Gaming Gaming 28 - Revisiting the Village

We're back again with another gaming podcast (we'll do another hardware one sometime soon, we promise). This week sees Joe and Harry joined by Paul Taylor and Ian Hardingham from Mode 7 games, the developer of the most excellent Frozen Synapse...

http://www.bit-tech.net/blog/podcasts/2011/06/21/gaming-28-revisiting-the-village/

 

Good pod cast, although I find their lack of cheesecake faith disturbing.

 

I love your podcasts, but get some money and arrange one mic for each one of you.

 

We have one mic each. Provided by Shure.

 

I think more accurately they need monitors, without feedback you don't know if one person is quieter than all the others.

You know, if you all wore wired up headphones whilst your recorded it, you'd know as you spoke if the levels were off.

 

We've tried that before, but this seems to be a problem of compression. Currently we record on full volume and very loudly to the point that it can actually be painful to listen to when we edit it. Then we compress it into a file. Then we use Audacity to give it a big volume boost. Then we upload it.

Then you lot all complain that it's too quiet, leaving us unsure where the problem is...

 

It's not too quiet, it's that certain people are much quieter than others. You almost have to turn up and down the volume depending on who's talking.

It simply sounds like some people talk loudly/very close the mic, whereas others lean further back/talk quieter.

Either record everyone on different channels, so that you can hike the volume of particular people if necessary during editing, or record using headphones so you know during recording if someone's too quiet, and ask them to move forward/speak louder.

 

Interesting, it sounded OK here when editing. I allow little variations in volume that happen when people sit back from their mic to pass (otherwise i'd be editing it all day and you'd get half as many podcasts) but it seemed ok as a whole.

EDIT:
Listening back to it now (while i'm not simultaneously testing a PC for the mag) i can see some little imperfections. Ian could be louder later on for example, which is frustrating.

Some of the little dips in volume are also because people turn their heads when speaking to the person next to them rather than speaking into the mic.

 

I will admit; when Homeworld was mentioned; I turned around and just pointed empirically at the monitor while screaming "F#ck yes!"

/fanboy.

 

I'll admit I listened to it on the train, so I think the background noise probably drowned out a lot of the quieter moments of speech that you wouldn't struggle with normally.

It just seemed to be that Harry was very easy to hear all the time, Joe a little less so, and one of the Mode 7 guys was noticably hard to pick out.

 

Yeah, for what it's worth, sat here listening back to it Ian does seem quiet quiet (see the edit to my earlier post).

It's frustrating. We record and edit the podcast in garage band and what it spits out when we click 'export to disk' sometimes doesnt sound all that much like what you've just spent an age editing :-(

 

Volume seemed fine for me.

 

said **** though... oooooooo!!!

 

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

 

Homeworld was mentioned in this podcast!?

*Goes to download immediately. *

Was a bit disappointed at being another gamer podcast, but I'll forgive you for mentioning homeworld.

 

yeah material.. what your looking for is hard limiting- not sure about garage band.. I don't use that but they might have something similar

cut a random part of the podcast to show you the difference.. that should end the issues with the different voice volumes

http://www.4shared.com/get/FxRlAj9m/samples.html

 

I thought the volume levels were ok. Although I did have my iPod on full volume. Great to hear from the Mode7 guys, it all gel'd nicely. More podcasts with guests please!

In fact I was very tempted to buy Frozen Synapse until they said they didn't like cheesecake ...

My interest is peaking though and as soon as they release Synapse as a single game I'll pick it up for a check out

 

Homeworld
Tribes 2
wow, this podcast is full of classics, nice!

 

Volume levels were all over the place for me and I was listening to it using an android phone using bluetooth through the car stereo so I had plenty of volume available but the difference in volume between the Mode7 guys was remarkable. Aside from the volume issues, another entertaining podcast.

 

Good podcast. I'm not holding my breath after hearing their response to putting FS on tablets or phones though. Real shame that. Hope they make it happen and make it happen quick.