Creating a Movie

**The_Emperor** · 07-04-2003, 10:49

What was the song title? I wanna download that one

**frogbeastegg** · 07-04-2003, 11:18

That was great Was anyone else thinking 'A knight Tale II' with the combination of music and medieval knight action?

**Shahed** · 07-04-2003, 20:31

WOW I never did find that guy who made the movie for IL-2 i mentioned earlier. But seems that one like him found us.

That was GREAT

Thanks a million.

**Eyeswater** · 07-04-2003, 20:46

Thx people for your responses

Heres the process+software I used to make the vid,

Step #1 Recording
Using Fraps I made the screen captures of the MTW replay.Its an extremely easy program to use, the default key to start/stop recording is the F9 key, your footage is saved in AVI format in the Fraps folder.This raw footage will already be playble thru Windows Media Player (WMP from now on) but will most likely have a largish file size(more about that in a sec.
Fraps needs your in battle screen res set at 640X 480 to record so re-adjust that in MTW options before playing your replay, once done then play the replay and record what you want. That is the hardest part, finding the scenes and shots but practice is what its all about in this part of the process.

Step #2 Editing

Once you have got your footage its time to edit it to remove things like the odd stray mouse pointer, the paused button/box and to crop down the viewing area so you remove unwanted/unnecessary background goings on.Cropping and also resizing the animation dramatically reduces the file size which is very important too, the smaller the file the better.
The program I used for this was Jasc's Animation Shop which comes with Paint Shop Pro so if you have that, then you have Animation Shop(AS).
Once you fire up AS, its a matter of choosing the File menu/Open/then browse to wherever you have the AVIS(normally in the Fraps folder as mentioned above)then choose which one and click OK to open.
From here you can view the animation before deciding on what to crop out with the crop tool and choosing what size you wish to downsize to with the Animation Resize tool(found in Animation menu).
Once you are happy with your clip its time to save it in its new form.Now, someone has mentioned about the clarity of the video and its time to admit that I forgot to follow the Golden Rule of editing, which is when saving your altered file, be sure to rename it and preferably save it in a different folder otherwise you will not be able to start afresh on that clip if you feel like something hasnt worked out as best as you'd wish in hindsight,I rather hastily saved over my original clips during various tests on quality vs file size and in the end was stuck with the last result

In AS once you are happy with the file choose Save As and here you will be given the choice of various formats (avi,gif etc) to save to( I choose avi), 8bit colour or 24 bit etc etc.Its all easily followed from there and just a matter of experimentation again on what you find as an acceptable quality vs file size.I used the Full Frames Compressor at the appropriate prompt during saving but again experiment to get the best results.

Step #3 Composing the Movie

For this I used Windows Movie Maker( comes with XP I think)
to load the clips into the sequence I wanted them to play in and also add the soundtrack (optional

)
When your happy with the assembled clips etc save the project from the File menu and choose Save Project(so you dont have to manually reload the clips again if you dont like the finished project after saving) then after that just press the Save Movie button and follow the prompts, at the playback quality section I chose Setting:Other and Profile:Video for BroadbandNTSC(2Mbps total) but again its our old friend Experiment , for best results.Movie maker automatically plays the saved movie in WMP once saved (I think) so its best to have a peek and see if the quality is to your satisfaction and if not Open the Project in WMM and the clips will be in the order you assembled ready to save again in different settings etc.

WMM dramatically reduces the file size of your finished article compared to the original files/clips combined file sizes.And thats that... almost.

Additionaly I used Ulead VideoStudio 7 demo to compress the files size further still but it isnt necessary in every case ,just depends on how ambitious and long/big your movie is in the first place.In Ulead I just loaded my WMM made MTW.wmv movie then saved again choosing streaming Windows Media(wmv again) and it reduces the file size again .
If you have video editing software similar to Ulead VS7 then you can bypass the Animation Shop/Windows Movie Maker steps and do it all from your Vid Edit software in the first place or AS/WMM suffices if you dont have any vid edit software.

Step #4Upload to your webspace and then share with the World

[B]

Hope that makes sense but if not feel free to ask if theres anything I need to clarify or explain better.

Happy movie making people, now after all that I'm going for a beer and maybe kill another Spanish King if I get lucky

**Shahed** · 07-04-2003, 20:50

Somebody buy this man a beer

**The_Emperor** · 07-04-2003, 22:53

One Question... How on earth did the Spanish get the Chance to Invade Scotland?? Seems a bit of a difficulty strategically

**Alrowan** · 07-05-2003, 01:32

wow, nice, i think its time someone made an actual story film... would be most interesting

**Kraellin** · 07-05-2003, 07:08

most interesting, eyeswater, thanks. i believe i've got all those tools cept the last one, the ulead one.

oops. nope. dont have the windows movie maker. guess it doesnt come with all xp machines :( ah well, i think i know another way.

K.

**Kraellin** · 07-05-2003, 07:41

never mind. windows movie maker 2 is a free download from microsoft. got it and the creative fun pack add on, also free.

K.

**Shahed** · 10-23-2003, 03:53

Hello All

I have started my hand at movie making. You can view a sample here. (rightclick, save as) This is just a brief test to see what can be achieved. It's some footage of me running like a headless chicken in the game America's Army. The music is Persian folk, by Aref & Dariush (and no I don't expect you to like it

) . I am making some more and will post on that later.

Now what I would really like, and would love any pointers on is:

- A screen motion capture program which can record in higher than 640*XXX resoultion. This is becuase I have a reasonably good graphics card and it makes little sense to record on such low resolution when the end product can be considerably enhanced with better resolution.

- In ddition to the above I'd like to capture the sound as well. SO I need a program that can capture the soudn too.

-I'd now need a video/sound editor capable of filtering the screen capture sounds and merging it with my own music or voice/sound files.

Any additional pointers to the excellent posts by Eyeswater, would be most appreciated.

Thanks in anticipation

**Shahed** · 10-27-2003, 19:18

Hello Everyone I made another short movie.
Any feedback would be MOST welcome.

You can download it in a zip folder, by clicking the link below:

California Dreaming

That took me ages, but finally I got it done.
Would love some feedback.

--------------

**frogbeastegg** · 10-27-2003, 19:31

First film.
Very funny Sinan Loved the way you just dodged those bullets

It was like watching myself - I suck at dodging in FPS games The footage came out nice and smooth and the music wasn't bad, for some reason it sounded quite familiar but from where.....

Second film
Er, I don't get any actual film with this one, it's just music.

**Shahed** · 10-27-2003, 19:38

Yes the first one is a bit of a tragedy

I for got to mention something You must have DivX codec installed to view the second movie California Dreaming, since it is compressed using that codec.

You can download DivX directly by clicking the folowing link:

DivX Pro FREE bundle

DivX is good to have since a significant portion of online media are coded with this.

Cheers

**frogbeastegg** · 10-27-2003, 19:50

Ok, got the second film to work by playing it with VLC media player. You did a little better that time - you survived

Once again it came out nice and smooth, no hiccoughs or anything. Nice shooting BTW. When's the next film due?

**Shahed** · 10-28-2003, 07:53

Great

Thanks very much for your input Froggy.

About the next one: I would like it to be longer, about 5 minutes should be good. I am still trying to keep it as compressed as possible without losing picture and sound quality. I have not understood how to do that very well, yet. Once I got it under 20 megs, it's ready for publication. I may have another few short ones in before that.

**Quid** · 10-28-2003, 10:05

Great job Sinan You might just have persuaded me to go out and try something on my own as well...

The first one seemed to be a lot smoother than the second one...(with, however, a more tragic outcome

). I did enjoy both, though. Keep up the good work

**Alrowan** · 10-29-2003, 01:48

Originally Posted by [b

Quote[/b] (The_Emperor @ July 04 2003,20:49)]What was the song title? I wanna download that one

sorry to take so long on the reply, the song is Sowrds of a thousand men i think thats it, correct me if im wrong though, im at uni so i dont have access to my CD collection, which is where i too have a copy of the song

**Al Shama'ar** · 10-29-2003, 15:39

Grand

Nice work Sinan

2 things i'd like u to answer to:

1 - Explain, with some detail, how u did it.

2 - The reason I started this thread was that we would be able to exchange our battle tactics in a visual way. It's like they say, An image is worth a thousand words.

So please DO use MTW as subject of your testing and experimenting

Al

**Quokka** · 11-10-2003, 19:06

Does anyone have a link or copy of the movie Eyeswater made?
I was still just a twinkle in Gregoshi's eye way back in July.

Edit Mithrandir : testing.