Video Production Update August 31st 2025

Hey everybody, with The Silent Hill 4 Analysis out I wanted to touch base and debrief as well as talk about what's next.

First of all I appreciate the patience and warm reception the video has received after all this time. Hopefully this will be another big piece of content you get to enjoy and revisit going forward.

In fact it was so big that on the day I was finished... the video wouldn't even render. It would always only render out a broken file that would claim to contain the full video but didn't. Usually when I render a video off I try to have at least twice the amount of free space I need to create the file, so there's plenty of room for the renderer to work and put the pieces together. In this case though the video came out at around 65 GBs and 130 GBs of free space wasn't enough. I ended up having to free up 200 GBs of space on the 500 GB onboard SSD and when I did, the file finally rendered properly.

This means creating and storing multiple copies of the video actually makes for a bit of a challenge, since rendering and storing the video will require 265 GBs of free space. I only like rendering to the onboard drive and after that I have to store the 65 GB file on some other drive. Keep in mind I keep most of my game footage, which I have 10s of TBs stored of on various drives. I've been toying with creating an uncensored version for the Patreon, but this would entail more thought than you'd think, given the space I'd have to clear. I might have to even downgrade the video's bit rate to get it on the Patreon player. We'll put a pin in that idea and I'll get back to you.

Something I've been doing in the last few weeks though is managing my PC files, which I haven't tended to in a while. In fact it's been quite wild looking through some of these folders to tidy and finding stuff from... 10 years ago. Back before the Patreon even existed. It's actually noticeable how much more there's is to organise starting with 2017 because that's when stuff started to get made with actual frequency. 2017 is when the Patreon began, so it's all thanks to you, thanks for the 8 years of support.

One thing that made the Silent Hill 4 video so hard to make is that there was so much to say but in this case, talking a lot didn't necessarily mean covering a lot of ground. A lot of the time, I was writing 2 pages of script to cover about 5 minutes of game. That can be hard to work on, especially when I'm talking about a game I don't particularly have strong feelings on.

In the end though I think it was warranted. As mentioned in the video, I felt it was important to analyse SH4 the same way I did the previous 3 games, and when you do it that way the video naturally took the shape that it did, with a lot more criticism moment to moment, whereas before, in the prior 3 games, the moment to moment was usually dense with what felt like much more thought out content.

It's important to underline that if anything, my decision to approach SH4 the same way I did the others, is a sign of respect. I wanted to give it that same chance when put through that same process. Frankly I wouldn't even consider it worth trying with the Silent Hill games released after 4, I don't consider them real enough to be approached that way.

I'm not opposed to playing Silent Hill f at some point though, can't say if that will result in any content, but if it did, it almost certainly won't be an Analysis video in the same fashion of the ones on 1-4.

The last couple of weeks I've also started work on the Ape Escape Trilogy video. It's been nice to spend the last couple weeks of Summer 3D platforming, and I'm looking forward for you all to hear what I have to say on these ones. Still another game I have to deal with apes though. I'll report back when serious progress has been made on the edit.

I also want to get back to some long overdue Patreon content. I'm trying to select a recent short indie, (or not recent I suppose, it doesn't matter) to playthrough and review on here, so if you think there's one I might find interesting, please let me know.

Catch you back here soon!