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Machinima.com :: View topic - Demo To avi or mpg
Hold a camcorder up to the screen, then take the tape to your friends who has the voodoo3 with TV in/out and hook it into that, and have them tape a .AVI of it.
werd.
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Addendum: Really to basically turn a quake movie into a real animation file that media player or something can run, is very difficult or just takes real long to do.
And generally isn't worth it.
You get a program that tapes an .AVI of your desktop, whether youre using windows, or playing a 3d game.
You will need a monster computer for this.
Like 500|PLS| mhz OUCH.
Or you use a command in your desired game or engine, to dump every frame-per-second to a .bmp or .tga file, meaning now you have to have like 2 gigs free on your hard drive because each .bmp frame for 'full gay uncompressed color' is like 500k to 900k big.
So that means a damned second of video is 30 megs!!
(or more if you do 30|PLS| fps) NOW you break out Adobe-something that edits mpegs and piece them all into one big animation file.
Now at last you have a (probably huge) working .AVI or .MPG file and can delete all those bmp's.
But guess what you got to play the movie back in q2 or whatever, and 'tape' the audio stream of it like hold a microphone up to it or some other bound to be ghetto and conventional way, to get a .WAV file.
Then you need to put this .WAV file that you made mono or stereo or however you taped it, into that big animation you just made.
NOW the animation is huge as hell and you cant send it or show it to anyone on the net.
So you need to re-run it through a mpeg compressor and make it MPEG4 or severly chop down the 800x600 avi resolution down to 320x240 or 160xWHATEVER and then its finally 6 or 7 megs big for a 5-10 min movie.
Which is still ridiculous but sendable.
See what I mean.
Fuckit.
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I think what Immortal is trying to say is that movie files suck and that demos are the best, and they are.
So there.
RaiLord
www.planetquake.com/drivein
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If you want to produce conventional media versions of your films, depending on the platform you're using you might already have a command in place to do that- Half-Life and Quake II can both produce (soundless) movies (the latter with Keygrip II), as can Quake III (although you'll need the aforementioned monster PC for that).
Otherwise, your best bet is to get a graphics card with TV-out capability (see our recent "building the Machinima PC"
Article) and a video capture card, output the movie to video, then capture it back in again.
If you're looking to show your films off to people who don't have the game you're using, that'll produce some fairly decent quality footage.
However, I'd agree that it's not of the quality of in-game footage.
(A note- if you're wanting to capture TV-quality footage (640x480 or 800x600), your only way of proceeding will be to buy a FireWire card and buy or borrow a FireWire-capable recorder (like a digital video camera) and use them to perform the same operation.
Conventional video capture techniques can't capture that sort of screen size without lossy compression techniques (like MPEG capture).)
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Making a demo to an avi or mpeg isn't as hard as everyone here is saying.
Probably cause the people responding to you have never done it, but they like sounding like they have.
To do this you can rely on several peoples of software to make your demo an avi.
/cl_avidemo will actually turn your demo into a playable avi file.
I just suggest you do it at 640x480 so that it's not a gig in size when you're finished.
Or you could make sure you have a video card that will do TV-Out.
That way you can set your Television set up to be the "monitor"
Of your computer.
With one click of a button you can switch between your Computer Monitor and your TV Monitor.
This will play your demo out full screen from Quake1, Quake2 or Quake3 and you can record it beautifully onto a video tape.
If you have a video card that does TV out, then it also does TV-In.
Just capture it and you have it full screen in mpg\avi.
That's the long way around, but it's better than some of the stuff I've seen mentioned here.
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Don't forget the DIVX codec for mpeg4 avi's from http://divx.ctw.cc
I have also heard of some people using the "Microcrap"
(sic) codec, but DIVX seemed smaller to me in use.
And don't use .ASF, that really is a bad thing to do (huge).
And making the sound .mp3 format (within the avi) will help a lot, thats how I got the Quake3 intro from 155mb to 9mb without loss.
RaiLord
www.planetquake.com/drivein
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Quote: :
Making a demo to an avi or mpeg isn't as hard as everyone here is saying.
Probably cause the people responding to you have never done it, but they like sounding like they have.
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GO HOME LITTLE BOY.
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Quote: :
To do this you can rely on several peoples of software to make your demo an avi.
/cl_avidemo will actually turn your demo into a playable avi file.
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Well the other 99% of machinima makers currently use QUAKE 2 as the chosen engine and some are just experimenting with Half Life.
No official UT movies are out as well.
So if you want to decompile the Q2 source and add in that command for me, I'll even pay you.
I see myself using LFP and Q2 for movies years from now.
I'm real skeptical that a quake3 'keygrip' can even exist, like no ones that bad ass at C|PLS||PLS|/ASM.
And I've done that before, taped an avidemo on my hog ass 450mhz and a voodoo3 and plenty of ram and let me say it was a damned slideshow.
Shame on you for providing ol' dude with false hope!
It will be slower than THAT to use 3rd party software to tape any animation he is doing to avi like desktop capture style stuff because its not internal and integrated in quake3 making it lighter on the system overall.
Do I sound like I know what I'm doing?
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Quote: :
If you have a video card that does TV out, then it also does TV-In.
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Why am I copy/pasting that line again.
I know, because its so unbelieveable we all need to do a double take.
Voodoo3 3000 has tv out and no tv in.
The previous card I had before that, a HERCULES 128, had TV out and no tv in.
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Quote: :
This will play your demo out full screen from Quake1, Quake2 or Quake3 and you can record it beautifully onto a video tape.
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ISNT THAT WHAT I TOLD HIM?
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Quote: :
Just capture it and you have it full screen in mpg\avi.
That's the long way around, but it's better than some of the stuff I've seen mentioned here.
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You need to come off your god damn high horse with your weak 2 second Q2 AVI's.
Who wants AVIS/ASF/crap that isnt dm2 no one HERE thats for sure.
Your method is no better and your technical skill is no better than anyone else with a completed movie q1 q2 q3 or otherwise.
We all learn from each other and I'll tell ya I can run 3dsmax as good as your ass just gimme Character studio and some plugins I can make the doom2 guy do the disco too.
I like recamming because its plain SWEETER.
Jesus.
-m0rt
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Goss, I just wanted to say: thanks for your comments.
However, I too have seen cards that do TV out but that can't handle capturing video input;
I was very annoyed when I found that all of the video cards we've got around the office where I work offer this (lack of) functionality.
Immortal, I'm with you that machinima played back by a rendering engine has a lot of quality and filesize benefits - I hold forth evangelically on the subject myself whenever some poor listener lets me do so.
I think its a key strength of machinima and it's one of the reasons I'm excited about the medium.
But I'm not at all convinced that the use of more conventional video formats doesn't have a lot going for it too - and I think what Tritin are doing with their mixing of the techniques is fascinating.
The main thing is that I'm pretty certain a flamewar isn't going to do anybody any favours, it just means that useful information ends up getting lost in the noise.
I think the machinima community can benefit greatly from some of Tritin's ideas...
It's already enough of a shame that they don't have a proper active presence here on machinima.com anymore, please let's not split the community up even more?
BTW, adding an AVI writer to Quake2 should not , _in principle_, be a very difficult thing to do;
The technology to capture a screenshot is in the engine, the modifiable gamex86 part of the game should let you perform an action every client or server frame, and there are standard libraries for AVI output.
So at least in theory, you don't need to wait for the Q2 engine source in order to do this.
In practice, it's fiddly enough that it's an appreciable amount of work, so I'm not surprised it hasn't been implemented.
- Anthony.
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Joe- good to see you around again, and thanks for the comments.
Anthony- in actual fact, of course, an AVI writer (of sorts) is already available for Quake II- Keygrip II will, as described on Zarathustra Studios, write out bitmaps of an entire scene at any size.
However, the problem with that (and any other form of in-game output in several engines, including, irritatingly enough, Half-Life) is that you'll only be able to get a 10 fps playback rate, as that's the only frequency at which the engine will output AVIs.
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ASUS make a nice little (expensive card) that does it all- video in/out, good 3d.
Their 6600 deluxe and 6800 deluxe cards do all that, and are based around the nvidia GeForce 256 chipset..
6600 is SDR, 6800 is DDR.
The pure versions of both are a plain geforce, no vi/vo features.
And as an added bonus, you get a special port and some stereo glasses to give your 3D games a bit more punch..
But you do have to run your games in 2X the resolution you want them to look in 3D mode.
Dan "RaiLord"
Thomas
www.planetquake.com/drivein
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Yes, a stream full of bmps, at 10 frames a second no less,
is an afternoon of fun to sit and wait to piece together, then have to cut the resolution to a 4th which takes a nice hour or so too, then you get to shit that out into .asf or .rm to be distributable to everyones acceptable standards since the whole world doesnt have fiber optic connection or the like.
If you had a tv in/out couldn't you get crazy and loop the tv out to the TV in like press record in the background and fire up q2/whatever..
That still quite tasking but I wouldn't think as much as a separate AVI capturer software or something basically SHAREWARE AND BULKY AND SLOW...
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I've recently purchased an ATI Rage Fury Pro which, as it happens, can do both video in and out.
It's a 32 mb card and you can pick em up pretty darn cheap these days.
Far better than the Voodoo 3500 which should be avoided.
Furthermore, you're better off recording a quake 3 movie to video as opposed to the cl_avidemo command which is a definite NO!!
Once you have it on video, just record it back into yer computer and use Premiere, Soundforge, etc, to manipulate it.
Yes, it IS time consuming, but gets results.
Besides, any long time rendering can be done overnight.
Easy
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