Inspired by the plethora of Cyanide YouTube activity and the slight paucity of the equivalent for FUMBBL (with a nod to Ehlers who came before me) I have had a go at YouTubing a few different things on the site in order to suck people in - here's how I went about it.

I started with a combination of Debut screen capture, Audacity recording software and Windows Movie Maker to join the two together. Debut allows you to capture a rectangle of your screen as a video, so could capture just the FUMBBL window. I then spoke along with whatever was happening and recorded it in Audacity, and was also able to go back and edit the recording if I felt it was needed. The downside was the many hours that Movie Maker needed to process the video, and then the many hours to upload.

Using this technique, I did a few different things, including a tactical analysis of a few Lizardman games, a couple of fun games with random commentary, and introductions to Ranked, Blackbox and the RTTNAFC tournament, and you can find all of these on the YouTube! channel.

With YouTube however, you can do Live Events, and this reduced the processing time considerably as the video went live straight away. Though there is less flexibility in editing, I found I wasn't doing much editing anyway, so it wasn't a huge problem. In order to live stream, I downloaded Open Broadcast Software (OBS), which is again free, and you can select a particular window to stream, or combine different elements in once scene (putting overlays etc. on to identify your channel).

So what's the point? One of the great things about FUMBBL is the replay function, which means you can hover over players to your heart's content, fast forward, pause and rewind. How is this better? The audio is the big difference really, hopefully an insight into what the other coaches are thinking. I also recorded the RTTNAFC final recently, which had the commentary included and all the spectator noises.

Inspired by the different ways that video could be used, I moved on to recording tabletop Blood Bowl, which has its own challenges. Hope this inspires more people to produce commentated matches or perhaps segments of replays - ideas also welcome. I've been planning for a while to do one that shows all the possibilities of the tool, plus one on test mode. In terms of commentary a "joint commentary" would be interesting, with a recorded match and two people discussing it on Skype.

The possibilities are endless...