Adventures In Recording A Co-Op Let's Play

So last night my son wanted to do some Portal 2 Co-Op together. I thought to myself: Hey! This would be a good time to try recording him and I both on our computers.

Shouldn't be too hard, right?

Wrong.

I knew I needed to set up one of my cameras to record him while he played. No problem. I also knew that I would be recording my screen for play. Seemed simple enough.

The first problem right off the bat was the fact he is using an old flat screen TV as his monitor for his computer. That's because he also has his Xbox hooked up to it. His computer is hooked up to the TV via a HDMI cable.
Well, when you do that, you can't use headphones. Plugging them into the computer does no good, and the TV did not have a headphone mini-jack.
Because he had to have the speakers on the TV turned up to hear not only his game, but our voice chat, it was causing some serious feed back.

Okay, fix for that was: I moved his TV and hooked up one of my spare computer monitors to his computer. Now he was able to use his little ear buds, and no feed back from the mic.

BUT: now we had another problem. A serious echo of our voices.

This stumped me for quite a while. We were using Skype to talk to each other, and we play Diablo 2 this way just fine, no echo at all. However, what if you have two voice chats running at the same time?
That is what the problem was: Portal 2 has it's own built in voice chat, and it was running while we were using Skype too!

So we shut down Skype and began to record.

Unfortunately, I forgot that in our first attempts I had been recording on his camera which can only hold up to 30 minutes of video, and in our first failed attempts, I had filled up a large chuck of the memory card!

So lessons learned. We know how to do it better now, but we still have a pretty good video of us just goofing off. It cuts short at about 13 minutes because his camera auto shut off.

We'll do better next time however:

Aahah glad you got it working, I have the worst luck with technology. Something always goes wrong when I try to do something and it is not a quick fix. Have you guys played Diablo 3?

a reply to: Shepard64

No. My wife has it and has played it through a few times. She liked it, but said she liked how the skill trees in Diablo 2 worked better.

Your avatar makes me want to do a Mass Effect Let's Play, hehehehe. I have all 3.

a reply to: Shepard64

For some reason, this post seems far funnier than it should be. Good luck out there Shepard, keep fighting the good fight.

let me know if you ever wanna get together to play something like left 4 dead, I'll join ya and put you on my stream

a reply to: HomerinNC

Afraid I don't have Left4Dead. My oldest son has it and used to play it a lot.

I did just purchased Outlast. Steam has it on sale (normally it's 19.99 UDS) for 6.79 USD until Friday.

Going to give it a try as a Horror Survival that someone here on ATS recommended to me.

a reply to: eriktheawful

lol I never played the other diablo's but I am really enjoying this one. Mass effect is probably THE best video game series IMO it will be hard to beat. Shepard is just a big goof at heart.

we need to do an ATS lets play, who's down for that???
I'll stream it on my twitch, and I have a teamspeak channel we can use

a reply to: Shepard64

I still think they need to somehow bring back Shepard for ME4...

originally posted by: HomerinNC
a reply to: Shepard64

I still think they need to somehow bring back Shepard for ME4...

When I first finished ME3 (I made the take out the syths choice), I waited until all the credits had finished rolling, and there was a clip at the end of it:

Night on some planet, and this little kids says something like: "Can you tell me another story grandpa Shepard?"
Then the screen goes black.

Haven't seen if they show the same thing every time.

a reply to: eriktheawful
The boy actually says, "Tell me another story about the Shepard,"



Scroll to 22:50
BUT....watch JUST before that...


I think I'll do my next few streams playing the ME trilogy

Ya he says "tell me another story about the shepard"

What is this "lets play" you speak of? I have ME3 on 360

a reply to: Shepard64

we are talking about a co-op for Erik's channel and my twitch stream

a reply to: HomerinNC

Oh I see so I couldn't join with my Xbox?

posting to watch.

a reply to: Shepard64

No, would have to be on the PC