Other Hello All, I'm New Here

Hello everyone...

My name's Tim, I'm 32, and I'm from the UK.

I have been building PC's since my teens and have done everything from simple air cooled HTPC's to External waterlooped builds. BUT, for the last four years or so due to raising a family...I have been out of the game.

I have never truly been a modder. But it has interested me and I have always visited the likes of Bit-Tech to look in awe at all the amazing builds.

Lately I have come back into PC building. But have kept it simple. FOR Now.

See here.




I don't have any pictures of it switched on as of yet...but it's suitable. I Shall update thread soon.

What do you guys & gals think?

Maybe suggest to me some easy to do mods. To get me started?

In the meantime check out my attempt at YouTubing as you give it some thought.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfYz7U5tVelkXJBrshXYRRg

I have only done two videos thus far, so come back to me with opinions and comments if you like on that too.

BUT for now advise on ways to improve my build with maybe some simple mods.

Thanks all for reading.
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Hi and welcome your pc looks really tidy, good job.

 

Thanks for your kind comment.

 

Welcome to the community.
A very nice and tidy build you have there, much neater than my atrocious cable management (I'm very lazy with cables in my own machines).

 

Yup...I like to keep things as neat and tidy as possible. If I were to upgrade to a custom water loop in the future for example, it means less messing around re routing cables, which truthfully I hate doing. But it's worth the look in the end lol.

 

Hello fellow newbie...

The rear fan does extract air as you say. However. My water radiator fans are alternated. 1 pulls out hot air. Just like the rear fan does. And the other pulls in cool air. I also have 3 x 120mm fans in the front, all pulling in cool air.

I find the noise that these fans produce bearable. I could replace them with quiter fans or even ones with a better CFM. But they do a good job and aren't broke. So I say don't fix them. With things as they are I get my best CPU temps.

Thanks

 

I bite.

 

That's awfully nice...in an aggressive way or playfull way? lol!

 

Mankz is like a dog that growls at you but then rolls over to let you pet his tummy.

It's Nexxo you've got to watch out for.

Also, all praise relix!

 

U wot m8?

Im really just 25 trapped in the body of 75 year old but with a better cord trouser collection.

 

Just like my new puppy then lol. Thinks he's hard. But really he is nothing more than a fluffy ball of madness that just runs around like a looney for half an hour or so then sleeps the rest of the day.

I know a few people like that.

 

Welcome, To the real world!

Sam

 

Because the world I lived in before was not real? I must be a subject of cyber slavery. Just like this life I lead is been pulled down over my eyes to hide the truth...

 

Turn back, before it is too late!

Welcome to modding heaven

 

I intend on pushing through to the other side. No going back now...it is too late.

 

That's really clean, good job. The inside of my RVZ-01 isn't quite as neat, I'm really not looking forward to stripping it down to replace the CPU cooler!

Will have a nose through .

He does, you know.

 

Good job to start with. I think the main thing is to keep plugging at it and not get discouraged from uploading videos. You're in a pretty crowded market, so you might find that it'll be a pretty slow start in terms of viewer numbers. Whatever you do, try not to get too drawn in or discouraged by the comments! Some commenters are genuinely helpful and have some good points, but you will get a lot of crap! Obviously the more you do it the more comfortable you'll be in front of the camera - that really just takes time, it's not something that comes naturally to many people.

I do it for fun/a hobby, so I'm not necessarily interested in view counts or subscriber numbers; I've got so many abandoned projects on my channel, it's ridiculous!

Some technical points:

Try and avoid having reflections in your glasses, it can be quite distracting. In your first video it looked like there was a window or something behind the camera; in that situation if you can't close the curtains then try shooting at a different angle so that the window is off to your side, for example.

Having a lamp in shot can throw off your camera's white balance, unless you've manually calibrated/set it. Lighting generally looks good but you might want to look into getting some 5500K "daylight" bulbs. 5500K is a neutral white colour which matches the colour temperature of daylight, it helps ensure consistent and even lighting and avoids the yellow glow from standard bulbs (like you see with the lamp in the first vid).

What microphone(s) are you using and what device do you use to record? I can see a lapel mic in the first video but clearly there was some clipping going on; the sound was much better in the second video, but you were talking very softly. You should try and talk naturally on camera and handle variations in volume using the gain settings on whatever you're recording with (and with post-processing). I usually like to try and leave 10-15dB headroom (sometimes more, depending on the environment) above my normal speech volume. That way I can avoid clipping and boost volume, smooth out variations, etc, in post-processing; Audacity is great for preparing your raw audio. I recorded these two videos using an Audio-Technica ATR-3350 lapel mic and my iPhone SE; I plugged the mic into my iPhone via a RØDE SC4 TRS-to-TRRS adapter and used the app Voice Record Pro. I was really impressed; it coped more than admirably with some really awkward recording environments, including being wedged under one of the cheek pads in my motorbike helmet. I expected to have to do a lot of cleanup on the audio from my bike vlog but the raw audio was was good enough to take straight into the edit. I've also heard great things about the RØDE Smartlav+ and Sony ECM-CS3 lapel mics - beware though, the Sony mic doesn't have a pre-amp and it's stereo, both of which will cause issues if you're using a mobile phone to record (although shouldn't be an issue with something like a Zoom recorder). Of course you might not even need a new mic, it could just be a case of dialling in your gain to find the levels that allow you to speak at a normal, natural volume and avoid clipping .

 

Thank you so much for your comments. It is indeed a very steep learning curve especially not having recorded anything before. Then there is the editing...come the end there were many mistakes that I made. And you pointed out a few of them youself. The reflections (window), the lighting...shining off my glasses etc. My first video was recorded with a Samsung Galaxy S7. My second video was recorded with a Panason G80 and both times my audio was recorded with a Boya BY-M1 lavalier mic. The sound was very up and down. That was mainly due to myself not always talking at the same level...and when I edited the cuts I never adjust the levels of each scene individually. I tried to get my audio done in one take on the second video so that helped. The first video took loads of takes...

Regards the lighting I only have a ring light used by my partner for makeup shots so I tried to compromise there and use that. Really I need to get some lights and reflectors with the daylight bulbs in.

Im also trying to find an area I can dedicate to my work space and videos at the moment. It's kinda shoot as and where I can. Which then causes cramped angles and not much to work with.

Again thanks for your advise. Big big help indeed.

 

No worries .

Yeah the video quality in both is great, it's pretty impressive as to what you can achieve with a smartphone these days. Until recently I was using a Sony HDR-CX240e and I was pretty chuffed with the results. I got rid of that camcorder a while ago though: due to some personal stuff I wasn't really putting out much content, so it was just gathering dust. A lot of my more recent content doesn't tend to use a fixed camera angle (POV, drone footage, motorbike vlog, etc), and my action camera handles that just fine. The lighting in both your vids was fine, it looks like the ambient lighting was more than enough. I wouldn't go too mad with studio lighting unless you think you really need it - the content is more important than the equipment you used to record it, and this stuff gets expensive fast.

Editing is a pain . For some vids - especially vids with overlays, graphics, etc - I'd spend 10x as long editing as I actually spend shooting . I tend to do most videos "off the cuff" these days and don't script things: if I get things wrong then I can always add corrections in the edit (text overlays, etc), and if I fluff lines I'm really not bothered.

With regards to the audio, it might just be a case of recording the audio separately to the video and stitching the tracks back together in the edit. Unless you get a fairly high-end camera then you're probably not going to have a lot of control over the gain/volume settings when you plug the mic into the camera - you'll get a lot more control using something like a laptop or a portable audio recorder. Using my phone to record audio has made things so much simpler for me now; it's a bit fiddly to export and convert the audio files from the iPhone (thank you Apple codecs...) but it's so much simpler overall. Lining up separate audio and video tracks can be a bit of a pain but there are ways around it. Once I'm recording both audio and video I'll usually clap in front of the camera - this gives me a nice reference point on both the audio and video track that I can use to line the two up later on (who needs a slate? ). It's important to make sure that the audio frequency settings are the same though - if your camera only records audio in 44.1kHz then don't record your mic at 48kHz. It can lead to some odd effects, such as one audio track playing back faster than the other one.

I like to set things up as much as possible before I start recording - white balance, gain levels, camera angles, etc - so that it makes my life easier when it comes to editing. Because of that I tend to shoot both audio and continuously and split up scenes later on - I find this a lot easier to work with than stitching together separate files. If I need to do any kind of editing on the audio (normalising, etc) I'll normally do that in Audacity before I import it into the video editor; final levelling and mixing can be done in the video editor, but there are limited tools in the video editor for things like normalising or compression (I use Sony Vegas Pro).