It’s recommended that you pick a game you’re good at and love playing, as your enthusiasm will show through. Avoid games that are used frequently for LP’s, like Minecraft, Super Mario 64, or Slender. An over-saturated audience is a bored audience. You also run the risk, which gets higher the more well-known the game, of your LP video getting lost in the mix. Avoid repetitive games.
Free Downloads: D3DGear and Fraps (free version only records for limited time and uses a watermark on the video). Macs come built in with Quicktime Player, so that’s cool. If you want better production values and features, consider purchasing something like Camtasia. On most of the operating systems utilising X Window System (e. g. Linux based systems, BSD software distributions, possibly Macs) you can use ffmpeg with vcodec x11grab to capture part of your desktop. It can get pretty technical, though, since ffmpeg is operated via a terminal. To capture footage from a video game console, you’ll need a capture card, a video card with video inputs, a DVD recorder, a FireWire/USB converter, or a camcorder with AV inputs that you can connect directly to the console.
‘Live-commentary’ (creating commentary while playing the game) is difficult - especially if doing a ‘blind’ run. If your commentary is not confident or easily turns to dead air, consider ‘Post-commentary’ (recording the game footage, performing editing and then adding the commentary) instead. Note that post-commentary can also be in a text form.
Greet the viewer, tell them your screen-name, and give a brief summary of what is going to happen in the video. Giving a brief recap of what happened in the last video can also be included. Keep the introduction short.
Windows Movie Maker (for Windows PC) or iMovie (for Mac) provide some basic features, but getting a more extensive video editing program is recommended. Cut out excessive mistakes or deaths. Make sure your commentary is in sync with the video. Watch the video through after editing to make sure there are no problems.
Watch the video after uploading to make sure everything uploaded correctly. If not, re-upload the video or re-encode, if necessary. Take pride in the quality of your work. Never upload or keep a video that has obvious problems. Consider using a program to compress your video, like x264, DivX, MediaCoder, AVISynth, etc. If done right, there is little impact to video quality and it reduces file size, upload time, and space used on your hard drive.
Posting your video to a Let’s Play community allows you to get helpful feedback. You can learn new and useful information from message boards and other players.
Don’t let haters win. Every Let’s player has at least one hater who just wants to annoy them. If you stop making videos, they win. You’ll have more fans than haters, so don’t let them get you down.
