• I use OBS Studio to capture lossless video, for extracting the screenshots later. Uses up a lot of disk space but necessary for high-quality screenshots. I'll take some notes as I play for any "live" reactions I want to capture.
  
• I open up the resulting AVI file in VirtualDub2 and basically play back through it while writing up my commentary on it, pausing and picking individual frames to extract as screenshots or short clips as animated GIFs as I go. I have the menu shortcuts so thoroughly muscle-memorized I can do it in my sleep now I think. I also use it to resize the screenshots/gifs to the recommended maximum 900 pixel width as they're captured. There are other cool filters for simple effects - cropping, rotating, grayscale, etc. Probably better options out there but it's the one I learned on and it's still effective for me so I still use it. I might look at Avidemux someday.
  
• For any further image manipulation, I use Irfanview. Mostly for easily cropping/resizing individual images while maintaining transparency; important for icons and stuff.
  
• I write each update in basic Notepad, pulling screenshots as I go. For each image I'll put in the update text a tag for it based on the file name I gave the image (ie: [Image1]). It'll be more clear why I'm so specific on that in a moment...
  
• I use ShareX to batch-upload the images for the update, and Lpix as the image host. ShareX allows copying all of the image URLs at once after a batch-upload by shift-selecting all of them. I paste this set of links into a separate Notepad file...
  
• I run the command-line utility Rightload Url Replace that still works fine even though I'm uploading with ShareX these days. It takes all the image links in one Notepad file, and replaces any tags in another Notepad file with the URLs. So [Image1] becomes a fully-postable URL within image tags with a lot less work. This one step saved me so much time and frustration I can't recommend it any harder. I also keep all my commonly-reused images (for talking-heads on dialogue lines that I put in writing between screenshots, for example) in the image file so they always get automatically replaced in every update.
  
• From there I just use the "Preview Reply" option when posting to make sure everything actually came out right and find/fix any typos I can. You can check the length that way as well (number of images/characters/vertical scroll space), though I agree looking for natural stopping points is better than trying to enforce some artificial minimum/maximum on any of those.
  
• I use EasyPolls.net for making polls for audience input; much easier than tabulating votes, and let's you solicit input from the lurkers or others without accounts. Then I use ShareX to capture a screenshot of the page with the poll results afterward. There are tons of other options here though.

DKII fucked around with this message at 06:02 on Apr 26, 2024