Please post your techniques and software in this thread.

[Animl-AW]

Please post your techniques and software in this thread.

Making videos/movies can be a fun, creative, and challenging hobby.

I've been making videos recently for a couple reasons.
1) Any video is usually selling the game, higher quality has a higher impact, more quality videos from other players is great.
2) Designing a system the average player can afford, easy to use, and still get quality product, and pass it on.

Honestly, I could just barrow some physical video switcher and mixer components and just kill with videos, OR better yet, teach our IATSE video crew the AH viewer, design a storyboard, hand film files to them and say "make me an Oscar", I'd mix in the audio. And it would absolutely be theater quality. I consider that cheating. The average player certainly is not going to afford $100k+ in gear to make a video for a game.

The object was not the best videos ever, and they probably aren't, but a system most can get onboard with, they can improvise along the way. I'm an audio/sound guy, very amateur with video. So if I can produce decent videos with this system anyone can, and that is the concept.

When I designed the video processing system I use for AH it's at the lowest investment possible, but still get a good quality product. It's very easy.

It would be nice to have techniques and software in one post, verses searching and reading many threads. I think this would help bring others to the same level and have fun doing it.

[Animl-AW]

My setup and techniques are as follows

I'm not advertising software, it's just the low investment process I chose.

Software:
1) AH Film Viewer

2) Bandicam - is a lightweight screen recorder software for Windows that can capture anything on your PC screen as a high-quality video. This app also makes it possible to record a certain area on a PC screen, or capture a game that uses the DirectX/OpenGL/Vulkan graphics technologies.

3) Bandicut - is super fast video-cutting and joining software with an easy-to-use interface.
It allows users to trim parts of a video quickly while maintaining the quality of the original video. Users can also extract audio from video to MP3, join multiple video files, remove one or more parts from the video, or split the video into multiple files.

4) Windows Movie Maker - Is Free (you can find it in the "Windows Live" package and just install that component. Is a basic video editing app. If you are looking to create a more professional-looking movie, apps such as Adobe Premiere Pro ($20.99/mo) is a better option.

The one down fall I found is that it doesn't support the H264 NVidia NVENC codec, Which is the best setting for Bandicam, otherwise Bandicam should be could be set to produce H264 (CPU) setting. Which could be why i have the sky-banding negative graphic effect with my setup.

I only use .wav files for sound and .avi for video. These are high quality lossless compressions and contain much more data, also a lot larger file size, so check your drive space.

My Current Process;
1) HT can correct me on this. The game and viewer are one in the same. The viewer runs the game, it just reads your personal data file. Settings made in the game effects the film viewer (I think). Example, if I turn down Voice in the game, I also lose it in the viewer. However you run your device to pull the game should also be used when using the viewer, this can avoid glitches. Therefore, I run the game graphics at 100% full tilt, with voice off, and all background process killed.

I record the AH Film Viewer speed at 0.40x. This is the somewhat same as filming slow-motion. It gives the game and video card time to fully draw in the frames and a lot more of them per second. When it's sped up back to normal speed it will give it a smooth effect and full detail.

When I combine everything in Movie Maker to make a video, I speed each clip back up, between 1.4x and 1.6x. I usually use 1.5x. OR I can just leave it in slow-motion.

* Audio problem with changing speeds. even in slow motion the engine sound will remain at somewhat normal speed, when you speed it back up later the engine can sound like a sowing machine, totally unrealistic. So be careful how slow you record, or go as slow as you want (more frames) if you're not using game sound in it. Recording at 0.40x and speeding back up in Movie Maker to 1.5x seems to be a honest spot for me. There are almost infinite ways to achieve the same goal. How much drive space do you have?

2) Bandicam. I don't use the viewer to save to .avi, I simply only use it as a viewer and to get angles, Bandicam does the rest. It's just a shotcut to using the viewer and finding a honey spot for saving clear videos. It's just easier.

Run the AH viewer full size. Set Bandicam to record "Rectangle Area". Set Rectangle area to fit the AH view window. Now what ever you do for angles and speed gets recorded by Bandicam.

3) Bandicut - I take my .avi files from Bandicam and cut clips out of them.

4) I populate Movie Maker with my clips and selected audio and then go to it arraigning clips, usually to sync at least some with song accents. It's easy dragging and dropping. I can also trim clips to fit better. I can then mix the video clip AH sound with, or without, the song volume. Or turn off the clip sound and just use music. Movie Maker has Video (clips) Audio and Project Audio (volume of song) to mix with.

In audio I usually will use "Fast" fading in and out of clips. This smooths out the jarring change in video clip audio from clip to clip.

Sound
If I'm going to enhance the sound/song files, I use the old "Cool Edit Pro", which is now called "Adobe Audition".

When I do I will Normalize to -2db to give breathing room to work with before peaking (clipping) at 0 on the graph.
Then use the "Expand" option, this will help widen the stereo image, and give it a little more presence.
I will then use a Graphic Equalizer to cut obnoxious or un-used frequencies, to clean it up. I will usually slope off frequencies below 40hz and above 10k.
I then Normalize back to 0. You can barely hear these high freqs in your ears, if at all, but the brain is working to exclude the racket it takes in. This can be an irritant for long term listening. did the same to my AH sounds years ago.

That's my chosen low investment process. Feel free to throw in your own suggestions.

[Spikes]

I utilize a Streamdeck and OBS for capturing video output from the film viewer. I also output at 2560x1080 which is what I fly at when not in VR, but could also output at normal 1080p as well.

I have 3 monitors and have my left set on Film Viewer, right set on OBS, and the center is where the "Full Screen" film viewer opens. This allows me to use the film viewer's controls on the left screen still (play, pause, FF, jump, icon settings, etc) while also having OBS capturing at the same time. I utilize the Streamdeck to turn recording on/off in OBS so it's less mouse movement and clicking.

To compile and edit I use VEGAS Pro, has always worked well for me. There are also plenty of transitions on the internet for scenes which is nice.

[steely07]

For recording : Action! - https://mirillis.com/en/products/action.html  - It is a paid product, but only $20USD (on sale at the moment actually, usually $40, 30 day free trial with a watermark if you want to try it out)

To edit : Davinci Resolve - https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve - They have a free version which I used for about a year, I ended up paying for the Studio version, as I wanted the GPU encoding option to speed up render time, but the free version is absolutely fine.

Wish list : to be able to use the film viewer to set up shots, it does have this ability already, but at least on my end, It'll crash 1 out of 3 times when I try to do this, or even scrub through footage, so I tend to just use footage I've recorded via action!, just a version of the film viewer that was a bit more stable (and ideally had some keyboard shortcuts to play/pause, fast forward, reverse that could be used while the viewer is fullscreen would be great), and I think would encourage more theatrical film making.

Also for the film viewer, it'd be great to add the ability to use our HOTAS's to drive the camera position, ie : you'd cut out the 1 min of footage of a particularly good kill, and be able to play it, while flying the camera around the scene to capture the best angles.

I'd also encourage our fellow film-makers to output at the highest res you can, youtube will reduce quality, but I have a feeling some people (potential new players, read younger folks) are watching on high dpi screens and think any res below 1440p is old fashioned and not worth watching!, I've showed my teenage Nephews some of the older films (Grizz's epic 262 run for example) and they were asking why it was so lowrez.

Anyhoo, just my opinions!

Salute

Steely