Youtuber Guide

The minimum requirement to create videos is obviously the game, the YouTube app as well as recording software. While the first two are obviously without alternative, there are quite a variety of apps that can be used to record gameplay footage. This is we suggest a couple of recommended tools used by people who made it into the Art of War 3 Outstanding Player Program, a partner program offered by the developers of the game (more on that later).

Screen Recorder by Kimcy929

This app is mainly a recording tool and a tool to trim videos after recording. It doesn't offer any additional features, but makes up for it while recording, as it allows for very fine adjustment of recording settings, doesn't have a watermark, and is completely free. On top of that it allows you to use a face-cam, record your voice and ending the recording when you turn off your screen. While the last feature might sound useless at first glance, it is perfect for recording without any "magic stop button" or any other recording indication being visible, something that gives your videos a more professional look. Overall this app is a great choice if you are content with minimal editing or if you want an external app or software to do the job.

A Similar Alternative:

X Screen Recorder (Play Store Link)

Mobizen by MOBIZEN

If you need an alternative that is also capable of editing your videos directly in one and the same app then Mobizen is the right choice. It offers high quality recording with the magic button or notification bar recording control panel, allowing for intuitive video recording as all control elements are kept visible. It is important to know that while the app automatically includes a watermark while recording, this can be deactivated without paying anything.

And while it really should be avoided to edit a video on a mobile device (due to inferior performance compared to classic desktop setups), sometimes there is no other choice but to do it directly on the device where you recorded it. This is where this app comes into play. Beyond trimming, it also offers a couple of basic features like adding intro- and outro- videos or background music which should be enough, especially for those just starting their YouTube career.

A Similar Alternative:

Du Recorder (Play Store Link)

The first parts of your video that someone will see are the title, description and most important of all, the thumbnail, as it gives a visual representation of what one can expect of it. So it is no wonder that they will greatly affect if someone will watch your video or not. Please note at this point that even though Click-Baiting will increase the number of viewers in the short term, it will greatly hamper your channel's future growth as people will quickly figure this out and no longer trust your video marketing, because that's what title and co. are: Marketing

Title

When choosing a title its important to know that any title longer than 70 characters will often not be fully shown in search results (even though the actual length limit is 100 characters) so in case you want a very long title, you should make sure that only the least important information is included in the part which is likely to be cut of. Please note that it is a character and not a letter limit, which means that space, numbers and other symbols, even an apostrophe needs to be counted.

On top of that it is recommended to find some sort of order for your video titles that you want to use to make them more consistent. Here is an example how this could look like:

• [Hero Test #1] Cerberus vs Wasp - Fatsquatch vs X3M

• [Hero Test #2] Seraphim vs Mole - Major Pain vs siegsauer

• [Hero Test #3] Solaris vs Leviathan - SuperD vs E.B.S.G. Tracie

In this example the video title can be broken down in 3 parts:

• [video series] what happens - who plays

Another advantage is that viewers are more likely to watch another video if it's topic is related to the current video which can be made even easier to pack different series into individual playlists which you can place on your YouTube channel.

Description

In general you will have a hard time reaching the limit of 5000 characters for your video description but it needs to be noted that similar to the video title, there is a limit to what is shown in search engines. Therefore its recommended to put the most important and striking pieces of information in the first 3 lines and depending on the search engine between 100 and 120 characters of the video description as this is how much is usually shown in the preview of the video. So it stands to reason that whatever you decide to put into the first 3 lines should not just be a repetition of your video's title. Instead it should expand on it:

[PvP Adventures #84] Barracuda Mayhem - Back4SomeMoar vs Exterminator47

This also shows an additional trick, trying to hit both the 100 and the 120 character limit at the same time which you can easily check with online character counters like the one on WordCounter.net. Hitting both limits means that it will look good on both types of search engines, no matter if they display 100, or 120 characters.

Thumbnail

Getting the thumbnail right is not as complicated as it might sound as the minimal solution is already a very good option. When uploading your video you can not only upload a thumbnail separately but also choose to use a frame from the video you uploaded for that purpose. One that is commonly used for this purpose is the battle loading screen as it already includes all important information like the players and map while also looking great.

This example shows how good those battle loading screens can look as video thumbnails even though a custom preview like the one used for live-stream replays obviously outshines it.

To make custom previews, the right tools are required and it needs to be mentioned that doing it on a desktop device like a PC or laptop will make the creation a lot faster and painless, as mobile based picture editing can be rather limited in comparison.

Before that it is recommended to take a look at this: The Art of War 3 Fankit

It is a collection of assets including units, buildings, screens, avatars, campaign characters etc. which can be used for the creation of fan-content for Art of War 3 as which YouTube videos can be considered.

PlaceIt

Place it is a great webtool allowing you to easily create Youtube thumbnails amongst other things. What makes it so great is that it is very beginner friendly, as you usually start out with a template which you then modify in easy steps to get very good looking thumbnails. And unlike similar services it also allows you to upload your own images, meaning it can also be used to give finishing touches to your thumbnail after pre-processing it with another tool.

Paint

The software itself only offers very basic editing of images without any kind of more advanced feature like image layers, but if you only want to crop an image or quickly insert another image for your complete thumbnail then this software is perfect, especially if one considers that it is already included in Windows and is easy to get started with.

Gimp

Gimp, while overwhelming at the start, offers by far the most options for image editing, ranging from multi layers support to cloning, smoothing, colour swaps, effects, alpha channels and much much more, making it worth the effort of getting started with it as it allows you the highest freedom of all options listed here. Another advantage is that you will be able to use this software for a long time, as it has been around since 1995, making it very unlikely to be discontinued anytime soon.

As an additional note it needs to be mentioned that you should choose to save your pictures as .png files, as it is not only widely supported by most software, but also allows for an alpha channel to be added to a picture, which means it can have a transparent background.

One of the YouTubers in the Outstanding Player Program, also made a very educational video on how to make thumbnails for YouTube videos.

To take your video editing to the next level it is recommended to do so on a PC instead of directly doing so in your recording app. The reason for this is because editing software for desktops usually offers more features while being more precise on top of being much faster due to the much better performing hardware. This is especially the case when rendering high resolution videos, which take a lot of processing before they are ready, which in the worst case will not only turn your phone into a heater, but will also take a long time to finish. Therefore if you have the option to use a PC for editing, then you definitely should do so.

Just like with other software, there is no one perfect choice, but several options with their own advantages and disadvantages.

OpenShot Video Editor

A great option for beginners is the OpenShot Video Editor which is free and open source which gives the big advantage that all features are unlocked by default, updates are free and no lengthy registration process is required to use it. Besides this it offers a beginner mode and an advanced mode to make learning to use it easier. Its features include but are not limited to trimming, multi-lane editing (this feature is a must have as it allows you to use multiple source materials at the same time without merging them, allowing you to edit them separately even after they are already inserted into the video), effects, animation and export to a wide variety of export formats. Another important point about it is that it doesn't force you to include a watermark into your video.

A good way to get support with ones channel is to get into the 'Outstanding Player Program' , which based on your tier offers several advantages and is definitely worth it. Here is a summary of the currently (September 7th 2021) newest version of it:

Getting into the Outstanding Player Program should not be the end of improving one's channel. It's just the beginning and there are still ways to improve the video quality. One way of doing this is to improve one's recording quality, which is very easy when a PC is available.

One of the main issues when recording footage on a mobile device for example is the screen ratio. Nowadays the 16:9 screen ratio (regardless of the resolution) is the standard that most YouTubers use and while this is not an issue when recording PC games, a mobile device often has another screen ratio like 16:10. This means that during editing, every time the entire video has to be resized, which not only takes a lot of time, but worsens the video quality because the image has to be "stretched". In some extreme cases with ultra wide screens stretching will make it look so bad that the only option would be to add a background image to the video so that there isn't just a black bar in the background.

As mentioned above this is not an issue on a PC, because unlike mobile devices, the screen resolution can be set manually to any resolution. This means even a screen with ultra wide resolution (2560x1080) can be used as a normal wide screen (1920x1080) for recording. Not to mention that most recording software for desktop PC's allows one to record only part of a screen which also solves this issue.

To accomplish this, the first step is to get the game running on a PC, which is much simpler than one might think it is. The solution is a so called emulator, a software that runs a specially modified version of android on a PC and while some of them may cost money, or restrict a part of their features unless one buys premium, there are also options that are free to use while also providing what one needs.

NoxPlayer

Like all emulators, using NoxPlayers requires enabled "CPU Virtualization". To check if this is enabled open the Task Manager which under the "Performance" tab, when selecting "CPU" should have an entry called "Virtualization". What virtualization does, is that it allows the emulated operating system to directly access the hardware of a PC, which is key to having good performance when emulating. This means it is important to enable it if it isn't enabled already. While already in that menu, it is recommended to also immediately look up the number of logical processors of the CPU installed in the PC, a number that will be needed later. It's usually called "logical processors" or "threats".

The Help Center behind another emulator called Bluestacks, made a very good article on how to enable this virtualization feature. One only has to enable "Intel Virtualization Technology" (Intel CPU) or "SVM Mode" (AMD CPU) in their BIOS. If you don't know any of these terms, follow the easy step by step article mentioned previously, as changing BIOS settings without knowing what one is doing can have serious consequences.

After this is done, the next step is to install NoxPlayer on the PC and then after installing it, opening the play store to install the game (which requires a google account, preferably the one used to secure the Art of War 3 account). After this is done, in the settings a few things need to be changed.

In the performance tab, set performance to "custom" and if possible select between 4 and 8 cores (cores in this case referring to logical processors as shown in the task manager). Here it is important to also leave a few cores for the windows Operating system. Depending on the CPU the following the following distributions might prove to be the best option:

Less than 4 Cores: Will most likely not work at all
4 Cores: 2 Cores Windows, 2 Core Nox (questionable benefit to recording on a mobile device directly)
6 Cores: 2 Cores Windows, 4 Cores Nox (questionable benefit to recording on a mobile device directly)
8 Cores: 4 Cores Windows, 4 Cores Nox
10 Cores: 4 Cores Windows, 6 Cores Nox
12 Cores: 6 Cores Windows, 6 Cores Nox
More than 12 Cores: 8 Cores Nox, all other Cores Windows (anything beyond 8 cores for the emulator is a waste of system resources)

For Ram, if possible allocate at least 2GB, but also not more than 8GB. The total ram capacity of the PC can also be looked up in the Task Manager, by selecting RAM instead of CPU and the selecting a distribution accordingly. It might be called "Memory" instead of "RAM", but both refer to the same thing:
4GB RAM: 3GB Windows, 1GB Nox (probably bad performance)
6GB RAM: 4GB Windows, 2GB Nox (probably bad performance)
8GB RAM: 4GB Windows, 4GB Nox
12GB RAM: 6GB Windows, 6GB Nox
16GB RAM: 8GB Windows, 8GB Nox
More than 16GB: 8GB Nox, rest windows

After this, there is an option for "Graphics Rendering" mode, which should be set to DirectX, as for some reason, full screen video recordings can be full of stutters when using the "OpenGL +" option, not to mention that it offers better performance.

For obvious reasons, the recording of the game can't be better than the resolution at which it is rendered, so it is important to choose the resolution accordingly:

1280x720 (HD) using 280 dpi
1920x1080 (Full HD) using 320 dpi
2560x1440 (WQHD) using 360 dpi
3840x2160 (4K) using 420 dpi

It is important to note that rendering beyond the resolution of the PC's screen gives no noticeable advantage in video quality, so it should not be exceeded. So it makes no sense to set the emulator's resolution to 4K on a Full HD screen as the recording will still only be Full HD. Like a normal android system, the emulator also has a home screen. To ensure the icons on it are sized properly, the dpi setting has to be chosen correctly, as otherwise they will either be unreasonably big or far too tiny to read. This setting seems to not affect the game though.

All other settings are mainly dependent on personal preference. The last but also most important part though is to never forget to set the emulator to full screen, as only this can ensure that when recording it, it is captured in full quality. This can be done by using the "CTR + 0" (number, not a big o) Hot-Key. To leave full screen the same Hot-Key or alternatively "Esc" can be used.

For those who prefer a video guide on how to set up the software can watch this video: