Setting Up A Twitch Studio - Workflow from hairylarry's blog

Everyone wants to buy equipment but nobody wants to think about workflow. Yet, without a well defined idea about anticipated workflow it's difficult to even know what equipment to buy.

One of the advantages of livestreaming is simplified workflow. For instance.

Prepare for the stream.

Do the stream performance.

Check your stats.

Twitch keeps your streams online and it's possible to download them if there's one you want to save. I press the record button in Streamlabs OBS and record everything. So I need big hard drives, video eats disk space. This is how workflow drives equipment purchases.

My workflow is more complicated because my livestream is also a video production environment. I am livestreaming my shows. But I am also producing song videos of me playing my original songs. This is where workflow is most important.

Because there's this thing about video production. It's time consuming. So if you're going to do a lot of video production it's important to simplify your workflow or you end up bogged down in post production. This leads to the dreaded post production backlog where you are unable to keep up and end up with unwatched video footage that you worked to make but will never see the light of day.

The only way I know of to avoid post production backlog is to finish with post before you produce more video. When your performance is on a schedule, like mine, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday at 3:00 PM Central, you have to be able to zoom through post production and uploading your videos. There is only two or three days until the next performance.

So here's my workflow.

Pre Production

Write songs.

Create backing tracks.

Learn the songs well enough to practice them.

Production

Perform the stream which is livestreamed over twitch, recorded on twitch, and recorded on my hard drive.

Post Production

Log the show.

Create the song videos.

Upload the videos to my peertube instance for easy viewing and to my NextCloud  file sharing site for best quality downloads.

https://peertube.hairylarry.rocks/video-channels/twitch/videos

https://hairylarryland.com/nextcloud/index.php/s/Z9RFW4QS6XGa3qo

Promotion

Share links to the songs on my blogs, websites, and social media.

Upload song videos to Youtube or other websites.

I will do an article on promotion later.

Now I want to discuss Post Production and just how I manage to produce a handful of song videos every two days.

I watch the whole show on twitch logging the songs start and end times and marking the songs that should be excerpted for song videos. I add other comments while logging. Most commonly I note where the song video should begin because I don't always hit the groove right from the top.

This takes a little bit longer than it took to play the stream. Producing the log is only part of the purpose here. I am also monitoring my stream quality as viewed on twitch and I am learning from my performance.

For editing my videos I use OpenShot because of ease of use.

I load the stream recorded to the hard drive into OpenShot and I do a rough cut of the songs beginning and end.

I zoom in and fix the cuts to exactly where i want them. I leave the spoken intros and outtros where possible.

I use templates for my title and credits screens changing only the song title. I add them to the video and I place the fades to go from title to video and from video to credits.

This goes really fast. While I still have the song loaded in the editor I do a quality control viewing. Sometimes I decide the song isn't really good enough to post. Sometimes I choose different edit points. Most of the time I am happy with the song and deem it ready to upload. So besides checking the song I am also doing another learning pass listening again to my best performances. So I play the song, log the song and select it for post production, and then I listen again for quality control. This repeated listening may be the most valuable part of my piano practice.

Sometimes I want to include the spoken intro and then start the song later in the performance. This takes only one extra cut. To avoid a jump cut I zoom in on the spoken part so it's just a video of me talking. Then when I start playing I'm back to full screen making a very natural transition. Here's an example.

Bunnies

https://peertube.hairylarry.rocks/videos/watch/955242be-6dd2-45f9-b2cb-a09a49b15a1a

Here's a video from the same show without the zoomed in intro.

Eventually

https://peertube.hairylarry.rocks/videos/watch/ebdd8dcb-cfde-413d-b7ec-fbbad81d6e9a

Today's Monday. My last stream was two hours on Saturday. I logged the stream Saturday night. Sunday I produced Something Blue and uploaded it to KASU. So today I get to produce eight song videos. I know I will be able to finish this today, no problem, because of my streamlined workflow.

Because tomorrow I'll be playing another show.