The Making of a Video

The most common question I get asked is:

"How do you make videos like that?"

I will go into all the hardware and equipment I use, but there's 2 non-tangible attributes that greatly help. They are patience and creativity. You can have all the best equipment in the world, but without a little time, effort, and creativity it would all be useless.

Here's a summary of what I've used and how I used it.

HARDWARE

3 computers:

Computer 1: Pentium II 450

Computer 2: AMD 1900XP w/G-Force4 nVidia Ti4200 128MB w/TV-Out

Computer 3: Pentium III 800 w/80GB 100-ATA IBM HD

Dazzle Digital Video Recorder II PCI (installed on Computer 3) is what captures the TV/out from Computer 2

Korg O5R/W Sound Module for the midi music taken from EQ

Note: You don't necessarily need 3 computers, but it does give you the advantage of staging and capturing angles that you couldn't from a 1st or 3rd person point of view. You do need 2 computers at least though. One to play the character, and the other to record it. I honestly haven't tried recording with the same computer I'm playing on, only because I want each of those functions independent of each other and I think it would hinder the performance of both playing the game as well as recording it....at least for the horsepower my computers have.

It is feasible to use only one computer. You would need a video card with a TV-In and Out, record out to a VCR or Camcorder or other recording device, then reverse the process and play the VCR and record it back on the computer with the TV-In on the video card. But this method is cumbersome and introduces a lot of degradation in video quality.

SOFTWARE:

MovieStar 4.23 (comes with the Dazzle hardware) Software that works in conjunction with the Dazzle hardware to capture and create the mpg clips. It also can be used to edit and render, but I've found it too buggy for this function.

CoolEdit96 (to edit any audio .wav files I may need to...an oldie but goodie proggy)

AudioCatalyst 2.1 to convert .wav to .mp3. (another oldie but goodie)

Ulead Video Studio 6 to add/edit/render the clips, sounds, titles, effects, and music all together. (This is the proggy that makes it all come together!)

Flask 0.6 For video format conversion/compression/clipping.

METHOD

Once all the clips and scenes, etc are all together using Ulead Video Studio, I render it at the highest video quality possible, MPEG-2 720x480 format. This, of course, has the disadvantage of creating a huge file. "Part I" of the Pamela of Xev series is actually almost 80MB's in that format. I then use Flask 0.6 to convert it to MS-MPEG4V2 video format and DivX4 audio format which cuts the file size down significantly and retains most of the quality. I was initially having some trouble trying to get the mp3 audio compression to work cooperatively with the MS-MPEG4V2 video format, so my first two Pamela videos were done using DivX4 audio compression. In the "Cult of Setekh" video I was able to finally implement the mp3 format.

CONCLUSION

And that's pretty much it in a nutshell. I won't lie to you, but it took me a long time to put together "Part I"....about 3 weeks for only about 2 minutes worth of footage. It's not that it's hard, just takes a lot of time and patience. I would literally do 10-20 takes on one scene until I got it right. Often the EQ weather, time of day, or other players would get in the way and I had to wait out things that were beyond my control which got a little frustrating sometimes.