Space Engineers bullshittery - Update #1

Good evening folks. An update several days after the polls - Space Engineers was the clear winner with 771 votes. Thank you very much for voting all. It's much appreciated.

I've already made a solid start. Three things to talk about in this update:

• The process of "nesting" at the start of the project

• The character of the footage reviewed so far.

• The retrieval of an offsite storage device because of some data loss (?).

Mostly for the new Patrons, I've begun what I call "nesting" in preparation for cutting a compilation of highlights. Nesting is the name Adobe Premiere gives to the act of making a new clip from an existing piece of footage on your timeline.

For example, take a 3 hour .mp4 file (created by OBS during the livestream), then cut a 30 second segment out of it, then right click 'Nest...' to make a 30 second clip on its own independent timeline.

These nested clips are then properly named with something identifiable. Something I can pick out in a glance. Essentially the first part of making a bullshittery is to find the highlights I want to play with. And making sure I can drag and drop them.

How am I finding the highlights? Well they're hinted at in the notes I keep alongside the streams. Timestamps made during the streams themselves using a plugin called INFOWRITER. Activated with a button press on a plastic stream deck.

Nesting is the process in which these timestamps are reviewed. And either kept in the master and properly named. Or simply discarded. Making a big bucket of clips to select through. 40-50 of them making your average bullshittery.

I need to admit an annoying problem of the initial nesting - not all of the saved livestreams have attached notes.

This is almost always due to human error. Perhaps the text file was not properly saved, or something caused it to be deleted. There are special cases, such as VR, where you can't easily reach the button But in this case it's just human error. I'm pretty sure I failed to transfer over some notes in a reformat in 2023.

I had 8 streams without notes. Sorry about that.

I call these the 'unnested and unscrubbed'. And what I've done is convert them into .mp3 files and have had them play on my headphones as I've been moving around the house this week, walking the dog, or doing cleaning. Remaking the timestamps from scratch.

That process is now complete and the notes have been properly recreated. Resuming nesting.

The second thing to talk about is the character of the footage reviewed so far. There is a notable heavier presence of longform discussions this time around.

Things like Rocket League would be the polar opposite. The gameplay too fast paced to have a jovial discussion about one topic. But it appears that the last few big sessions of Space Engineers have heavily featured space travel or player isolation on various planets. Rather than one big build on the same base. We kept each other company by bantering on teamspeak, rather than directly interacting with each others grids.

I suspect this will affect the cut by having the visuals not directly correlate to the comedic audio in many scenes. Mag describing something funny that happened to him at work, for example. With Mag being on the planet of Triton and me streaming in orbit around Mars.

I'll be able to report back with more information after an initial bullshittery cut in a few days.

The last thing to mention is my need to retrieve an offsite backup device.

For some reason, there are 4 of the streams which Premiere can't seem to retrieve. For reasons unknown. I know they exist as I have their notes. But they don't appear to be in the master.

My mum has been kind enough to store an off-site backup device in a box in her loft. I gave it to her just in case I have a fire or break in or something. Even if I lost my PC's, I'd be able to rapidly recover the business end of things.

I'll pop over this weekend and retrieve the storage device. Try to figure out why these 4 streams are missing.

So right now, please bear with me. I'm assembling clips, trimming others down and properly nesting them. I'll report in next with a draft cut and more information on how it's going. Thanks all.