Last week when I started playing the Nature’s Calling event, I just took a million screenshots, and then chose a select few to illustrate my blog post. This week, I’m playing around with some video editing.

I’ve screen captured myself playing the Sims 4 Nature’s Calling event for Week 2 and put it on my personal YouTube channel. I’ll embed that below, so you can watch it if you are interested.

I haven’t done any serious video editing in quite a while (and that was in Final Cut Pro, and I’m using Adobe Premiere now), so I’m back to newbie skill level. I’m hoping that this will inspire me to edit and post more of our travel videos (since we have a 3 1/2 year backlog already!). My edits are pretty minimal in this video, although I did learn how to do my closed captioning, so I’m pretty excited about that.

Here is a link to the video I watched to learn how to do the closed captioning. Both for your benefit, and my future reference. You’re welcome!

I also got to hear all of my “so,” “like,” and “um” words…. Sooo, that’s great….

I’m sure my narration will get better the more that I do it and am aware of what I’m saying.

I played these quests a bit later in the week – because life – so the Week 3 quests should be available in just a couple days. Let me know in comments if you’d prefer I share my experience via screenshots like in Week 1, or if you prefer the video walkthrough from this week.

The screenshot method is certainly a lot quicker to do, but I feel that the video option is a bit more… personable. (And by my unpolished presentation, you can be sure that it’s not AI generated!) I captured just over an hour of gameplay (after capturing and then losing about 1/3 of the gameplay because I didn’t know what I was doing). Next, I recorded my voiceover where I narrated the gameplay events. This took the same length of time, since I did it all in one take. I used Quicktime for both the screen capture and audio recording. I think it worked pretty well, considering that it’s a free app that came pre-installed on my Mac. Editing the video in Premiere took several hours, but I got it down to about 40 minutes. It took another 40 minutes to encode. Then, I was ready to upload it to YouTube. It was 1 am at this point and said that it would take 3 hours, so I went to bed. I ended up waking up around 5 am and couldn’t resist working on it some more. I finished all of the background video settings in YouTube Studio and published it. Then, learned how to do the captions and added those. After finalizing things on YouTube, I linked it on my Facebook page, and came here to make this blog post. It’s just about 7:30 am now, so post-upload editing took me 2 1/2 hours. I’m confident that I can get my production times down as I get more competent!

I hope you enjoy, and thank you for your feedback!