Ok...About to Take the Plunge

[Warspawn]

Been here a decade and I'm really wanting to take some time and learn how to record, edit and put some of the AHII world to music.

Can you record in-game with the .ahf files and convert them with fraps?  If you go directly to fraps, can you get external views?  Ordinance views?  I have a pretty beefy system with a core i7 950, 12 gigs of DDR3 1600, 2 TB of Raid0 drives and a GTX 295 video card, so there should be zero hit from running fraps and AH at the same time.

Thanks!  I know this is gonna take some time, but work's been cut way back so I have lots of that available...  Any help and advice would be greatly appreciated!  Niros is an absolute diety when it comes to this stuff, been watching his vids and trying to imagine doing things like that.

[Krusty]

Fraps just records what you see. You don't generally want to run FRAPs in real time because it is a big system hit.

The normal way is to record the game in an AH film, play back the film, and record FRAPs off of that. That also allows you external views and whatnot. Whatever you can see, Fraps will record. However, there are some minor things, like the text buffer will not be there (if you want that), the head views will default rather than use your custom views. That means sometimes you won't be seeing what you normally saw from the cockpit during the real fight.

All of these are minor details and mostly can be overcome.

Doesn't matter how good your system is, there is ALWAYS a hit when running FRAPs and gaming. Maybe it's a hit you can live with, but it won't be "zero".

As for exterior views, bomb views, these are why you would use the film viewer. It allows lots of these views with the camera system. You set up a camera and then record as it plays back.

The problem is the bombs view. This takes a bit of practice. You essentially set up a camera that just happens to follow the bomb to the target. It takes a bit of finesse, but you can do it with a little trial and error.


Hope that helps (at least a little)

[ink]

Fraps just records what you see. You don't generally want to run FRAPs in real time because it is a big system hit.

The normal way is to record the game in an AH film, play back the film, and record FRAPs off of that. That also allows you external views and whatnot. Whatever you can see, Fraps will record. However, there are some minor things, like the text buffer will not be there (if you want that), the head views will default rather than use your custom views. That means sometimes you won't be seeing what you normally saw from the cockpit during the real fight.

All of these are minor details and mostly can be overcome.

Doesn't matter how good your system is, there is ALWAYS a hit when running FRAPs and gaming. Maybe it's a hit you can live with, but it won't be "zero".

As for exterior views, bomb views, these are why you would use the film viewer. It allows lots of these views with the camera system. You set up a camera and then record as it plays back.

The problem is the bombs view. This takes a bit of practice. You essentially set up a camera that just happens to follow the bomb to the target. It takes a bit of finesse, but you can do it with a little trial and error.


Hope that helps (at least a little)

QFT


you wont get black outs or red outs...but you can go off line and record in fraps those parts 

[guncrasher]

warspawn i used to fly with fraps on and only took a small fp hit in my 2500k build.  what I found out is that I had so many films with ah films and fraps that I couldnt match them to each other.  also there's the annoying text box.  so I just use ah to record my films then set up shots then use fraps to record them.  any black outs, I just went off line and recorded them as suggested while looking down at the dashboard or up at the sky then added them.  i use sony vegas to edit my films.  only about 50 bucks at new egg every other month.

semp

[Rob52240]

I just make camera shots with the AH Film viewer.  Then use fraps to record the shot's I've saved.  Then I use virtualdub to compress the files fraps generated and append them in the desired order and add music.

This is one of the ones I've finished.
http://www.youtube.com/user/MajorTom791#p/u/30/bwJeyB4y4zo

This is about 10 Plane relative shots strung together to show a Jug sinking a boat.
http://www.youtube.com/user/MajorTom791#p/u/11/4G9q6rD_j40

[LCADolby]

I just make camera shots with the AH Film viewer.  Then use fraps to record the shot's I've saved.  Then I use virtualdub to compress the files fraps generated and append them in the desired order and add music.

I do pretty much the same, but I don't compress any FRAPS files.

[Rob52240]

I do pretty much the same, but I don't compress any FRAPS files.

Why?  The files fraps generates are enormous.

[LCADolby]

1TB HDD 

[Krusty]

Same here. 1TB. I guess I'm spoiled but I do remember before I got this when I was scraping and removing programs to save space.

The thing is then to edit the files fast, clip out the waste/excess then resave it and remove the original source files. That will cut down a lot of useless footage and save space, but takes more effort.

[ink]

Why?  The files fraps generates are enormous.

record in half size, cuts down majorly on the size of the file.

[Krusty]

Depends on what you want to use it for. If you're 1280x1024 then recording half size gives you 640x512... It's an unhelpful resolution if you want to zoom in and crop anything, because it's already too small for HD resolution. At 1280x720, you wouldn't even fill the screen without zooming and pixellating.

So yes half-size does ease performance woes (I run that when doing live AH recording) but for making a specific prodcution it might not do what you need.

[Rob52240]

I record in full size, then convert the huge file fraps generates (nearly always a gig per 2 seconds) and convert them to MPEG4 which reduces them in size by a factor of about 1000.