Lawson's training videos
Lawson's Training Videos have been quite popular in the Allegiance community. Lawson is an average Allegiance player with a knack for scripting and recording game narrations. His is the voice that narrates the community created training mission (# 7) released as part of FAZ R4.
In addition to narrating, Lawson has created several training-style videos. Most of the videos are not finished products, but rather considered proof-of-concept; all footage as of October 2007 was unscripted, recorded primarily during pickup games.
He recorded and edited his first video (below) without consulting any other players. As such it came as a surprise to the community, and his thread in the Helpline Forum at FreeAllegiance.org quickly became the most-frequently-read unpinned helpline topic ever, with over 1,400 reads and 87 replies as of October, 2007. Due to the topic's popularity Lawson realised there must be a demand for training footage and started experimenting in earnest, creating many more videos.
Below are links so you can watch or, if you prefer a high quality version, download the videos that Lawson has created.
Videos on Google
The most convenient host for Lawson's content is Google Video. Similar to YouTube, it allows users to watch low quality videos with minimal effort.
Bomber Sample
- Training Sample - Bomber Sample - 2 min 18 sec
- Posted Jan 7, 2007.
- Unscripted game footage edited as if it were an upper-level training video, although no particularly advanced topic is addressed. Shows a fighter launching to defend a base against an inbound bomber; the defense succeeds with the destruction of the bomber.
Intro Reel
- Training Video Intro Reel - 55 sec
- Posted Feb 11, 2007.
- This video is a teaser, as if it were the first part of a full training session, leading into the Game Overview Test video to follow.
Game Overview
- Game Overview Test - 6 min 17 sec
- Posted Feb 21, 2007.
- Provides a training mission feel, from game start, including a freeze frame of the overhead map with a description of each part. This video is somewhat slower paced, but provides substantial detail explaining why certain things are being done, as well as some clarification of abbreviations seen in chat.
- A FileFront version of this video was removed from FileFront by their automatic "deletion of low-use files" policy.
Constructor Fight
- Constructor Fight (PAL) and Constructor Fight (MPEG4) - 4 min 4 sec
- Posted March 23, 2007.
- Two constructors aim for the same asteroid, causing a massive, dense dogfight. The video is narrated and heavily edited with zoom and highlighting effects in the first 2 minutes; the second half replays the entire sequence with no editing. As a side note, this video demonstrates a few rookie mistakes, including nanning while out of range and nanning while a target is not yet taking armor damage.
- Due to screen density, the video is somewhat blurred. The PAL version is much smoother to play on Google Video. For reasons unknown, the MPEG4 version hitches badly, but has good audio; it may be removed by Lawson at a later date.
Videos on FileFront
FileFront provides free content hosting for files of almost any size. One drawback to FileFront is pervasive advertising; also, files which are not viewed or downloaded frequently will be deleted from FileFront after a warning email to the file owner.
Quality of files hosted at FileFront is very high; the original source WMV or DivX files are provided in full resolution in most cases, and FileFront also provides a streaming version of each uploaded video.
You can download all of Lawson's Videos hosted on FileFront here.
Sector Overload
- Sector Overloaded Bomb Run - 53 sec
- Posted Sep 22, 2007.
- Footage from the Zone Game held on September 22, 2007; this shows a TP2 drop in which over 20 enemy bombers and fighter ripcord into a sector. The number of ships in the sector cause a sector overload which kills off the entire bomb run and most of the other ships in the sector. Due to an error in configuring Fraps, all original footage from this game contains no audio; music was added to this video.
Technical Details
Lawson uses many tools to produce his videos, each with its own caveats and advantages.
Capture
Fraps (available from fraps.com) has proven to be the most effective tool to capture Allegiance footage with minimal impact on computer system performance. With its lightweight, nearly-lossless codec, Fraps ensures high quality captures at 30 frames per second or higher. Because Fraps is designed for performance over compression ratio, captures tend to consume vast amounts of disk space. For example, 800x600 resolution at 30 frames per second requires 333MB of disk space per minute.
ZDSoft Game Recorder is another candidate for Allegiance capture. This application can compress to WMV or MJPEG format in real-time, and works with more modern games such as Halo. However, due to some unknown incompatibility in the Allegiance 3D engine, Game Recorder cannot maintain more than 10 frames per second in Allegiance. It's hoped that as Allegiance is continually revised and updated that Game Recorder will provide better performance. This software can capture in different formats and resolutions than the resolution selected for gameplay; for example, 800x600 game footage can be compressed on the fly into NTSC 720x480 progressive MJPEG format for easy editing in a prosumer-grade editing system.
ASUS GameLive Replay was also used in Lawson's early efforts. It leaves a watermark on the video; however, it is free to any ASUS video card user and has no time limits. Resolution is limited to a maximum of 720x480 during capture, regardless of the game resolution.
Staging
After capture, staging the captured content ensures that edited video is run through the lowest number of compression passes necessary.
- AVISynth is a scriptable video edit tool.
- FFDshow-Tryout is a codec set and includes makeAVIS, a frameserver wrapper.
- makeAVIS generates an AVI that is usable in Pinnacle Studio Plus.
The exact combination depends on the target output format of the final video.
- Fast editing: AVISynth script to resize 800x600 30 FPS footage to NTSC format for direct editing in Pinnacle Studio.
- Highest quality: AVISynth script to resize 800x600 30 FPS footage to HDV2 format (1080i) by either full scaling or adding borders, with edited results in MPEG2 HD format. A second pass to crop the borders in VirtualDubMod and frameserve into Windows Media Encoder provides the best possible results for downloadable viewing in WMV or DivX format.
Narration
Audacity (from http://audacity.sourceforge.net) is an open-source free audio capture and editing utility. It includes a variety of effects and rivals several commercial-grade sound editing packages. The recent 1.3.3 beta release has a vastly-improve noise reduction filter, essential to creating a comfortable listening experience when using consumer-grade microphones.
Most narration is done with a sub-$50 Plantronics consumer-grade headset, often with a USB capture interface to reduce system noise.
Editing
Pinnacle Studio Plus 10.5--though intended for prosumer video in DV or DVD format--provides adequate editing features for game footage. Although interlacing issues and final rendering in Pinnacle are challenging, the overall results are quite good. This provides the possibility to build a DVD of training videos, usable on any DVD player.
The final render output is performed in Windows Media Encoder for WMV format, or VirtualDub for DivX and WMV3 format.
