Hey yeah, I confess! I plonked the camcorder infront of the screen before the mission rolled and then filmed a bunch of replays and cut them in (with premiere) matching the real-time by the vox - I haven't used fraps yet - I was keen to try and capture the 'liveness' of the mission, as well as having the engine noise, blackouts etc. that disappear in the replays...
So it is actually dodgy digital camcorder quality, though I must say (as I know each frame of this shizz almost personally) that the compression youtube uses is pretty basic, and even the frame rate seems to be lowered slightly...
The original film/file is 720 by 576, edited as an Indeo 5.2 AVI, and is 1.73GB! - rendered to dvd it looks a whole lot better - you can actually see all the ack and the painstakingly matched action in the backgrounds of most shots...
...but it is what it is. I really need to fix the colour/contrast to get the maximum appeal from the image, and although the dvd version is as blurry compared to the original graphics as the youtube version is to the dvd version, I quite like the abstract fuzzyness of the dvd version, but youtube makes it look like a film of a PSP game shot with a mobile phone!
Next film I do I'll use fraps, but I need to buy the full version, and I'm certainly not planning on recreating in cinematic form any seventeen minutes over A47 style missions... a nice two or three minute montage of airwar put to some instrumental punk-math-rock sounds appealing...
'N1K2J' was more about creating a 'hollywood style' 'real time' narrative - an experiment in editing/cutting to movie music - to me that's what scuppers most of the Aces High clips on youtube, their perfunctoriness - I mean, we all know that Aces High is less cheesy than Michael Bay films, or Russell Crowe galloping along shouting 'HOLD THE LINE!', and hopefully in the future, more films will be cut that reflect this. There are some great Aces High films out there, but there should be more!
Hmmm, about the file size/compression, the 'divx' compression seems to be the most economical I've used, and yeah, I'm surprised it came out as 730mb - I was expecting about 400mb - I'll play with the settings and I'll probabaly be able to get it down without any discernable loss of quality...
Cheers!
PS. I may upload the film to google movies or something, I think their player's bigger, anyway, it'll be nice when sites allow you to upload 400mb and 20 minutes and not recompress your files...
