Gr Movie-making

[davros]

Yep, had a look at that Rocky and you are correct...they have a policy of deleting all games movies....EEEK!

http://www.vimeo.com/blog:140

I'll be making extra doubly sure I have local and remote backups of my videos now.

Dav.

[chiles4]

Thanks for the link - that sux. I know YouTube supports HD movies but what I've read so far, it seems like a PITA.

[chiles4]

Well I try to have only one HD movie at Vimeo at a time - maybe the Vimeo gods wont get ticked! So far no deletions - I'm still "under the radar".

But I think I may be done with all heavy-handed editing and shortening and compressing and size-shrinking of my gaming movies just to get them under 20MB (fully compressed) so I can e-mail them to friends. And Photobucket is nice but after they do their "pass", the movies look like crap!

I recently filmed my wife and her sister doing a "tryout" for the TV show "The Amazing Race" and converted the footage to DVD video format. Recently, it struck me - why not do that with your gaming videos too?... *puts on evil smile and inserts pinky into corner of mouth*

Theoretically, I can record an entire mission (or at least a good amount of footage) and save it with the highest quality settings to boot. After appending and editing four or five 4GB Fraps .avi files, I ended up with a ~19GB, 8-minute, 1280x800 pixel movie. I then compressed that with Super@ with a VERY high bitrate of over 9000. The resulting movie was only about 600MB in size and easily burned to a DVD. I watched it on my 43" TV and it was quite nice - no pixelation whatsoever. I would have LOVED to have watched it on a brand new LCD TV - my projection TV is about 10 years old and not very "sharp".

There you go - a permanent, high-quality archive of your exploits available for watching on your big-screen TV. And yeah, I will be mailing a copy to my main gaming buddy.

[Rocky]

That sounds great Chiles. It's a lot of work, but I bet it looks great on a big telly.

[chiles4]

In reality, it's actually easier. I abandoned the method I described above and now I simply burn the whole gaming session (no editing) to DVD. With no editing, yeah, you have to watch me reach the AO (by chopper or vehicle) and do boring things like reload my weapon, gear up at a weapons crate and switch between weapons.

With a wonderful app called DeVeDe (for Windows), each gaming session becomes one DVD title and then you simply browse to all the Fraps 4GB files that comprise that gaming session. You then pick a few settings you want for your DVD and let it rip. I think the app can create a DVD video ISO or actual DVD files (.VOB, etc.) which you can then burn to DVD with ImgBurn or Nero, etc.

The bitrates involved are so high that you're almost watching the same quality that you see when you play - and that really breathes life into your gaming videos.

[Cpl Ledanek]

I guess Vimeo is busy and have not viewed my videos ....yet

[ApexMods]

I'm still looking for a free - preferably open source and multi-platform (Mac/PC) - solution to capture in-game movies (a/v) without any stupid time limits (just 30 seconds with FRAPS?!? ######?!?).

I know there's a commercial solution called Snapz Pro X for Mac which allows a free trial period of 15 days without feature restrictions - not really optimal due to the short trial period, but at least it seems to let you do proper capturing.

Any suggestions for PC? BTW - Xfire is not an option for me (please don't ask - it's a long story).