The TD-344 IncidentFollow

I made this video goofing off & testing out the fraps software. Alot of peeps asked me how to make SWG Videos, so i cracked down, and made one.
So i could help peeps with technical questions, lol, so don't expect GREATNESS, was my 1st attempt.

The TD-344 Incident
What happens when a Stormtrooper decides to change his life?
http://swvault.ign.com/View.php?view=Movies.List&category_select_id=4

CAST:
TD-344 by Gatorr
TestCenter Server
http://swg.allakhazam.com/db/userinfo.html?char_id=39653


Doctor by Instigator
TestCenter Server
http://swg.allakhazam.com/db/userinfo.html?char_id=28434


DS-146 by Lu'ke'Du'ke
TestCenter Server
http://swg.allakhazam.com/db/userinfo.html?char_id=44780

DS-146 by Drizz "the ride up to TD-334 aka TD-344 clip"
Lowca Server
http://swg.allakhazam.com/db/userinfo.html?char_id=38262


Nurse by Kaldilla Shadowwolf
TestCenter Server
http://swg.allakhazam.com/db/userinfo.html?char_id=44778


VK-238 as himself "Gatorr's pet, a Stormtrooper Sniper"
http://swg.allakhazam.com/db/abilities.html?swgability=2786

Special Guest Stars:
Lt. Harbrik as himself
http://swg.allakhazam.com/db/bestiary.html?swgbeast=972


TD-344 by TD-334 "changed the name a little"
-no pic at this time-

Edited, Oct 13th 2006 at 6:47am PDT by Instigator

THE HOW TO CREATE SWG VIDEO'S POST

NOTE:
Okies, i have tested this Info, even made the short film TD-344 Indident, so it works , rather well. Use'n only the free version of fraps. I now have full version, very awesome. But you can make a video, like i did, with just the free version.

http://www.fraps.com/


The TD-344 Incident "the video i made"
What happens when a Stormtrooper decides to change his life?
http://swvault.ign.com/View.php?view=Movies.List&category_select_id=4

Fallen
My Fav SWG Video. So far this video is my favorate SWG Clip.
http://swg.atomicspacekitty.com/video.php

Dueling newbies
2nd Fav, this is another film, made from peeps, from Ahazi server.
http://www.daedaluspa.com/movies/duelingnewbies.wmv

Let's Dance
3rd Fav Video, this clip actually contains a member of my PA, IEBO, he's the one killin the rebel dancers, lol
http://http:/www./markimus.1gb-host.com/movies/startdance.wmv

Fett's Vette
4th Fav Video
http://swvault.ign.com/View.php?view=Movies.List&category_select_id=2




THE HOW TO CREATE SWG VIDEO'S POST
Original Post:

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=dancer&message.id=26690


Video Index

Balgosa/Windspire

* Helios Men
* Cheeky Cheeky
* The Ice Man Cometh
* Baby got Back
* Yatta!
* Fett's 'Vette

La'lepa/?

* Fingertips/To Faz (There a thread for this one somewhere?)

Javier/Furplay Entertainment

* Cantina Crawl 6
* Cantina Crawl 7
* Cantina Crawl 8

Tiaga/TK Arts and Entertainment

* Dance With Me

Lianne/Ensom Ulv Entertainment

* Butterfly
* Bring Me to Life

?/Solar Flair

* Can't Get There From Here

Wendel/Arcanum Entertainment

* Bria Discoteque

Lots of good videos! Keep em coming!

Also, what I'd like to get here is links to threads about the video that have a link to the video. The original, if there are more than one.. hundred... *cough*Helios Men*count* To be clear, what I'm looking for is in-game videos. Other videos by these people may be great, but they have their place. Part of the reason I'm linking threads is so people can see who makes them and look at what else is available. Eventually I'd like to link to "production companies" as well, so if anyone listed up above has a URL they'd like to be linked to, let me know.
In the Director's Chair

Think this looks like a lot of fun? Well, guess what... IT IS! However it can be a bit of work as well, and confusing at first. I'll try and cover the basic....

First, Javier reminds us that the best tool to use is your mind. Let your creativity flow. There are professional tools out there, but the videos you see that use them, barely scratch the surface of what they can do and are designed for. To my knowledge, only myself and Javier use professional level programs. Most (all?) everyone else uses something simple like Movie Maker 2.

If you don't feel like diving in head first to the deep end, this is all the help you need to get started. You'll need 4 tools here. To capture videos from in game, Fraps is the best choice. It does cost to be able to use it for more than 30 seconds, but it's a very small bit and well worth it. You will also want Windows Media Encoder and Windows Movie Maker, both free downloads from Microsoft.

I recommend working with the original files if you can. It results in a better quality image in the end with a potentially smaller download size. And you can ooh and ahh people like Pappi who come over and see the crisp sharp copy of your work that looks as good as the game instead of the muddy compressed version. They will be big, though. Very big. Very very big. In the making of "Dance With Me" I had nearly 200 gigs of hard drive space filled. A lot of that went unused though, and in the end what went into the final video weighs in at only 20-ish gigs. Still not small. If space is tight, you'll want to get VirtualDub. Even if space isn't tight, it's a very useful program, and it's also a free download. You can use it to compress the videos from Fraps into something like DivX and work with much much smaller files.

If you've never worked with videos before... Have at those and ignore the rest. That is all you need to make videos. Learn what there is and let your mind wander into creativity instead of technical details. If, on the other hand, you like mixing creativity and technical details, read on.

Getting Videos

First step... You need footage. There's two ways to do this. The hard way, and the easy way. Why would you want to do the hard way? Well, if your computer struggles to keep a decent framerate, the easy way doesn't help at all.

The easy way.... Get Fraps. It is designed to.... capture videos from DirectX games! Imagine that. However, it does put an additional strain on your computer. To give an idea, my P4 3.2 (HT on, though I'd probably be better off with it off) w/ Geforce FX 5700 Ultra, runing Fraps to capture knocks up to 25% off my framerate. Not usually a problem; 15fps is plenty for a downloaded video, and what I've been working in. Capturing in 30fps, however, does allow for smoother video and slow motion. Not that you can't do slow motion with lower fps, it's just choppy. Costs a little bit, but not much at all, and well worth the price.

The hard way... If your video card has TV out (Most do) and you have some sort of video capture card/digital camcorder/whatever, hook em up! Record from one to the other. The quality will be quite a bit worse picture-wise, but it doesn't hurt your performance at all.

Shuffling Formats

Again, no question about what to use here. VirtualDub is hands-down the best video transcoder for Windows. And it's free, to boot. While it only reads limited formats, and only writes AVIs, it can be used to do simple editing to cut down the size of your source videos, it has a direct copy mode that can do edits without recompression (= no quality loss, and no size increase). Use it to convert to whatever format you need. When you're done, if your resulting file isn't wmv and you want it to be, Windows Media Encoder is a free download.

Making Movie Magic

Here's where the real choice comes in. There's several options depending on budget, patience, and willingness to learn complex things. These are programs I know are used by the directors you've come to know and love. If I missed any someone is using and could recommend, let me know.

Beginner - Linear Editors

The term linear editor refers to the fact that the editing is a series of sequential clips arranged end-to-end. While technically any digital video editor using HD storage could be classified as a non-linear editor, generally the NLE term is applied to a certain style of editing.

Microsoft Movie Maker 2

Pros:

* Another free download from MS
* Simple drag-and-drop-interface
* User-doting interface
* Did I mention free?

Cons:

* Windows XP only
* Can be a bit limiting in it's simplicity (Correct me if I'm wrong - I couldn't even figure out how to do anything useful in it)
* Inflexible; it does what it's programmed to do, nothing more.

My thoughts:

Tried it... I'd already been using the more professional style editors, so I was baffled by it. Not my style. But it has been used very successfully to make many of these videos. For most people, it will be more than enough to do what they need.

Professional - Non-Linear Editors (NLE)

Non-linear editors are usually noted by their interface. The main editing control involves a timeline with multiple "tracks" of video or audio. The video tracks are a "stack", layered from top to bottom to combine clips/effects/etc. Each track can then have an effect applied to it, and clips can have transitions at the beginning and end. Everything that can be done (Aside from transitions) is it's own entity on the timeline, independent of everything else.

There is also a concept of "key frames". This is where some of the real power of these programs starts to shine. Everything about how the video is displayed has settings; fade in/out of tracks, effects, even what portion of the track is to be viewed. When you use a keyframe, you mark two spots, and set the settings for the two spots. It will then transition the settings from the first to the second. If you'd like to see an example, in the video "Dance With Me", in the first scene with multiple people in it, it does a transition where it gets all blocky, and in the last scene transition during the dancing, there is a blur to transition the scenes. Neither of these were transitions; they were both effects. It started with a key frame that told the effect to basically display video normally, went to one that had it so distorted as to be unrecognizable, then switched scenes and went back to a key frame that said display it normally. Thus, a new transition is born. With that, the mind is the limit in what you can do.

But, enough about that. (Can you tell which style of editor I like?) On with the choices...

Adobe Premiere

Pros:

* Powerful, professional quality software.
* Tried and true industry tested.
* Well documented. (?)

Cons:

* $$$ (Click on the link and look below the order button..) Really only an option if you have access through your place of work, or friends.
* Can be intimidating/difficult to use to the untrained.

My thoughts:

I've used this once, long long time ago. I qualified as the untrained then, and this was difficult/intimidating to use. Was able to barely squeeze by and fake it to do what I needed. I can't really offer much more than that except to say - this one's been around for awhile. I don't recall if anyone uses this for editing their videos.

Final Cut Express

Can't say much about this - I've never used it. Barely heard about it. Looks comperable to Adobe Premiere though. I've heard it also includes some fun goodies to help snaz things up, dunno if Premiere offers anything similar. The list, therefore will be a bit sparse.

Pros:

* Powerful, professional quality software.
* Well documented
. (?)

Cons:

* $$ (Express is their low cost version, cheaper than Adobe. They have a pro version for $$$$) Again, really only an option if you have access through your place of work, or friends.
* Can be intimidating/difficult to use to the untrained.
* No Mac? No soup for you! This is an Apple program, and surprise of surprises, only runs on Macintosh.

My thoughts:

Again, something powerful. I also know this one is used by Javier for all his videos, and those nifty titles he does. However, he falls into the category of "Has access through place of work".

Cinelerra

This is my personal choice. If you feel like being brave and going this route, feel free to come talk to me, and I'd be more than happy to share some tips and what I used.

Pros:

* Powerful, professional quality software.
* Free!!! Sort of.
* If you have a lot of computers sitting around doing nothing... (Uhhhh....) You can setup a "render-farm" to speed things up.

Cons:

* User-what? If Movie Maker is user-doting, then this is user-torturing. I'm talking BOFH level of torturing.
* Documentation? Wassat?
* Very very very (very) limited video format support. (I needed a go-between program even to get it to play with VirtualDub. Ouch!)
* Oh yeah, and if you're glued to Windows, hands off this one too. This is a UNIX program.
* Slow, too. (Dunno how it compares to Primeire or Final Cut on similar hardware. Probably slower.)
* Much much more.

My thoughts:

About now, you're probably thinking "What is he nuts? That sounds like something you'd go get a root canal if it would put off having to use it!" So why do I use it? Well... I'm a power-user. And I wanted something I could use on Linux. Even then, it took me a month to really get "up to speed" and I'm NOT a slow learner of new software. I still don't know all the in's and out's.

One thing I'll comment on though.. It does have a nice feature... It constantly keeps a backup of what you're working on. If it crashes, your computer freezes up, you accidentally kick the power cord, etc... Recovering is 2 simple steps. The bad part of that..... It crashes fairly often. For awhile I had it crashing a couple times an hour, but I re-installed from a different source, and it cut it down to a much more bearable once every 2 or 3 days. However, I did start having problems with it getting confused about the saved file. It seemed to get corrupted of sorts, though I never actually lost any work in this "corruption" so it still confuses me exactly what happened. I was able to go ahead and finish though.

I would highly recommend this package as something to avoid. I had my reasons, and it's grown on me, and the price was good, but unless you feel like going that extra mile without having to shell out the extra grand, stick with movie maker.

When I say sort of free... You don't pay money, you pay in sanity.
Happy Movie-Making!

If someone has ideas for what I can add here, or further reviews of these or other editing software, feel free to pipe up. I leave the creative process, however, as an excercise to the budding director. My only piece of advice there - storyboards, or at least a script outline, are your friends. If you know what you want to see, it makes getting the video go much smoother. Of course, don't be afraid to experiment.

Edited, Wed Nov 17 06:49:46 2004 by Instigator