The beautiful and OH SO SMART, Quinn Ying just put out a lesson on making a Second Life machinima.
Its really detailed and smart....Like our lovely Q. You can give it a read after the break!!!
This guide is provided as a tool to allow every user to start producing their own machinima, with the least effort and as quickly as possible.
It comprises ways to get around some of the most common pitfalls an inexperienced user might fall into, and the best hints to achieve a quality clip with the least effort. The basic steps are explained, providing valuable sources where needed, happy filming!
1) Install Fraps
1) Install Fraps
To start recording your footage, you'll need a screen capture software, which will save in a movie format (avi, mpg) all you can see in your viewer window. The trial version of Fraps is still usable. Being considered the best one around for windows, it deserves at least a try. Recording is usually triggered by a hotkey, that will create a new file in a predefined folder. For Fraps the start/stop recording key is F9.
For free alternatives to Fraps, check:
This article collects a very inclusive list of capture software available, with some comparison between their functionalities and performance.
2) Recording your SL content
Once you figure out how to record the content of your viewer window using your screen capture software (we'll name it Fraps from now on), you'll need to make it work with Second Life. Since SL adds some interface elements to the rendered image, you'll need to hide these elements.To hide your huds and interface, every viewer provides two key combinations:
- ALT-SHIFT-H: Hide huds - press again to show
- CTRL-ALT-F1: Hide interface - (Note: some people might find this combination hard to get. Keep in mind that laptops usually need a further key (usually Fn) to get the F1 function. when pressed alone in SL viewers, F1 key opens the Help Browser, so this might be a good way to test it alone. On many desktops the CTRL and ALT keys are duplicated on both sides of the keyboard, but the viewer might need you to press the one on the right or left side, so if it doesn't seem to work, try using both ALT keys.
Since you'll need to use them both combinations every time you record some footage, before starting your recordings, and again at the end, to make your interface come up again, a good practice when you begin could be to take a note.
Before using Fraps, take note of the location it saves your footage, and change it if needed. Start and stop your recordings hitting F9 key.
Note that Fraps will save your videos using the resolution of your current viewer window size, so to make an optimal use of your computer resources, you might want to reduce the size of your viewer window.
To do it, you first need to show "advanced" menu on the menu bar of your viewer, hitting CTRL-ALT-D. Once "advanced" menu appears, select "Set window size..." and choose a suitable resolution for your films. A smaller window will get you a better frame rate (fps) and produce a smaller video file when recorded.
3) Moving your cam around
When recording, your cam controls will be hidden, so you'll have to resort to keyboard and mouse to move your cam around.
The best way to do that is left-clicking on a subject while holding ALT key pressed, and moving your mouse while holding down your left mouse button. This combination will allow you to zoom and rotate around your subject. To get two other kinds of controlling your cam, try pressing CTRL-ALT or CTRL-ALT-SHIFT instead of just ALT.
These key combinations will allow you to rotate around your subject and pan laterally. This thechnique is better explained in these two vids, available on Youtube.
3.1) (optional) Smoothing your cam movements
All the viewers allow you to modify the cam behaviour when moving, allowing you to achieve smoother camera movements. Not all the viewers allow you to directly modify the parameters controlling your cam, forcing you to modify them manually as debug settings:To do this, show your advanced settings menu (if it doesn’t show, CTRL-ALT-D will toggle it)
Go to Advanced - Show Debug settings. I provided the values I’m currently using, feel free to test different values to match your tastes.
- ZoomTime = 2.5 (Time of transition between different camera modes (in seconds)
- CameraPositionSmoothing = 8.6 (Smooths camera position over time)
- DynamicCameraStrength= 16 (Amount camera lags behind avatar motion (0=none, 30=avatar velocity)
4) (optional) Compressing your footage
Once you’ll have your filming done, the destination directory of Fraps will have collected a certain quantity of files, usually very large in size. This is due mainly to the fact that live recording cannot get a real good compression rate, having the requirement to do all the job in real time while your viewer is still running at full speed.
At this point, you might want to reduce the files size, to make them more manageable, to store them easily or to make them more compatible with editing programs ( I found that mac editors hardly manage AVI files).
A good tool to convert your FRAPS files in MP4, quickly and without any noticeable loss is FFMPEG. This handy tutorial will provide you with some hints and useful tools to do all the job:
The compression rates achieved by FFMPG range from ten to twenty times smaller files, and doing it very quickly!
5) Editing your footage
To edit your footage, you’ll need a dedicated application, and a lot of products are available to date.
Its choice is very personal, and depends on some factors, like if you’re on a MAC or PC, how much you can afford to spend for a commercial product or resort to a free one, and your personal tastes. A couple of Wikipedia articles can help you in this choice, providing a comparation list comprising a long list of available products:
These products will help you with a range of functions including:
- Selecting your scenes
- Adding transition effects between your scenes
- Adding titles
5.1) Adding a soundtrack
To avoid concerns related to the intellectual property of the music you’re using, you might want to use some Creative Commons licensed music, that usually allow it to be used freely in your videos. A very comprehensive list of sites providing these kind of tunes is listed at the Creative Commons site:
To comply with the music license, take care to give credits in your titles to the author who made it!
5.2) Adding sound effects
You can use effects included in films you downloaded too, Downloadhelper is a free Firefox plugin that allows you to extract movies provided by streaming sites and save them to your computer.
6) Encoding and Uploading
At the end of your editing work, you’ll have to save your clip as a viewable file. The file format you’ll choose will depend mostly by the site you’ll have to upload your movie to. Since most free sites accept files within a certain size, the formats that achieve the best compression rate are MP4 and WMV, which are accepted as a standard by most sites.
In my experience, every site has some sort of “preferred” format, which matches the format the site uses internally to store files.
When a different format is provided, the site usually re-encodes the clip, which means it converts it to its own format. You’ll notice this by the time the site takes to show your movie after the upload has ended. Usually when such a conversion is done, you’ll notice a loss in image quality.
Making some tests, I noticed that naughtymachinima.com accepts WMV files without reconverting it and keeping the original quality. Of course other sites might have different “tastes” so the best way is to encode your film in at least a couple of formats and see which gets the better results.
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