Well, recording the Final Fantasy 14 wrestling match (primarily for my friend who is out of town but also for one of the performers who asked for access to the videos when I spoke with him about getting permission to record) went so well that I’ve become the unofficial videographer of the group now. The wrestler shared it with the rest of the group and they all loved it so much that I offered to keep recording the events for them, sharing the videos via a throwaway gmail account I have. I was clear that I wasn’tmaking a commitment to record every single event since I’m sure there will eventually be some I can’t attend and I’m not going to let this game get in the way of my non-digital life, but I plan to attend each event as long as it’s my choice and I’ve got the ability to record them relatively easily so I might as well. It was a relatively easy process, after all. I spent some time earlier today (I’m writing this on the day of the wrestling match while I wait for the videos to finish converting and then upload) messing around with my settings so I could get the best possible mixture of recording quality and file size. I chopped the entire event into smaller pieces, too, so that people wouldn’t be stuck watching a four-hour video and could instead focus on individual matches or how the pre and post match banter or events looked. I even titled and numbered them so that it would be legible to anyone what was going on. It wasn’t a lot of work, mind you. It took about thirty minutes to configure my setup–which I used for streaming back in the day–by messing with settings, recording stuff for a minute or two, checking the output, and then tweaking more stuff, but now I’ve got that set up and all I’ve got to do from now on is manage the recording software, process the final videos, and then upload them to my gdrive for my throwaway email account. Easy-peasy.

Going into this, I didn’t really expect a favorable reaction to this degree. I figured my contact, one of the people involved in the wrestling federation, gave me permission because one of his favorite fans (my friend) wouldn’t be able to see a big match he’s got coming up later the week this will be posted, but he seemed genuinely interested in the idea in his own right as I talked about it more and went through what I was doing to reassure him that I wouldn’t be posting the group’s creative expressions anywhere. After the fact, he was so excited by the idea that I couldn’t help but offer to keep it up. It’s so rare to get to see your creative work reflected like that, to find someone who is willing to do work to preserve what you’re doing and likes it enough to commit some of their own time to do something beyond consuming it, that I couldn’t help but want to provide that to this group. After all, they give us four-ish hours of free entertainment every week or two, so it feels like the least I could do to give back since I’m not a very active fan (and am so bad at recognizing which characters are which that I feel shy about talking to any of them after the matches).

I don’t have much planned for this next match aside from a fan stunt or two that some of my fellow guild members are doing, but I might also do a little silly stand-in type stuff for my friend who can’t be there since she normally plays the part of a silly, love-struck fan who is smitten with the dark, broody heel (the title for a villain in the wrestling world). That won’t take up much of the match, though, so I might spend a little time trying to get good vantage points and improve my camera work a bit so that the recordings I take can be higher quality and hopefully more valuable to the wrestlers. The people actually putting on the show are the audience for these videos, after all (other than my one friend, anyway), so I’m going to try to get a better mix of the ring and audience activity/participation this next time around since I pretty much ignored the audience last time (I even did my best to cut them out a lot of the time). I’ll probably ask this wrestler if he or his group has any particular requests or stuff they’d like me to pay special attention to, but there’s a limit on how much I can do, anyway. After all, as much as I want to record these videos for them, I am still there to watch some digital wrestling, be entertained, and roleplay with my friends. Who I should probably also let know that I’m recording and sharing these recordings since their messages to me will also show up in their videos and I do not have the editing chops to block out specific parts of the text boxes, only all the text boxes or none of them.

Which might be the thing to do, honestly. To create a separate text box for my group chats and figure out how to block that out. I already have one set aside specifically for the announcers and wrestler narration, so I could probably set aside another one. I’m only allowed to have four text boxes, though, so I’ll probably need to edit them every single time I go to record a match since I actually use three of them pretty regularly. It’s not difficult to do, mind you, just stuff I’ll need to remember to do. Which is maybe asking a lot seeing as I keep forgetting to change my “display effects” settings back to my normal setup after matches. It’s great to have that stuff on during the match so I can see all the special effects the wrestlers and the support folks are doing, but it’s difficult to have it all on for the rest of the game because, during larger-group activities, it quickly becomes overwhelming to see that much activity on the screen all at once. Like just the other night I didn’t realize I’d forgotten to set things back to normal until I did a 24-person raid and was quickly overstimulated by everything happening on screen, but I couldn’t figure out how to turn it off while I was in the raid and just had to push through it for the full thirty minutes of often-overwhelming visuals. Maybe I need a checklist of some kind. That’d probably help me move my settings back and forth and, if I’m going to record all these matches, it’ll be worth the time to write it all down.