Difference between revisions of "Talk:Creating a Worms movie"

Revision as of 18:06, 17 February 2010

I'll be writing a guide here before submitting it as the WKB page. Please suggest changes or needed WKB "standards" where you see fit. OutofOrder 16:20, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

Creating a Worms:Armageddon movie is a process that involves several steps. This article will mainly cover the technical aspects of them.

Preliminar advice

The most important thing when creating a movie is to have a clear idea of what you want it to be like. This includes having a script (a mental sketch of it may be enough, but writing down the story or timeline works even better) and having replay material available containing the moves you're planning to add to the movie. Consider and fetch the music and/or sound effects you want to use. Sometimes ideas are born out of the material you already have, sometimes you get the idea first then create or collect your material, and most of the time it's both.

In the process of making a movie, you will find yourself reviewing your idea and changing details, maybe going back to creating new replays or rewriting the script. This is a natural process that will make your final movie better and more enjoyable. Do not expect your movie to be awesome simply because you're choosing the highest frame rate or the best codec settings. Be patient, take your time and follow the steps. It will eventually come out nicely.

The process of making a movie may take a considerable amount of your hard disk space. If you want high quality video, please have in mind that a 10+ minutes long movie can fill hundreds of Gigabytes of uncompressed raw video. You can reduce the space taken by raw video by compressing it before the editing stage, although this will reduce the final video quality. This will be mentioned later in the article.

Getting started

From now on, it will be assumed that you already have script and material ready. You will also need the following software:

• Worms: Armageddon installed and updated.
• VirtualDub
• One of the following:
  • Adobe Premiere Pro
  • Sony Vegas Pro (not Movie Studio, which is a more limited version than Vegas Pro)
  • Any other timeline-based video editing software of your preference.

Getting W:A ready for video extraction

.WAgame replay files contain the gameplay you want to show in your movie. W:A will extract video frames using the same interface configuration you have chosen for in-game play. So here are a few things to have in mind before extracting video:

• Disable the background gradient (presing the Insert key in-game), because otherwise it will greatly increase your final video size. Do it unless you really need to display the background gradient, objects and clouds.
• If the replay was played online, you can disable the telephone animation that shows up when chat lines are sent. If you want to do this, open the Phone_Disable.reg registry tweak found in the Tweaks folder.

Creating the movie

Exporting video frames from a replay file

The video extracting feature of W:A allows you to extract video frames from a replay file. Each frame is stored as a PNG file. If your replay file is named TESTVIDEO.WAgame, your video will be extracted to a User\Capture\TESTVIDEO\ folder

Repeat these instructions for every of your collected replay moments.

1. Browse to the folder containing your chosen replay file.
2. Right-click a replay file, then choose Export video...
3. In the dialog box that opens, fill in:
   • Frame skip: If you want the smoothest possible framerate, choose 1 (equals to 50FPS). A value of 2 is acceptable and it will halve used disk space, although it will cut down framerate by half (25FPS). Any higher values will noticeably drop the smoothness of animation.
   • Start at/End at: fill in the start and end moments of the particular move, turn or series of turns which you want to extract.
   • Resolution: Low resolutions result in smaller video files, but also show a smaller part of the action. High resolutions allow for better quality and broader perspective but take much more disk space. You should choose any resolution not smaller than 640x480. Recommended values are 800x600 or 1024x768. Widescreen resolutions are also supported.
   • Basename: and each frame will be saved using this basename value.
4. Click Ok to start extracting the video. In-game action will be captured, but you may still override the automatic camera by left-clicking and moving the mouse around if you want to focus somewhere else.

Converting frames to video files

Editing