Descrizione
Witness the journey of The Patches Patrol, a rag-tag group of miscreants and hooligans. In this episode, The Patrol mingles with the denizens of the famed Gank City...
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First and foremost, I must apologize to those of you who'd been waiting on me for so long.
If you've been watching this series and waiting for the next episodes, then you know of the fairly long absence and inactivity on my part that kept you all waiting. I must say I probably could have handled that better, as well as could have avoiding making you all think I'd left this for dead. Truth is, at the time of the stream we did, I was in full on production mode and had even nearly finished editing most of the previous episode. The stream went great, we got to interact with a lot of you guys and see your funny Patches creations. It was a great experience, so why did I go absent after the whole thing?
Simply put - it was because of a grave technical issue. Despite switching off Shadowplay and onto OBS for recording, and despite testings and my own assurances that recording issues were finally put to rest for good, something went gravely wrong. Really early into my recording of the stream, OBS for whatever reason decided it was no longer going to
pick up any audio besides me speaking. For about 85% of my footage, you could not hear the other 4 guys, you could not hear the game audio, or anything but my voice speaking amidst dead silence.
After closing the stream and calling it a night, I pulled up the footage to look through it a bit and discovered what happened. Suffice to say, my resolve was completely and utterly shattered. I sort of just snapped. I'd invested countless hours into technical troubleshooting and testing to make sure I was done with recording stutters, and instead I got that. I didn't really know what to do, I'd essentially just lost the entirety of the stream, which I'd openly stated would be its own episode. I didn't know how I could possibly lay down such a disappointing outcome to not only you guys, but also my friends who'd been collaborating so closely with me on this. So I just shut down, and I went on hiatus and began focusing more of my attention on making content for my other channel. The time went on and I got busy. I got a new job for a bit, Covid happened, I got
engaged, I went back to school, I began doing paid editing work for others, and so on. In the back of my mind leaving the Patches Patrol just sitting like that quietly ate at me, but I ignored it and hid from it.
It wasn't until recently I thought a bit harder about it and had a small epiphany. In fact, I cursed myself for not thinking of it sooner. One of the patrol members, our very own Expendable Patches, was the one actually streaming that night and he had provided me with the raw stream footage shortly after we finished up. He doesn't realize it, but he saved the episode. I was able to take the audio from his recordings, and match it over what was happening in my recordings, essentially solving the audio problem. There are still parts here and there where maybe you can notice it, and the small bit when I fought Aldrich couldn't be saved, but otherwise it was now intact. So I hustled and finally edited together the episode with renewed morale. And don't even get me started on the Lautrec bit, that was its own can of worms to which I owe another huge thanks to the guys for assisting me with.
Gotta say, I learned some things during my hiatus on this channel. Probably the most important thing I learned is that technical issues will be a forever prevalent problem in both recording and streaming, and that one must take creative approaches to solving them instead of letting them destroy the work you do. Now that I've got this fixed up and I've got
the guys rallied once more, it's prime time to finish things up - especially before Elden Ring hits us!
All's well that ends well, right?