spent a fair amount of it sorting through paperwork for my old D&D campaign (man, THAT was a nostalgia trip!) but also got the cream dry/overbrush done on the remaining beach boards, so they're ready for a mammoth bout of re-grassing (yes, again) along with the rest of the Omaha boards this week, in time for Posh Lard. Fortunately the War Worlds Scenics layering spray makes this very easy. I hope to do a test board later in the week and video the process, now I can.
Well, that was a learning experience. I finally got the camera batteries charged (and a new charger ordered that doesn't require a US to UK adaptor :D) after Wednesday's setup stuff and Thursday and Friday's general gefuffle in getting James out of hospital (our NHS are wonderful, trust me, but woefully understaffed and underfunded - don't get me started).
Nice setup - basically I have a pair of lapel mikes that go to wireless belt packs (they also do a single one for not much more than half the price), and the receiver unit will mount on the camera accessory shoe out of the way and plug into the microphone input on the camera. As I have a newer Canon (700D) DSLR it'll shoot full HD video and the view screen will flip and twist so I can see it while I'm filming.
Things to work on:
the view screen is sufficiently small I can't see it very well without my glasses, which means I can't tell if I'm correctly focused when sat down. The autofocus can 'hunt' a bit, which currently is solved by a process that involves a bunch of faffing with manual with something placed in the chair at 'me' height to focus on. More experimentation required - I think I can force it to use a limited set of autofocus points so it will reliably pick up me rather than the bookcase behind me.
I could plug a small monitor into the camera's mini HDMI output so I can see what it's showing better, however...
this would make my tendency not to look into the camera even worse (which is not helped by having a lazy left eye that tends to drift inward :D)
That said, I don't look as bad in front of a camera as a talking head as I thought I might...
Still. Can't show you the resulting video as it's for someone else, but here's a screen grab of iMovie, just to prove I'm not making it up.
Next step is to sort out all of the above, and also figure out which multi-camera software I can use for gameplay videos.
Yes, I'm not done tidying yet :D
I do also now have a small camera clamp, which was bought for James while he was in hospital but wasn't terribly useful, which now allows me to do over-the-shoulder workbench shots without camera shake and my head getting in the way.
I do also have a shelf clamp for the DSLR, but it's quite hard to get it to stay in position and not sag, annoyingly.
The below (very short!) test video was done using the iPhone audio, rather than the lapel mic - as it's pretty much just above my head, this isn't that bad (yes, the dialogue is banal, but it's just proof of concept). It does demonstrate that my cutting mat has seen better days, however...
I was asked a couple of weeks ago if I would record a video piece for someone. More details of exactly what it was some other time but it did require me to get the main studio room set up for the purposes of recording video. Which is where you get to find out what my other two Amazon purchases were, namely, a tripod and a pair of wireless lapel mics.
You’d probably have got a little test piece with this post except that I’ve discovered that both my camera batteries are absolutely flat as a pancake. And they take forever to charge, so I guess that’s it for tonight.
