For the past few months, I've been playing around with Davinci Resolve for making gaming content. For a while now, I've kind of had that itch to try something new. It provided its own new challenges, thrills, and it did another thing for me. It reinvigorated my enjoyment of making content.

For those who don’t know. Way back in what must have been the early 2010’s decade. I was a YouTuber. I made maybe a hundred or so videos before some stuff went down, and I wiped that channel and hung up my content creation hat. Until 2017, when I started making written content.

I’ve never been one to talk a lot. So every time, many around me said I should really get into video content again. It was an easy no. These days, however, it’s hard to use that as an excuse anymore with how text-to-speech has become more of a thing.

It’s also kind of crazy how quickly prices have gone down. Just a couple of months ago, when I looked into what I could afford to use. I was working out that it costs around $100-$500 per month to meet my needs in the higher-end places. Now, with so much competition, it looks like I'll be needing to reevaluate the free options I have been using up till this point. As those are no longer the prices being charged.

Something that I have found crazy in my journey so far is just how quickly I'm able to render videos. I recall back in the day, a short 15-minute or so video would have taken my computer hours. It would have sat at 100% CPU, and with some of the GPU being used but not fully. My computer back then would not have been usable at all.

With my current setup. I can render a 43 minutes of video in just 8 minutes. Rendering is no longer my bottleneck. In fact, it almost feels too quick. It’s also kind of funny as a 53-second clip takes ten seconds to render.

My biggest bottleneck, other than editing, is now upload speeds. I don’t have that great of an upload speed. Sometimes I'm even able to edit, write a script, convert it into speech, and splice it into a video. Then render, and work on a few things in a short amount of time, then it takes to upload.

Hogging upload speed also causes issues for others in the household. Granted, I'm now uploading at speeds like I could have only dreamed of back in the day. I recall sometimes trying to get an upload started before going to bed. Letting the computer run all night and hoping I would not get caught in the morning for “leaving” it on and wasting power.

With the amount of time I have to work on content in a given week. For now, it’s not so much an option to upload to multiple platforms at once. Unless I see a huge reason to do so. While I could get a better upload speed. Spending around $200 a month on just internet is out of the question for the time being.

Next up comes storage. While many see me as some insane gamer. I have rather cheap monitors, with one on its last leg. I don’t take screenshots, let alone record at that high a resolution. At least there is nothing people can do these days. So a recording in a game like Eve Online tends to be under 3 gigs an hour. Other games can go as high as 15 gigs of storage an hour. With the rendered video taking up under a noticeable but a lot less than the raw footage ends.

I remember back in the day. I was so hard-pressed for storage space. I’d sometimes be deleting not only the raw files but also the renders of them, the moment uploading to YouTube.

While I don’t have an insane amount of storage these days. It’s not an issue having over a terabyte of files to edit, as I've sometimes run into. I'm rather thankful I bought the storage I did before today's prices. As there is no way I'd spend $300 on a 2 TB SSD these days.

Over the past few months, there has been a lot of learning and so many mistakes in DaVinci Resolve. A few times, I've even thought I was done. Hit render, and then afterward watch the final product. Just to realize, when I went to cut out a section or edit the timing of a frame, it caused total mayhem that I did not notice while editing. Forcing me to start from scratch after failing to try to fix the issue that I ended up creating.

With all of that ended up coming to my Anathema Adventures series of exploring mostly wormholes in Eve Online. It was this kind of series that really pushed things for me in having to learn new stuff and deal with a lot of recorded footage.

Sometimes I could go out for hours and barely have anything worth using. That is kind of how exploring and running exploration sites in wormholes and other areas of the game goes in Eve.

It is kind of crazy when you end up cutting down six hours of footage into just 45 minutes or even less. It gets to the point where it changes how you think about doing something. As the way you were doing it worked great when dealing with less than an hour of footage. It, however, fails to hold up when dealing with something a lot bigger.

Each one also game with it’s own issues. The first one I noticed was quite off after getting through the entire process, and it had finished uploading. Thankfully, I had yet to release it, so I had to redo large sections of it and reupload the entire thing.

The next one after that some time has passed, and I thought I had made some changes in how I went about editing for the better. I also wanted to add in some extra stuff that required having multiple timelines, soundtracks, and other stuff going on. After far too many hours of what felt like I was bashing my head on a wall. I went back to things, still being a bit simpler.

This was one of those the project got out of control, and I was not ready for it yet kind of deals. I still needed to learn a lot of things by just endless hours of editing and trying out different features, settings, and using different tabs of DaVinci Resolve to fine-tune things.

By the third one, which ended up being my bigger “success “of the series, if you could call it that. I became more aggressive with my editing. It takes a lot of writing to just fill up a couple of minutes. I wanted to combat the more dead space I had.

There was also another thing I was working on. Trying to have a better catch at the start. The numbers I got back ended up showing how big a difference putting a lot more focus on the start of the video made.

There was also a lot more other stuff going on in the background, in how I ended up trying to get this video to get more views. Which is kind of funny, as the description is, in fact, a lot shorter and even less effort put into it. There is however, a lot of factors that I've slowly been learning and thinking about.

Finally, you have today. Where I had six different videos, I ended up weaving them together to make a single one. I wanted it more on the shorter side, like the one before it. That, however, was just not going to happen. Also, with the way things unfolded, cutting it in half and making two videos out of it was just not going to work.

At one point, I had almost eight hours of footage down to about two. Then I went back through it again and got it down to an hour and a half. Still, that is just way too long. So I went in and was the most aggressive I have ever been in cutting footage. While I could not quite get it down to where I wanted it. It’s a miracle it’s only 43 minutes in length.

It was also at this point in all the things that I've been learning to edit. Where I got to add in little things here or there. I could now add in text. Not hard to do, but I end up having to learn everything on my own as I go. I had a much shorter project where I ended up working out that.

There were also a few things I did on the audio side. I don’t have the best headphones ever, so on my end, it’s not a huge change from how it was. It was, however, a lot of little things that have been adding up over time.

Now the biggest issue is really just the annoying background sound I've failed to get out of the text-to-speech. I’ve tried a lot of settings. I’ve even considered just using a different one. It’s still something I'm fighting with, at least for now.

Final Thoughts

The last two or so years for me as a content creator have been a struggle. It’s hard to keep putting in the level of energy I had been putting in and not feeling like I am making forward progress. Even when it seemed like things were moving along again. Months later, down the road, I'd just hit another road bump.

For now, making videos has brought back that old feeling. That feeling I had back in 2017 that I slowly lost year after year. I’m not exactly sure where things are going to go from here. Making both written and video content takes more time than I have. I’ve made some attempts over the past two weeks that just did not work out enough to publish.

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Content created by @Enjar.