Disclaimer: I'm going to assume that we want to keep the current video format. From the feedback we get, people really like it and while the majority of our viewers may not notice all of the small details, inside jokes, and references those reflect one of our project's core motivations: The deep love for Morrowind (or The Elder Scrolls) and the will to save it from the ravages of time and to keep it alive with a modern, cross-platform, open-source engine. As I've stated in the past, the release videos have always been a major part of each release (0.13.0+) and there are quite a few people who only loosely follow our project but get really excited when a new release video arrives.
That particular approach leads to a drastically increased amount of time needed to produce videos that hold up to that standard compared to a more superficial visual change log or a video concentrating on only a few core features. It also makes dividing the production into smaller chunks more difficult, as the format requires a strong coupling between general narration, in-scene narration, scene transitions (auditory and visual), actual scene footage, and background music. At least in my workflow, there are constant feedback loops between all these aspects, and simply splitting tasks up between several people may cause issues.
Some in-depth thoughts on dividing tasks:
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Splitting tasks horizontally; several tasks per person are possible
- Narration: general and scene-specific
- Footage: in-game and editor scenes
- Audio: in-game music and sound effects, backgroud music
- Cutting: putting everything together
- Dubbing: timing and content of closed captions
- (Translation: translation of script and closed captions)
- (Thumbnail: creating the thumbnail)
- Supervisor: coordination, upload management
Evaluation:
- (+) The workload for a single person would be significantly smaller.
- (+) Supervision and more eyes on the product could make it less error-prone.
- (-) The abovementioned coupling between all these tasks would require a constant communication between all parties, with everyone feeding their results back into the pipeline. Given a good chemistry between all team members, it should be possible, but a noticeable increase of total production time (not time until completion!) is to be expected.
- (-) Who creates the core concept? There has to be a basis which the different branches build upon. This is a non-trivial and tedious task, even more so as additional information is needed compared to the one-person-does-it-all approach.
- (-) It would be extremly difficult to maintain the usual narrative and visual consistency of our videos.
- (?) Speculation: Recruiting volunteers might turn out to be a problem.
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Splitting tasks vertically; several tasks per person are possible
- Intro and Outro (engine and editor)
- Main Engine Part 1
- Main Engine Part 2
- ...
- Main Editor Part 1
- Main Editor Part 1
- ...
- Supervisor: coordination
Evaluation:
- (+) The workload for a single person would be significantly smaller.
- (+) Supervision and more eyes on the product could make it less error-prone.
- (+) Internal consistency of the main parts.
- (-) We still need constant and good communication, although not as much as with the horizontal approach.
- (-) Who creates the core concept? Despite the vertical division, there needs to be a concept for the whole video and a list of issues to be covered for all main parts. Additional information might be necessary and must be coordinated by the supervisor.
- (-) The supervisor needs to take some extra effort to maintain overall consistency of the videos.
- (?) Speculation: Recruiting volunteers might turn out to be a problem.
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Splitting engine video production and editor video production
- Engine Video Producer
- Editor Video Producer
- (Supervisor)
Evaluation:
- (+) Only two volunteers needed.
- (+) Consistency of both videos is easily maintained.
- (+) Communication between the producers may speed up the production process and reduce errors.
- (+/-) That's still a huge amount of work for both producers, but most certainly less than in case of a single producer.
- (-) The engine video usually requires a lot more work than the editor one: there not only tend to be much more solved issues for the engine than for OpenMW-CS, but recording the footage is more tedious and less predictable than for our editor. Also, cutting and rendering are much more time-consuming. So we are still left with a significant imbalance.
- (-) Start of video production needs to be timed so that both producers are availabe.
- (?) Who wants to be the second producer?
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I know that these are the extreme cases and that derived or mixed forms are possible. Feel free to give it some more thought and correct me when necessary.
Finally, a (possibly incomplete) overview of things we already "outsource" to make video production more efficient...
- Proof-reading of the script (technical)
- Proof-reading of the script (semantic and syntactic)
- Evaluation of WIP versions of the videos
- (Translation of closed captions)
... and a list of things we could outsource as well as their estimated effectiveness:
- Conceptual input: suggestions and concrete concepts for parts of the video => potentially big time gain; already done in some cases; can be done before the release phase starts
- Footage: recording of footage for major features or features that are best presented with certain mod setups => varying time gain; highly specific for each release; e.g., shadows feature
- Dubbing: timing and content of closed captions => saves a couple of hours; difficult to do without a somewhat finished video
- (Translation: translation of script and closed captions => saves a couple of hours; can be started with WIP script)
- Thumbnail: creating the thumbnail => minimal time gain; can be done before the video is finished
- Upload management: video upload, video description, publishing => minimal time gain
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Conclusion: Under the assumption that we want to keep the current video format, turning video production into a team effort may be problematic. However, smaller changes to support the main producer(s) may yield noticeable results. From my perspective, a team of two producers which closely work together - maybe one focussing on the engine video and one on the editor video - is the closest we can get in terms of dividing the workload without running into new issues. Moreover, more input before the start of the actual release phase may help reducing production time. We've already done that to a certain extent and it helped a lot with categorising issues and building up the narrative of the videos.