Movie Making Tutorial - The Basics

[1pLUs44]

Well, after my screenshot tutorial, I'm going to put up a basic for making your own film.

First, you need to open up your film viewer, and open up Fraps (go to www.fraps.com to download it for free)

Make sure you have the 'No Cursor' selected.



You then need to open up your film viewer and go to the shot you wish to see and pause. There will then be a bar you can use to adjust speed, slower speeds make you less jerky and they look better in films.



When the text is yellow, it means it isn't recording, when it's red, it means it is Recording.



As soon as you get everything you want recorded, you open up Windows Movie Maker, and you click 'Import Audio' and find your song. Put it where it is circled in red, then find 'Import Video' and place the videos accordingly.




As soon as you get everything going like that, you click 'Add titles or Credits' and 'Video transitions' to add to your video the finishing changes to it.








As soon as everything is perfected, you need to click 'Save to my Computer' and save in 'My Videos' Then, upload it to youtube, vimeo, or where-ever else you would want it.

[Chalenge]

Skuzzy please sticky this thread! 

[crazierthanu]

Nice tutorial, but we wanna know how to get that brilliant quality like you do 

[1pLUs44]

Honestly, I dont know

But someone else made a thread on how to get good shots, I'm thinking about quote/copy/paste unless he wants to post it up here.


Edit: please check out new movie!

[Fulmar]

Yeah, now I know for sure why your movie's are jerky.  Your fraps is recording at 7 FPS.  Really need to target at least 30 FPS if you want smooth video.

[lowZX14]

Ok, let me get this straight, FRAPS records in AVI or some other codec that is accepted by WMM.....
How can I just take what I have from the saved camera shots and get them into WMM?

I want to use Power Director or whatever else it is I have, but I'm at the in-laws playing with this thing and they have Vista which I cannot install my PD on that I got last year with my DVD burner, so WMM it is for me, go figure.

BTW, thanks 1pLUs44, now I just have to convince the chief financial officer of the house to let me download and buy FRAPS.

[ImADot]

I didn't use Fraps (which I believe just records what your monitor is displaying).  After setting up my shot, I click the "stream to AVI" box next to the "Play Shot" button.  When I click the button to play the shot, it prompts me to choose a filename to save as, and allows me to choose a codec from a list of installed avi codecs.  Then it renders the shot as avi.  On my "crappy" laptop during vacation, it took longer to render the scene than the real-time playback (perhaps 3 minutes to create a 2-minute shot).  But, the quality and smoothness of the result was (imho) very satisfactory.

See my first movie in this thread: http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/index.php/topic,246237.0.html

[Fulmar]

I didn't use Fraps (which I believe just records what your monitor is displaying).  After setting up my shot, I click the "stream to AVI" box next to the "Play Shot" button.  When I click the button to play the shot, it prompts me to choose a filename to save as, and allows me to choose a codec from a list of installed avi codecs.  Then it renders the shot as avi.  On my "crappy" laptop during vacation, it took longer to render the scene than the real-time playback (perhaps 3 minutes to create a 2-minute shot).  But, the quality and smoothness of the result was (imho) very satisfactory.

See my first movie in this thread: http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/index.php/topic,246237.0.html

Yes, seriously, FRAPS is handy because it's fairly simple to use an can work across multiple games.  But in the case that you have a slow computer and your fraps recording frames is sub 30 FPS, for sure use this route.

[lowZX14]

The computer I have now is terrible, only a 64mb vid card, plus it's about 4 1/2 years old.  Working on getting a new one built, but it may be a little while.  I can try to run it and see how it will do.  I normally pull off a frame rate in the 40's or so in-game.

[Fulmar]

The computer I have now is terrible, only a 64mb vid card, plus it's about 4 1/2 years old.  Working on getting a new one built, but it may be a little while.  I can try to run it and see how it will do.  I normally pull off a frame rate in the 40's or so in-game.

You'd be lucky to achieve above 10 FPS when recording with Fraps.  When recording, FRAPS is very demanding on your computer.  It's much more intensive than just playing Aces High.

[BMathis]

Im still having planes jumping around my screen in the Film Viewer as the film plays...

[lowZX14]

You'd be lucky to achieve above 10 FPS when recording with Fraps.  When recording, FRAPS is very demanding on your computer.  It's much more intensive than just playing Aces High.

Alrighty then, I will just use the process that ImADot outlined earlier.  I guess I should save the money for FRAPS when I get a new machine.  When it's time for that I'll ask for some recommendations for the new computer since I'm building my own.

I also have planes jumping around in Film Viewer from time to time.

[ImADot]

When you use the film viewer to "stream to avi", it plays back slower as it renders - but your final movie file should play back very smoothly.  Down side is that you are limited to a relatively small video size - like 640x480.  If you want to record a fullscreen movie, your only option is to playback the film viewer is fullscreen mode and use something like Fraps to record it.

[Fulmar]

640x480 isn't bad for a video.  Remember, standard screen DVD's are rendered at 640x480 or 720x480 for widescreen.  Every AH movie I've done is been 720x480.  I prefer WMV 9 codec at either 90 or 93%.  Anything higher % wise is going to dramatically increase the file size of the movie without much quality gain.  Say a 5 min movie is 50mb at 90% and it would be probably close to 150mb at 97% quality.

[BMathis]

<<S>> twinboom.  Nice to see a face on someone who kills me in the MA. 
 
to Yankfan. Great film work there!

Mathis