Friday, February 15, 2008
11:58 by FoxTwo
I was busy making a new machinima, based again on MissLoi's new story. Also, cendrine's question here prompted me to write this entry, to perhaps give some info to people who may be interested in taking up this art form. Yes, making machinima is an art-form.
First of all, to get started, you need:
Hardware
You need a gaming-capable PC/laptop. What that means, is your PC must be more than a "typical" one which people use to surf the Internet and type a couple of reports. It must be able to run GAMES, and we're not talking about "Maple Story" type. As a general guideline, you need at least a Pentium4 2.4Ghz single-CPU machine with about 1GB RAM and a pretty decent graphics card like a nVidia 7600 to record the game's actions relatively jerk-free.
And, you need HEAPS of harddisk space. RAW footage typically takes about 4GBs per about 2 or 3 mins of real time action. Normally what I'd do is once I finish a scene, I'll compress all the raw footage down into DivX or Xvid format
That's just about the bare minimum.
Software
A typical sequence of events will be this.
Post Production
You take all these raw footage and edit them in your video editing software. If you need to add in voice dialogs, that is where the audio editor comes in - you record your spoken dialogs there, cut/edit/trim all the audio files there, before you import them into the video editing software. The video editing software is your "central console" where you string the scenes together, add audio, cut out bloopers, overlay subtitles etc. Everything to make your movie "ready" to show the world.
Once you've made all the final edits, EXPORT YOUR MOVIE! Most movie editing software will not "save" the movie into any useable format, ie you can't play the movie in your Windows Media Player unless you export it. Choose your format and quality wisely. Higher quality means a bigger resulting file. Lower quality may make shooting at high resolutions pointless and pixellates everything, but your filesize will be very much smaller.
After exporting, run the resulting file through VirtualDub to encode and compress them for release onto the Internet. Some video editors like Adobe Premiere, can actually export the movie already compressed in DivX or Xvid format, so you can skip VirtualDub.
Release
Upload your video to a sharing site like Vimeo (I recommend Vimeo over Youtube anyday), because Vimeo has higher quality video streams. If you shoot your movie in high resolution, your video will be High-Def in Vimeo (ie DVD quality or better). Vimeo also doesn't have that stupid 10-minute limit on your videos, so your movie can be 1 hour long if you want.
Besides, Youtube just mashes everybody's video into dinky 320x240 VCD quality videos. It looks sucky, trust me.
Other sites you might want to try are metacafe and videoegg.
Conclusion
That's basically it. Notice I did not attempt to teach you how to use your software. Your software choice is up to you, and you need to learn how to use them. Making machinima is simple to understand but difficult to execute.
For total beginners I recommend you get the game The Movies. This game comes with almost everything you need up to the point of "Release" as mentioned above. You can shoot, edit, and do simple post-production on your movies right inside the game itself. You don't even need FRAPS to record your movie!
For me, my current "project" still requires me to do post-production outside of the game because I need to add and edit something else, which can't be done from inside the game.
11:58 by FoxTwo
What You Need To Make Machinima
I was busy making a new machinima, based again on MissLoi's new story. Also, cendrine's question here prompted me to write this entry, to perhaps give some info to people who may be interested in taking up this art form. Yes, making machinima is an art-form.
First of all, to get started, you need:
Hardware
You need a gaming-capable PC/laptop. What that means, is your PC must be more than a "typical" one which people use to surf the Internet and type a couple of reports. It must be able to run GAMES, and we're not talking about "Maple Story" type. As a general guideline, you need at least a Pentium4 2.4Ghz single-CPU machine with about 1GB RAM and a pretty decent graphics card like a nVidia 7600 to record the game's actions relatively jerk-free.
And, you need HEAPS of harddisk space. RAW footage typically takes about 4GBs per about 2 or 3 mins of real time action. Normally what I'd do is once I finish a scene, I'll compress all the raw footage down into DivX or Xvid format
That's just about the bare minimum.
Software
- A machinima-friendly game. That usually means First Person Shooter games, such as Half Life, Battlefield, Call of Duty etc. However it's not a hard and fast rule. People have made machinima with games like The Sims 2, The Movies, or even MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, Everquest 2, City of Heroes etc.
- A video recording software. Most machinima makers use FRAPS. It's one of the most recognised names in and out of the machinima circles.
- A video editing software. If you're just starting out, you can use the free, built-in Windows Movie Maker that comes with XP itself.
- An audio editing software. I use Audacity. However, as long as you have something that can let you edit and re-shape sounds, it's ok.
- Video compressing software, like VirtualDub. VirtualDub also lets you make minor editing to your movie, and has various filters and options for cutting and joining clips.
- Video codecs to encode your video so that you don't have to upload a 500MB file. Very popular are Xvid and DivX which would cut your 500MB file down to about 50MB without much loss in quality.
A typical sequence of events will be this.
- You write a story out on paper first
- You choose a game to "film" this story in
- If the characters in the game need special movements not normally found in the game, you need to locate mods or scripts to control the characters to make them do what you want them to do
- Record the action
- Rinse and repeat until scene is done
Post Production
You take all these raw footage and edit them in your video editing software. If you need to add in voice dialogs, that is where the audio editor comes in - you record your spoken dialogs there, cut/edit/trim all the audio files there, before you import them into the video editing software. The video editing software is your "central console" where you string the scenes together, add audio, cut out bloopers, overlay subtitles etc. Everything to make your movie "ready" to show the world.
Once you've made all the final edits, EXPORT YOUR MOVIE! Most movie editing software will not "save" the movie into any useable format, ie you can't play the movie in your Windows Media Player unless you export it. Choose your format and quality wisely. Higher quality means a bigger resulting file. Lower quality may make shooting at high resolutions pointless and pixellates everything, but your filesize will be very much smaller.
After exporting, run the resulting file through VirtualDub to encode and compress them for release onto the Internet. Some video editors like Adobe Premiere, can actually export the movie already compressed in DivX or Xvid format, so you can skip VirtualDub.
Release
Upload your video to a sharing site like Vimeo (I recommend Vimeo over Youtube anyday), because Vimeo has higher quality video streams. If you shoot your movie in high resolution, your video will be High-Def in Vimeo (ie DVD quality or better). Vimeo also doesn't have that stupid 10-minute limit on your videos, so your movie can be 1 hour long if you want.
Besides, Youtube just mashes everybody's video into dinky 320x240 VCD quality videos. It looks sucky, trust me.
Other sites you might want to try are metacafe and videoegg.
Conclusion
That's basically it. Notice I did not attempt to teach you how to use your software. Your software choice is up to you, and you need to learn how to use them. Making machinima is simple to understand but difficult to execute.
For total beginners I recommend you get the game The Movies. This game comes with almost everything you need up to the point of "Release" as mentioned above. You can shoot, edit, and do simple post-production on your movies right inside the game itself. You don't even need FRAPS to record your movie!
For me, my current "project" still requires me to do post-production outside of the game because I need to add and edit something else, which can't be done from inside the game.
Labels: machinima
