Recording Hardware

We all record on Apple Macbook Pros and don't (right now) use any other hardware or interfaces. This tends to pose a problem when we're recording in the same room if someone doesn't have a mic with noise-cancelling.

Headsets

We've used a number of headphone/mic combos over the years. When Ingrimmm is rocking solo he uses the Blue Yeti Pro because it's a phenomenal mic at a (relatively) low cost. It's way too sensitive if there are other people in the room tho so when there's a group of us we use the Sennheiser Game One (PC) Headphones. If you have a laptop (like the new Macs) you'll need something to convert the Mic and Headphone lines to something your computer can recognize with some headsets (like the Sennheiser, or even some of the Turtle Beaches). We use the Sabrent Mic/Headphone to USB dongles cuz they look sexy, are well-built, and are friggin perfect.

Recording Software

We all use Screenflow (MAC) by Telestream.

In the past (when Ingrimmm used to record on his PC) we used Camtasia Studio but stopped for two reasons - 1) no one else had a PC so the file formats didn't match and, 2) Camtasia is great but SUPER slow at saving files. We used have to wait for upwards of 20-30 min for a one-hour recording to save. So play for one hour, save to avoid crashing from huge file size (which CS didn't like), wait 30 min for Camtasia to finish, rinse and repeat. Not ideal. Also Camtasia Studio could NOT handle MC running in full-screen. We found out the hard way that it will just record a solid blank screen.

Recording Settings

We upload to YouTube with a minimum quality of 1080p. File sizes tend to run heavy - about 2 GB for a 30 minute file - so we have a 20 Mbps upload pipe from Comcast.

Multiple Recordings at Once

This can actually get pretty complicated so I put it as it's own section - click here.

We each have our own copy of the recording software, and we each have a LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 1 TB 9000488 drive that we each save our recordings to. To keep track of when/whose recording each file is/was we name them something like Ingrimmm - LEGENDS - YYYYMMDD - 001 so that everything stays organized over time.

Once a drive is full, or a major recording session is over, everyone gives thier hard drives to Ingrimmm who swaps them out for empty ones, and pulls all the recordings onto a LaCie 2big Dual Thunderbolt-2 USB 3.0 2-Bay RAID Hard Drive 6TB (9000437U) to consolidate and archive them.

This setup is expensive but the rotating system of drives means we don't have to worry about people running out of HDD space on thier computer or not having a thumb drive big enough to transfer all the files.

To consolidate our Audio we all log into something like Discord or Teamspeak and join a private channel. This lets us hear people that aren't in the same (physical) room, or talk to people who parachute in mid-recording to see what's goin on. We'll typically do this even when we're all in the same room just because it's easier to make sure everyone's audio is being captured.

All the recordings are then pulled into a single Screenflow project and we sit and re-watch everything and figure out whose screen had something interesting going on, put them in the forefront then add things like the "GRIMM-CAM ACTIVATED" overlay and fade-in/fade-out transitions so the camera views switch over nicely. Each of the audio and video tracks are synchronized too so that everyone's audio and video lines up and don't accidentally overlap or lag too far behind.

We're all running Macbook Pros with between 8 GB and 16 GB of RAM (memory). We usually give Minecraft between 4-8 GB of memory depending on how many mods are in the pack and what resolution texturepack we're using.

We use the Sphax PureBDCraft texturepack almost exclusively. We typically run the x64 resolution because our computers can handle it, and it's the most common resolution for the modpack specific patches (meaning most of the modded blocks have sphaxified textures at that resolution).

No. LOL. Also, I bet a psychologist would have a field-day figuring out why this question is always asked in capital letters.

It depends.

For things like tutorial worlds we have a PC (just because it wasn't doing anything else) that we use to host the servers on our home network. These will typically never have more than 2 of us on there so there's no need for anything crazy.

Occassionally a bossmode Plat Donor will also spool up a server for other Plat Donors and these are almost always hosted by a 3rd-party. Usually an entire server is rented and we spool up our own instances of MC servers. This gives us complete control over everything that's going on. Sometimes tho it's just easier to let someone else deal with the headache so we'd use something like CH or whoever else has a good reputation and a box big enough at the time.