Recording and making a .avi or .mpeg

[Mero Vilul]

I know how to record, but what is the best way to create a .avi or .mpeg of it? I saw a thread about this a while ago, but don't know if it was in this forum, and I got tired of looking after klicking 5 pages back...

[Akshara]

I too have searched for this, and not yet found a definitive answer. I've tried recording audio and encoding the MP3 at 128 bit rate, but it never works properly in game.

 

What does the original audio need to be recorded at?

16bit or 8bit

44.1, 22, or 11khz

 

And what bitrate should the MP3 encoding be?

128 or 160

 

Any insight would be appreciated.

[Akshara]

<bump>

 

Has no one actually tried recording an MP3 and succesfully used it in game?

[RamataKahn]

Taken from Jake's post in another thread:

 

Well, I haven't tried in JKII so someone smart and/or someone from Raven might have to come by and smack me down BUT, here's how you do it in Q3:

 

Plan A: Extreme but sexy approach:

 

First off, I'm assuming that by "how do you record movies" you mean, how do I save out part of my game to an mpg, avi, or quicktime file. If you just mean, how do you make a recording of the game that anyone else with the game can play back, only read to step 3.

 

There is no direct "create video" option in Q3 games, but if you go through a couple of extra steps, you can turn your matches into video suitable for download or television broadcast or international film release or whatever. First off, though, you need to record a demo.

 

If you don't know what a "demo" is in FPS games, you should probably not even be bothering with this without looking up more information. Anyway, to record a demo, drop down the console (shift-` on the keyboard) and enter the following commands (without the numbers at the beginning of course):

 

1) g_synchronousclients 1

2) record filename

 

Of course where it says "filename" you type whatever you want this in-game recording to be saved as. When you're ready to stop recording, type:

 

3) recordstop

 

(This could be "stoprecord," I can never remember, but it is something very similar to that.) To play this file back at any time, in game (not as some sort of .mpg .avi .mov or whatever), just type "demo filename" from the console.

 

Now, this is the questionable shady part. If you want to save the demo you've just recorded to some sort of digital video movie format, you need to be mildly bored, but dedicated. And again, this hasn't been tested by me in JKII, just in Q3. Anyway, what you need to do is enter the following:

 

4) cl_avidemo framerate

 

Where it says "framerate" there, you'd substitute that with the frames-per-second you'd like this to be exported to video as. Most commonly, for Internet video etc, you'll want 30 fps, and therefore type "cl_avidemo 30."

 

Now that you've activated cl_avidemo, you need to actually select which demo you want to save to disk. To do this, you simply need to play the one(s) you want to save out.

 

5) demo filename

 

Of course, with "filename" being the name of the demo you want to save. The playback of the demo will be somewhat choppy here, but when it's saved out to disk it will look perfect. Note that you can repeat step 5 with as many demos as you'd like.

 

Some tricks: You can overcrank and get some nice slow motion effects by typing, for instance "cl_avidemo 120" -- that's 4 times the framerate capturing the same action, so when you play that back at 30 frames per second it will appear to be happening at 1/4 the speed. Nice John Woo type thing going on. Also if you have something that you want to speed up, you can try like "cl_avidemo 15" which would make the action occur twice as fast when played back at 30 fps.

 

Anyway. Now again I'm going only from memory since my computer is not one destined to play JKII unless Aspyr grows a brain (Yes, I'm on a Mac. Shut up, I'm trying to help you out here).

 

This is the tricky stupid part. The Q3 engine doesn't have the code in it to save out demos directly to video. Instead, if you look in your "screenshots" directory (probably wherever you have JKII installed) you will see that it is more than full. In fact it is practically overflowing with screenshots. Yes, that's right. Instead of writing out to an actual movie, the game has written your demo out to 30 screenshots per second (or whatever you set the framerate as).

 

Now you get to find a program to assemble these together. Programs like Adobe Premiere or even the QuickTime Player Pro Edition will be able to do this. I don't know of any freeware programs to do this, but you should be able to find one. Anyway, find a program that will combine all of the screens into a movie and you're all set.

 

Yes, I realize this is a maniacal amount of steps and work to go through, but if you actually bother to do this (and also re-sync the sound, since that gets lost), you will end up with the most impressive looking in-game captured footage on the planet. Even nicer looking (when downloaded online -- if you're putting it on TV it doesnt really matter how you get it) than the trailers LucasArts put out.

 

(Recommended mostly for things like MOD video trailers and maniacally produced clan videos)

 

 

Plan B: Quick and dirty approach:

 

Get a video card with video capture and video output to TV capabilities. Play JKII to your hearts content while recording to a VCR using your cards video output to TV port. Then capture the video tape footage back in to your computer in a program like Permiere. Doesn't look as good by any means (everything is blurry and washed out) but it's definitely fast.

 

(Recommended for anything else

[Akshara]

Thanks for the info!

 

I was mostly referring to recording audio soundbites, so maybe I didn't get the first poster's question...

 

I discovered that an audio file MP3 encoded at

 

64 bitrate, variable

44.1khz

 

Will play ingame as a dialog replacement, and keep the file size down.