Movie Making Tutorial By Apollosmith

[GhostDog 0]

Apollosmith has taken some time to put together this tutorial that might be helpful to a lot of aspiring Spielbergs out there

 

Here's what I do to make my movies and it works pretty well, so I thought I'd share.

 

First suggestion: If you're not going to take some time to make a half-decent video, please don't waste my time and bandwidth. The action doesn't have to be spectacular, but if you don't take the time to make the video look nice, please don't start.

 

Second of all, if you want to make quality movies, you're going to have to have a fairly high end computer. I suggest a secondary hard drive (at least 7200 rpm) to capture your video files to.

 

I use Fraps 2.0 set to 'Half-size' and 25fps. My game settings are all set to the same settings I play with normally - 1024X768 with most everything maxed out. This means that Fraps will capture at 512X384 and 25fps. When I start capturing video, the frame rate in the game is going to drop to around 10-15 fps. That's OK. If it's too slow, just turn down graphics settings until you get between 10-15 fps. It will still be jerky, but that's OK because we'll fix this in a minute.

 

Before starting the video capture, make sure ALL unnecessary programs are turned off. Check your Windows services and stop any that you don't need. I recommend implementing the "Safe" configuration as outlined at http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm

 

Video capture smoothness relies upon processor speed and hard drive speed, so optimize them as much as you can. Defragment. If possible, capture to a large hard drive that does not contain either Lomac or your OS.

 

Once you're in-game, just set up your mission, select 'Record Track', and fly your mission normally. Do not try to capture video while recording the track, just let Lomac record the track as you want it as you fly from the cockpit. Save your track, then play it back again. This time, start setting up camera angles and recording video clips.

 

MOVIE MAKING HINT: Most individual 'takes' should be no longer than a few seconds. Just watch MTV or an action movie for a minute and you'll notice that exciting movies keep the camera in one place for an average of 2-3 seconds. Long, drawn out scenes of your plane are boring. Most Lomac movies out there could be half their length and would be much more enjoyable.

 

Before hitting the Fraps 'Capture' hotkey, slow down the Lomac simulation rate (Alt+A) to half or 1/3 speed. This will allow you to have extremely smooth video in the end. When I am just watching a track at normal speed, my frame rate is around 30 fps. However, when I capture, that drops to around 12 fps. So by slowing it down to 1/2 speed, I now see around 60 frames per second of real-time action. But when I capture at 1/2 speed, even though the game is displaying around 12 fps, I am capturing around 25 frames per second of real-time action. So, Fraps will be capturing about 12 fps of game play into 25 fps of video. Yes, everything will appear in slow motion, but when we speed it up later with Premiere, we'll get 25 fps (or more) of smooth, real-time gameplay. If 1/2 speed is too choppy, go down to 1/3 speed or even 1/4 speed. This will result in VERY LARGE video files, because it will take 2, 3, or 4 seconds of video to capture one second of gameplay. Capture the track from multiple angles so you have plenty of footage to deal with when you start editing.

 

Once you're done, open Premiere and set up a custom project. Select 'Video for Windows' as type. Set the dimensions to the exact size of the video you captured (mine is 1/2 of 1024X768, or 512X384, which happens to be an excellent size for the final encoded movie as well). Set the frame rate to 25 fps (or whatever you set Fraps to). Set fields to 'No Fields (Progressive Scan)' and select square pixels. This will make your Premiere settings to be the same as your captured video.

 

Now start editing your video. Import your clips and start adding them to the timeline. Because you captured at a slower rate, you'll have to speed up the footage in Premiere (Clip menu... Speed). But, before doing this, you have to worry about audio.

 

When you play a track at 1/2 speed, the audio does not play in 1/2 speed, it plays in full speed. This means that the sound of popping flares sounds the same at 1/2 and full speed - the pitch does not change, but it is still synchronized with the video action. If you speed up the final clip, then the audio is going to speed up as well, making it change pitch and sound like the Chipmunks. Premiere does have a 'Maintain pitch' feature, but it doesn't work very well. So, you want to have the audio speed remain unchanged while the video speed is increased. Do this by unlinking the audio and video for a clip on the timeline (Select the clip and then choose the Clip menu... Unlink Audio and Video). Now select the video clip and Clip... Speed and set a value of 200% if you captured at 1/2 speed. You can create some cool effects by making the gameplay footage faster or slower than normal, or even changing the speed part way through to get a slow-mo or fast-forward effect. The video length is now half of what it originally was, but the audio is the same length (now twice as long as the video). You now have the arduous task of trying to synchronize audio with the video. This is easy with most clips (such as a fly-by), just crop the audio to the length of the video and synchronize them. However, this is really difficult if there is audio events that must be synchronized exactly with the video (such as a clip where you fire 3 missiles). Because the audio is twice as long as the original video, the sound of the firing missiles takes twice as long as it does in the video and will not synchronize. In this case, I end up cutting my audio so that I have one missile sound. I then duplicate this clip 3 times and place it on the stage to synchronize with each missile fire. I then take a 'jet' sound from another clip that might match the angle of my missiles clip and copy it to another audio track to get a continuous background sound. It can be very arduous, but it results in very good quality audio and super smooth video. You can even add cool effects, like missile, explosion, or flare sounds in angles that otherwise wouldn't have them.

 

When you're done editing, export a full quality .avi file. Then use whatever encoding program you want to compress the full .avi. I use divx.

 

IMPORTANT: The most important thing is to never compress, resize, or change frame rate of your video until you are compressing the final clip. NEVER, EVER change the frame rate from 25fps and the dimensions from what you originally captured while you're editing. If you want to make changes, let your encoding software do it, not your authoring software. I capture at 512X384 and 25fps and encode my final video at the same dimensions and frame rate. The only thing I do is compress the video using Divx. NEVER, EVER compress already compressed video. Export at full, uncompressed quality, then let Divx (or Windows Media, or Quicktime, or whatever) do the work.

 

Your final video should be no more than 6 or 7 MB per minute and should look chrystal clear. I use Dr. Divx and tell it to compress to a certain file size (i.e., if my video is 5 minutes long, I multiply 5 X 7MB to get 35MB, and set Divx to make the final video that size).

 

Wow, that was long. If you have any questions or suggestions, send them along. If you'd like, I'll add some tips later on adding camera shake and some ideas on setting up cool camera angles.

 

Here's a movie I did with this setup - http://smithplanet.com/loomingthreat.zip

 

-Smitty

 

Follow the original thread here on the Movie Makers Board

 

Cheers,

 

GhostDog