06/23/2008    |    Devlog    |    Yardarm    |    Discuss

Making videos from screen captured content can seem daunting at first. But, with a little practice you can be throwing together great videos of your moments in game. It doesn’t take expensive editing programs or courses in video editing. There are easy to use tools that are free, come with your computers media package or are inexpensive should you wish to purchase. This guide will help you with how to utilize basic software and some tips in planning your game video.

First things first… you need an idea! It can be tempting to just take a bunch of screen captured video and edit together a video. But a little planning can go a long ways and save you hours of time in the end. Form an idea of what you want to create. Write it down and try and create a storyboard.

A storyboard is like an outline for a paper. Start with your basic idea and the first scene. Do you want your video to be done in first person view or from a view high above your avatar or ship? Are you in town or in battle? Making an outline of the scenes you want to collect will help you be more efficient when you collect your screen capture. It will also be easier to edit because you will already have a solid idea of what exactly you are trying to portray and how each scene transitions to the other.

Let’s talk about software. There are a lot of programs out there to choose from. I am going to cover the ones that I have found simple to use and are inexpensive to procure.

Fraps

Fraps is a Real-time video capture and benchmarking program. It utilizes windows software and can be used to capture games that use DirectX technology. There are a number of features to FRAPS: You can not only collect Realtime video but you can also take screenshots. It can be used with Windows 2000, XP, Vista and x64 editions. You can download a free version or buy and register the full version for $37. Fraps has a full support forum feature as well for any questions you may have. http://www.fraps.com

Once you download the version you are interested in, open up the settings and take an overview of the control commands. Benchmarking displays are controlled with toggling F8 and F12. Video capture is toggled using F9 as the Hotkey. Screenshots are captured by toggling F10.

Selecting “Start Fraps minimized” will hide the Fraps dialog screen when you launch the program. Fraps can still be accessed through the icon in the system tray. Under the Movies tab in settings you can adjust the amount of frames per second of video capture (fps) and direct what kind of sound input you may want to collect. A good average fps number that will maintain quality but not necessarily impact game performance is 30fps. Some games can have designed limits that restrict the amount of rendering faster than a marked framerate or even locked into a maximum framerate of 30fps. Fraps can have a noticeable impact on your gameplay. This can be attributed to the extra processing involved in saving the screen data to disk.

In order to utilize Fraps you simply start Fraps before you load up your game. This will move a Fraps Icon to your lower hotbar on your windows desktop. Once your game is loaded up you can hit F9 once to start video capture. To end your video capture you simply hit F9 again. Fraps will save your videos into a folder with the pathway C:Fraps. The size of the video files Fraps will save can be quite large and if you shoot a lot of video this fills up space quite fast. The reason the files are so big is because while the game is running there is not a lot of encoding going on and there is very little compression. This is why storyboarding can help you. You save time and don’t take up harddrive space with minutes of video that you may never really use.

Now there are two roads you can go down with regards to quality. Have you ever seen a video on YouTube that was very blurry and pixilated? This is because though the quality of the fraps may have been collected at high quality, it was edited without having the proper codec compression and converted to AVI files. You can certainly edit any fraps video in Windows Movie Maker, but the video quality will be poor and the editing will be difficult. You can always go down the path of using an expensive program such as Adobe Premiere. However, if you are just starting out or tight on funds, the road to follow is to utilize a program called Virtualdub and use DivX codecs. It is an extra step but it is well worth it when you compare the end product.

VirtualDub

VirtualDub is a video capture and processing program. You can download the program at http://www.virtualdub.org. There are a number of different release build you can choose on depending upon the computer system you are using. Download the virtualdub program you are interested in and then visit http://www.xvid.org to get your latest codecs. Install both onto your desktop.

To get started with VirtualDub, follow these steps:

Start VirtualDub

Select File. Open and choose the video in the Fraps directory you wish to compress.

Select Video. Compression and choose Xvid MPEG-4 Codec

Select File. Select Save As AVI and specify a filename for the new AVI. This is an opportunity for you to name your files in order of your storyboard. Virtualdub will show you the video as it compresses. Give it a new name and you can save yourself time searching to the exact clip you will have wanted to use. Write down the name of the clip for easy reference.

Windows Movie Maker

You don’t need a fancy video editing program to create a video out of your screen capture. You can easily use Windows Movie Maker to create your project. If you are going to add music to your video instead of mic captured sound, it is better to upload that first. Matching your editing of video to the music can be an easy way to add transition and maintain flow within your game video.

To do this: Select Import Audio or Music and then select the music you are interested in using. Once it is downloaded, left mouse click and drag to the timeline.

The next step is to go over your storyline and find the clip that matches your storyboard. If you have renamed your clips to match your storyboard this is really easy. If you have not, you may have to open several clips to find the ones you wish to edit into your movie. All you need to do is select Import video and find that clip in the list of Fraps videos (or the folder if you saved it somewhere else). Drag and drop that imported video into the timeline

If you are using music in your video, now is the chance to mute out any sounds your microphone picked up. Simply toggle the set audio levels button in the upper left corner above the timeline. Slide the slider bar to audio/music. If you are more concerned about it you can always mute each video clip as well.

To edit out parts of the video you don’t wish to use, simply hit the play button and let the video run to a section you are using. Toggle the pause button and then select the button in lower right below video. Running your mouse over this button it will say ‘split the clip into two clips at the current frame’. This will mark an easy editing point and divide your video clip. If you want to be more technical you can also follow the timer both on the video, the video clip size and the audio to match transition points. Find the end of the clip and do the same thing. You will see the cut clips in the timeline below.

Now all you have to do is delete the unwanted clips from your timeline. To delete the unwanted clips, highlight them in the timeline and select delete.

Video Effect and Transitions

Windows movie maker has a large number of easy to use video effects and transitions. Effects are what you can use on a selected clip. Transitions are what you will use to transition between two clips. The first effect you will want to think about using is to make a Title clip. To do this, select the first clip in your video. Select ‘Make titles or credits’ and select ‘title at the beginning of the movie’. You can change the animation, font and colors by selecting the edit tabs.

Enter the title you wish to use and select done to have it applied to the clip you selected.

You can also place titles and credits on the clip itself instead of before or after. This is an easy way to create text on the video itself. This way the user can still see the video and the text you have run across the clip. The length of the title can be trimmed by simply adjusting the slider in the timeline itself.

You can select a single clip, or multiple clips to apply a video effect. Slowing down your clip by half speed can help focus the theme of your scene. It can also help a viewer follow fast paced action. If your video has issues in brightness, you can lighten or darken selected clips as needed. Try out different effects and apply the ones you enjoy!

One issue to note is that sometimes Windows Movie Maker will not run the clip as seamlessly in the miniviewer window. This is just because the miniwindow allows you to look at what you are doing but is not an accurate representation to the quality or flow of your final product. Make sure to view your final saved movie in Windows Media or another media viewer to check your work before uploading it to a website.

You can also choose to different transitions between scene clips. Fade in and Fade out are common transitions that can be right clicked to activate on each clip you select. Timing the transition to beats or changes in your musical score is also an easy way to tighten up the appearance of your video.

Saving Your Movie!

In order to upload your finished project, you need to save it as a movie file. Select File, Save Movie File. Choose the location and name of your movie. The next step is one of the most important. What you select will have an impact on both the quality and usability of your movie. A common choice is to save the movie under video for broadband (512). This can give you a good quality image as well be easier for people to download it. High quality video (Large) will give you a really nice quality image but you could run into issue with size. Experiment with media options to see which one works for you. Save your movie twice but in separate format choices.

06/23/2008    |    Devlog    |    Yardarm    |    Discuss