Training Vids and other fun things

Post by **TheBored** » Mon Mar 17, 2008 3:29 pm

Picobozo wrote:QUOTE (Picobozo @ Mar 17 2008, 10:47 AM) I agree. We should upload this to Youporn instead. The quality there is excellent!

Winning post!

Anyways: Crono. Talk to AEM. We have a Training Documentation forum dedicated to the Training Missions, F1 Menus, and stuff like that. These videos would fit right in. Lawson (the awesome narrator) also reads that forum.

TB

apochboi · Post by **apochboi** » Mon Mar 17, 2008 3:32 pm

We need some Apoch Narration, camp gay and scottish, fantastic /mrgreen.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":D" border="0" alt="mrgreen.gif" />

refill · Post by **refill** » Mon Mar 17, 2008 4:12 pm

Good idea Chrono! I have been milling about on this matter for a period. I tried furiously to clear up my screen to film some action and was 99% there when FAZ4 came out and knocked the steam out of my efforts. Here is an example of me testing and how far I got. The movie with The Stranglers music and the Star Wars clip was the best effort I have yet made in clearing out the clutter.

I would like to ask one thing. If you guys do make recordings, please, please, please will people allow others access to the unedited files?

(Boi! I want those Raindog narration files. Do you still have them? Ta in advance. /mrgreen.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":D" border="0" alt="mrgreen.gif" /> )

Edit: I have spent some time thinking about hosting the finished files. So here is my moronic thoughts on this.

I have found that you can get decent to excellent quality on 4mb per minute and if you keep each completed lesson to 2 minutes. You will be able to host all your files with the likes of Google so as to avoid the downloading hassles. Peeps do not want to have huge files to download and I would think 2 minutes is more than enough to do "dummies guide to dumbs" and the like.

Talk to us Chrono a little about your format choices, software, templates, streaming... etc etc.

ogorass · Post by **ogorass** » Mon Mar 17, 2008 4:32 pm

A thread in Instructors forum is started. CDT-I could use some of those. A list of scenarios will (probably) be worked out and passed to you. S'that ok?

ImmortalZ · Post by **ImmortalZ** » Mon Mar 17, 2008 5:37 pm

I have some extremely powerful compression tools at my disposal and spare CPU time. ( I have some videos done in x264 that'll blow your pants off when you see the bitrates at which they are encoded )

If you don't want to muck about with the editing and compression, I can offload that provided you are okay with serving me the files over FTP or similar.

Of course, you have that stupid transfer limits on your connection, so you might want to direct instead of film? /mrgreen.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":D" border="0" alt="mrgreen.gif" />

Post by **aem** » Mon Mar 17, 2008 8:39 pm

Yeah if you want to do training videos you should coordinate with me. I have my domain allegtraining.com which I got to make training videos. However I never really started due to the lack of a good way to shoot videos in Allegiance. That and I found making training missions to be better in a lot of cases.

I hope to code in an observer mode specifically to make recording in-game video easy. In the meantime (the past 3 months) I've been recording videos for another online game and have gotten pretty good at game recording and video editing.

Right now there are basically three ways to get decent recordings for training/promo videos:Hold recording sessions where some people go into a server and try to simulate various scenarios for the training videos.Be allowed to join in planned matches: Squad games, Zone games, etc. I had thought the thursday night squad event was perfect for this. Are these still happening? I haven't played Allegiance in ages, so I'm not sure.Some things could be recorded in a training mission or an empty serverBut yeah I'll give you access to my training forum. Its gotten a bit inactive but you can bring it back to life. Had tried to revive it to start working on new training missions but didn't get much of a response. (look in the training zone: Training_Documentation)

EDIT:

To clarify I can host videos at allegtraining.com and you should probably coordinate with me on video content (for training purposes anyway). I will probably narrate my own videos just because it makes the process simpler. As others have said I would suggest you see if lawson will narrate any videos you make.

mesial · Post by **mesial** » Mon Mar 17, 2008 10:13 pm

I can handle a couple of gigs of #2.
As far as #3; my vote goes for Lawson. He's proven himself as a great narrator.

CronoDroid · Post by **CronoDroid** » Tue Mar 18, 2008 3:50 am

Right, thanks dudes.

@ImmZ: As for compression and editing, according to my ISP "uploads don't count" so FTP to ImmZ could work, I'll have to check.

Other than that, with VirtualDub I got a 1-2ishGB CoD4 video down to 30MB using mp4 compression at a bitrate of 3000/s, it runs for 50secs and only took a minute or so to do that, and with the Fig Bomber vid I made it's about 1:44mins, 45MB and it's quite easy to see what's going on. I need to jazz it up with more footage but yeah.

@AEM: On the topic of getting decent footage of gameplay, I encounter numerous exciting situations every week or even every day (and let's face it, PUGs are generally larger than SGs, the ones I've been in anyway) so massive furballs and bomber runs happen quite often. I'll coordinate with you on these vids in the forum too.

@Ogo: Sure.

Finally I'm using FRAPS to capture in-game video and so far I've been using VirtualDub to compress them. To make the videos I'll probably get Sony Vegas or Adobe Premier from my friend as he works as an IT type dude and has access to lots of this sort of software (PS, mmm mmm).

I have a fairly beefy rig so none of this really pushes it to the limit, all my videos are done at 100fps with not much slowdown in-game so I'll still be able to fly like. In fact CoD4 slows down much less than Allegiance does while I'm frapping, annoying.

ImmortalZ · Post by **ImmortalZ** » Tue Mar 18, 2008 5:33 am

If you have a beefy rig, I can supply you with tools and exact settings to do ubar encoding. If you'd rather not do it yourself, we can stick to the FTP plan.

Post by **aem** » Tue Mar 18, 2008 5:51 am

ImmortalZ wrote:QUOTE (ImmortalZ @ Mar 18 2008, 01:33 AM) If you have a beefy rig, I can supply you with tools and exact settings to do ubar encoding. If you'd rather not do it yourself, we can stick to the FTP plan.

I'd like to hear these "ubar" encoding settings.

Heres the results or the last video I made for another game:Estimating 2-3 hours of so video recorded w/ Fraps (1024x768, 25fps), many hundreds of GB from FrapsMade a 21 minute video downscaled to a resolution of 600x452 using clips in Sony Vegas at near lossless quality to 1.5GB (because I still need to convert it to flash which will compress it again)Used flash 8 video encoder to convert to flv at I think 1100kbps video and 64kbps audio: result 208mb for the 21minutes at 600x452.These videos play on my flash web page using the FLVideo player and it only takes FLVs. So if your method doesn't convert to flv (which I'd rather not do anyway), I'd need another player to stick in my flash web page. Need them to look very good.

I'm OK with my size for the most part, since most of my videos will be 7-8 minutes..

(webpage: http://soccerbrawlmedia.com/ note: buttons on right haven't been done yet so aren't functional)