Dancer Archive

Best tip I can give for camera movement..

Err...

To be honest, it's a big PITA. You may notice I didn't do anything complex with the group shots. The reason is that the solo shots, sometimes it took me a whole day to get something decent as far as camera movement.

I'm thinking, however, that one of those pointers like some laptops have, where it's more like a joystick, might be good for nice smooth pans. I'll probably pop out and see if I can get a simple USB device like that.

Updated with the latest batch. (Sorry that took so long.)

Message Edited by stephypoo on 08-01-2004 04:14 PM

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Marksman-Dancer wrote:

I have a few technical questions for you directors out there: What resolution are you running your game at? And are you capturing video at full or half size?
(...)
I have a computer running with an AMD Athlon XP 3000+ and NVidia GeForce4 Ti 4200 video card. When running at a resolution of 1024x768 I am getting a framerate of about 15-25 fps while filming. Which brings up my next question: In Fraps, there is a section where you can choose what fps you want to film at...what do most of you recommend? From what Tiaga said in his write-up, he films at 15 fps. He also mentioned that filming at 30 fps gives smoother looking video when doing slow motion.

Thank you, Tiaga, for compiling links to all the videos in one place and writing up some helpful pointers for fledgling directors.

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Personally, I play in 1024*768 and captured my video at full size, 25fps using FRAPS. My machine is a 2.6Ghz P4 with 1Gb of RAM and a Geforce 4 Ti4200. Outside of a crawl and Mos Eisley my framerate usually remains well above 15fps, which is why I chose those settings.

I edited the AVI's at that resolution using Movie Maker 2 and then saved the final video at a 720*5?? resolution at 25fps. I actually simply used the option that allowed me to set the data rate of the video to 1.1Mbps in WMM2 and it computed that the best fit was that resolution and framerate (which, I think, is pretty standard in most (but not all) of the videos I've seen).



Now if I can add a little technical question of my own: I have no trouble saving my videos as AVI movies in WMM2. However, I gave BuffTitler Dx 9 a try to create more interesting titles for my next video and, when I save the sequence as an AVI file, it indicates the correct length but runs very slooooooowly (a few frames per second) and is nowhere near done at the end of the running length. I noticed a similar effect saving an AVI file from Virtual Dub (I was trying to keep only part of a large sequence and reduce the size of the files I was manipulating). Has anyone encountered anything similar? I'm curious as to what might be causng this.

so people using Windows ME (me) have no option of a free editing software like MM2?

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Wendelius wrote:

Now if I can add a little technical question of my own: I have no trouble saving my videos as AVI movies in WMM2. However, I gave BuffTitler Dx 9 a try to create more interesting titles for my next video and, when I save the sequence as an AVI file, it indicates the correct length but runs very slooooooowly (a few frames per second) and is nowhere near done at the end of the running length. I noticed a similar effect saving an AVI file from Virtual Dub (I was trying to keep only part of a large sequence and reduce the size of the files I was manipulating). Has anyone encountered anything similar? I'm curious as to what might be causng this.

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Interesting. I've resolved this particular issue. I contacted the programmer of Bufftitler Dx 9 and asked him that question. His answer was:

Harddisk are not fast enough to play an uncompressed DVD quality AVI in realtime. This is not a problem for your video authoring tool because you can make perfect DVDs with them, but if you want to watch the AVI on your computer you will have to use a lower resolution, a slower framerate or use compressed AVI.

And he's right. I placed that slooow title sequence in Movie Maker 2, put a new soundtrack on it and saved it as a WMV file and it plays fine. So it's just my hard disk which isn't keeping up with a full uncompressed AVI. I hope this lesson can help someone if anyone else hits the same issue.

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Quetza202 wrote:
so people using Windows ME (me) have no option of a free editing software like MM2?

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Well if you're fond of pulling teeth, you could try what I used. Besides Fraps, everything was 100% free. However, aside from Fraps, Windows Media Encoder and VirtualDub, everything I used was non-Windows. However, I count the OS it was running on in with that "everything was 100% free" line.

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Wendelius wrote:
BuffTitler Dx 9

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What is this? I did a web search and came up with nothing at all. Do you have a link to some information?

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Tiaga wrote:

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Wendelius wrote:
BuffTitler Dx 9

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What is this? I did a web search and came up with nothing at all. Do you have a link to some information?

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As mentioned above, it's: http://www.blufftitler.us/ (I think the URL was in the 2nd part of the 2 part Private Message I sent you earlier today).

There is a free demo you can download. If you do, load up the sample projects for a demo of what it can do.

(edited for spelling)

Message Edited by Wendelius on 08-06-2004 01:56 AM

That'll learn me. I read the first part, but haven't gotten to the second part yet. I'll add the comments next update.