A Return to Vlogging, Thoughts on Time
In a previous post, I announced my new youtube channel, in which I posted some videos of myself playing chess on chess.com
After taking the time to make a few videos, I gave up, since it seemed difficult to continualy post new material. I didn't think I had the time, especially considering my professional responsibilities and the time I took for maintaining several blogs (this one, Science on the Squares, and Just Me and Eubacteria).
Things haven't gotten less busy; in fact, I have more or less abandoned my blogs (Even here I had planned on posting some more games and never got around to it). I am now a parent of a beautiful baby daugther. Time has become a precious commodity, and everything in life can feel like a game of blitz now, everything feel like you're in time trouble.
Between being a parent and a professor, where can one find time for a mere 'game' (of course, chess is as grand as a game as they come), or trival pursuits such as a blog about chess. I'm sure finding time for the game is a pernnial problem, especially for adult players such as myself.
However, despite dropping other extra activities, I still managed to find time for an odd blitz game here or there; in fact, it's a fun way to take a break that doesn't take a lot of time. I decided to try and maximize this experience by once again capturing it on video; the idea being to make the most of your time.
Once again I was faced with the challenge ever aspiring chess youtube streamer has; how do I produce the videos and make them high quality (i.e. as close to Chessexplained or John Bartholomew's videos as possible) with the least effort?
As you can see from my videos, both those from 9 months ago and the more recent ones, it is a trial and error process to get it right; I found that I first had to get the right software, get the right setup and calibrate the audio. Then I needed to calibrate myself, training not to mumble, to articulate my thoughts, and to speak loudly. Thus, the first few videos aren't that good, but practice makes perfect.
With regards to the software, I think that Open Broadcaster Software is the way to go if you have Windows. This is the software I used to make the more recent videos; it is free, easy to use, and has great functionalities. If you work with it abit, you can produce high quality videos like you see others have made on youtube.
Here is one of my latest efforts: I still need to work on the placement and size of the board, but I hope you enjoy the commentary! Please leave comments or questions on youtube, and please subscribe if you enjoyed.
For the sake of variety, I will also be making videos from lichess.org, which has some interesting chess variants:
