Category: Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep

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Murderlin’s Temple – Borderlands 2 S05E04 – Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep – True Vault Hunter Mode

I don’t really have much to say about this video, as I seemed to spend most of it locked behind a grate trying to futilely assist JBG as he bravely fought all manner of magic creatures alone.

The slaughter missions seem to be very ‘marmite’ moments, in that they’re either incredible fun, or just more hassle than they’re worth. Sadly, this one seemed to fall into the latter category.

All manner of high level enemies was bad enough, but that coupled with numerous floor traps, flames and a precipice all around the level that meant instant death meant that staying alive in these missions was a real feat of achievement. One which I summarily failed to achieve.

I doubt I’ll be back, sorry Murderlin.

My overriding memory of this video has little to do with the gameplay and everything to do with the slog it was to bring together as a functioning video.

We’d been using facecam for a while and noticed some issues with lipsync for videos over an hour. This video was the first time we really started to get to grips with it.

We discovered MS Camera was recording at a much lower framerate than it reported. All our gameplay is recorded 30fps @48000Khz The camera was recording 14fps @44100Khz.

The short term solution was to eventually transcode the source webcam from 14fps to 30fps and then use that in Premiere Pro. They lipsync drift was solved at the cost of 3hrs additional transcoding before we ever got to start editing the video. We immediately started seeking a quicker solution.

The answer was OBS (Open Broadcast Software) which takes the webcam footage and codes it on the fly to our required 30fps @48000Khz. It wasn’t perfect by any measure, in fact, it was a step back in the quality of the captured chroma key background, but that’s a story for another day.

In the meantime, my memory of the gameplay itself was that I kicked arse once I realised running around the level was a bad idea and holding our ground was the way forward. My high powered, movement limiting shield helped a lot.

 

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An Emotional Conclusion – Borderlands 2 S05E03 – Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep – True Vault Hunter Mode

When we started this video, we assumed we’d get the final mission wrapped up, and maybe even have time to take in one of the side missions. How wrong we were!

This turned into one of our longer videos, despite cutting out a fair portion in the middle where we found ourselves wandering around the dungeons trying to find our way out!

Tina threw the kitchen sink at us in terms of combat, and we barely had time to draw breath as we fought our way to the top of the tower to take on the Handsome Sorceror in the final battle of this story. The identity of the queen had JBG guessing right up until the end, and led to a real laugh out loud moment when she was revealed.

A very strong ending to this DLC, and one which almost made me weep the first time I played it through.

JBG touches on some of the technical challenges faced in the production and editing of this video, and I need to offer an apology for the annoying level of keyboard and mouse sound on my side. I experimented with using the microphone on my webcam for this video, not realising that it picked up much more of the clicking of keyboard and mouse. Lesson learned!

You could not accuse the developers of the Tina DLC of cutting corners for the finale. It was non-stop for nigh on 90 minutes, with wave after wave of opponents to the very top of the tall tower and the face-off with multiple incarnations of the Handsome Jack bad guy wizard. It’s full-on.

The ending is both poignant and hilarious and is worth the battle to experience it, especially if you liked the characters and story narrative of the main game play-through.

Technically this video was the first time we realised the audio sync on the webcams was drifting when tied with the gameplay. Or the webcam video was drifting from the audio. You can see it on both our videos but more noticeably on AD’s.

The drift turned out to be Microsoft’s Camera application recording at some odd FPS well below the 30fps it reported it was recording. The framerate meant the audio drifted noticeably from 1hr+ when synched with actual 30fps video.

Most issues we can resolve during the edit, sometimes we can’t as was the case here. We apologise for the lack of lipsync at the end of this video.
The short term solution will be to transcode the webcam footage including the audio to 30fps before editing, but that’s a time sink in itself.

Going forward, we will need to find an alternative to MS Camera.

 

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Befriending Dwarves – Borderlands 2 S05E02 – Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep – True Vault Hunter Mode

Tiny Tina’s DLC continues to offer up some great combat, although a few of the supposedly humorous parts of this campaign fell a little flat for us. Having to repeatedly die attempting an impossible puzzle, only for the ‘joke’ to be revealed wasn’t particularly fun.

That said, the rest of this episode was really enjoyable, offering up lots of varied combat against a good mixture of enemies of different levels.

I’m particularly pleased with the way these videos are turning out now. The newly-added facecams add a new dimension, and if anything are forcing us to be a bit more descriptive and communicative, knowing otherwise the bottom third of the video is taken up by two relatively static images of us starting slack-jawed out our monitors!

My recollection is that this DLC finishes really strongly, so I’m looking forward to continuing the series.

The second hour of our Tiny Tina adventure was great fun if you ignore the puzzle that only reveals it’s impossible to solve after you’ve killed yourself several times trying to solve it. That sort of game mechanic annoys the shit out of me.

The rest is of good quality and great fun. The setting is medieval with a dungeons and dragons flavour, and taking on bows and arrows with SMG’s and shotguns does sometimes feel a little unfair but…

On the technical front, we are starting to hit our stride now with the facecam. One of the rules we imposed on ourselves when we created the channel was that bringing the separate video feeds together as the final product should not become an industry in itself. Of course, it has been a learning curve. The goal has been to spend no more than an hour putting together each video. The first videos took three hours, but once the process was in the bag I got it down to 30 minutes, and then we introduced something else, that took it back to three hours, and then process and practice brought it sub 60 minutes again.

One of the biggest technical challenges at the beginning was synchronising two videos onto one screen. Synchronising the videos involved a lot of frame counting, subtracting frame counts, shifting timelines back and forth until I discovered you could select both sequences in Premiere Pro, right-click and select synchronise!

All hail synchronise. It doesn’t do it precisely every time; usually, it’s a couple of frames out. But adjusting those last few frames is a few minutes over the frustrating 20 minutes it was.

Hopefully, we’ll get to share more insight into the technical aspects of GreyOps over the coming weeks.

Have fun, see you soon.

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Tina in Denial – Borderlands 2 S05E01 – Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep – True Vault Hunter Mode

Tiny Tina’s DLC is a bit of a departure from the normal Borderlands fare. Instead of taking on the usual opponents, this DLC sees us fighting Orcs, trees, knights and various other fantastical creatures. Doing it with sniper rifles and rocket launchers does seem a little out of place however!

As seems fairly standard with the add-on content, the early levels are a little weak, but this DLC soon gets into its stride giving us some decent bouts of combat. Tina quickly tugs at our heart strings, seemingly unable to accept that Roland is dead. This theme continues throughout the DLC, and I remember the ending being particularly poignant.

This video also continues the evolution of our video presentation, and now sees JBG and I appearing in the videos in full HD glory, allowing you the dubious pleasure of watching us as we commentate on our various escapades.

I’m looking forward to continuing this DLC, as my recollection is that it builds to a very strong conclusion.

My first impressions of Tiny Tina’ DLC were not positive. Skeletons are one thing, but shooting walking trees are another. I’m glad we were committed to playing the DLC though because it gets a lot better once you are past the first orc village.

Throughout the campaign, there is a good blend of opponents ranging from skeletons, knights, archers, sorcerers and orcs. Throw in a dragon or two too.

Tina’s DLC has an excellent narrative on loss as well. It is very powerful, starting with the introduction of a story favourite at the end of this first episode.

If you have been watching our videos for a while (and who wouldn’t) you will notice a few changes in the layout; for a start, you can now see our faces. In just a few weeks, we have gone from having a twirling avatar beneath each of our screens to a gnarly face overlaid on the background and video.

Creating that sort of video overlay with a transparent background takes a certain level of technology; namely a greenscreen. Once we decided we were going to have our faces and then saw that we each either had a wardrobe in the background or a bookcase, it wasn’t a great leap to decide greenscreen was the future. We both bought the same fold-out green screen, which is excellent but HUUGE! Also folding it back up is an art form in itself.

Greenscreen is a challenge in every video because the screen must be well and evenly lit to remove it from the video. Currently, AD and I use bright off the shelf ceiling bulbs. If you see any static in the background or the transparent background isn’t entirely transparent, it is because we’re recording in the spare room and not in a studio. We have found recording the facecam at 1080P with a high resolution does result in a lot less static.

There have been challenges at every step creating these videos and still are, it’s one of the reasons they’re worth making. As we go forward, we’ll be discussing them and the solutions in greater detail. If you want videos demonstrating the process, let us know in the video comments.

For now, have fun. See you in the next one.