Post by Mayhem on Oct 11, 2006 10:31:20 GMT
Mayhem's Movie Making Guide For COD2
While it is very simple to use fraps to quickly record a demo and then stick that into windows media maker to make a frag movie, the end result is going to be a very low quality movie. The aim of this guide is to make a much nicer looking cod2 movie. The best software to use is something like Sony Vegas 6, which is what I will be refering to.
The first step is to establish what resolution you would like the end result to be. Common resolutions are 640x480, 800x600 and 1024x768. My personal preference which gives a good balance of quality and size is to use 720x576. The next step is to determine what frame-rate you would like it to run in, either 25 or 30 are the most widely used and I will be using 30 in this guide.
The next step is to config your cod2 to settings best suited to movie making (in other words the best detail possible). Create a new profile from the startup screen and change the graphics options so that all the best options are selected, i.e. directx9, extra quality textures etc. Also set the In game resolution to the resolution you plan to make your movie in. When this is done quit out of cod2 and add the following lines to the config_mp.cfg file which should be saved in a folder something like C:\Program Files\Activision\Call of Duty 2\main\players\Movie". This config file governs how all your movie will look like so its worth having a look at messing around with some of the cvars to perhaps remove stuff that you don't want on screen such as the radar / hud / nade indicators etc... I won't cover that as I'm no config expert but theres plenty of guides out there that can tell you what all the commands do.
It is possible to use Seismovision to play demos but it is fairly simple to do it without using that program. Open up the config file in notepad and add the following lines to the bottom of the file.
bind UPARROW "timescale 1" // Normal speed
bind DOWNARROW "timescale 0.01" // Super slow motion
bind LEFTARROW "toggle timescale 32 16 8 4 2 1 0.5 0.25 0.1" // Slow down in steps
bind RIGHTARROW "toggle timescale 0.1 0.25 0.5 1 2 4 8 16 32" // Fast forward in steps
bind F5 "fx_enable 0" // Remove all fog and smoke effects
bind F6 "fx_enable 1" // Display fog and smoke
bind F7 "r_drawentities 0; r_showtris 1; r_lightmap 2" // Enter a wire-frame mode (needs tweaking still)
bind F8 "r_drawentities 1; r_showtris 0; r_lightmap 0" // Normal display mode
bind KP_RIGHTARROW "cl_avidemo 30" // Start recording screen-shots at 30 fps
bind KP_LEFTARROW "cl_avidemo 0" // Stop screen-shot recording
After having done this you are ready to record your clip. Open Cod2 again and enter the following line into the console.
/devmap mp_carentan;disconnect
then when the game has dropped back to the menu screen.
/demo xxxx
These commands enable developer mode so that you can slow-down / speed-up the playback. Using the keypad 6 starts recording a demo and 4 will stop recording. This places .TGA screen-shots in a folder within cod2 e.g."C:\Program Files\Activision\Call of Duty 2\main\screen-shots" folder.
Now open up sony vegas. Firstly we need to set the project defaults in vegas that you want to use for all your clips. Select File>New and enter the resolution and frame-rate details into the dialog box. Also tick "Start all new projects with these settings". Click OK then
The next step is to stick all the screen-shots together into an .avi file. I highly recommend that you stick them together uncompressed as compressing them at this stage can reduce the quality later on. Select File>Open and navigate your way to the screen-shot folder e.g. "C:\Program Files\Activision\Call of Duty 2\main\screen-shots". This will open up a time-line of all the frames which you are free to do what you want with. At this stage I always save the screen-shots as an uncompressed avi which maintains quality for later on when you put all the clips together.
Go File>Render As>Custom Template then replicate all the settings you used before for resolution and frame-rate. Also make sure that the Video format says uncompressed. I then save this as a template so that I can quickly go through this process with the next set of screen-shots I stick together. Go File>Close to shut down this clip. Normally you would then go back to your demos and get some more clips but as I am only working with one clip here I will open the uncompressed avi file now and add some effects to it before I compress it to a compact format.
Open up the uncompressed avi and you will see that there are 2 icons to the right of the time-line. The top one is for altering the size, direction, zoom of any clip. Select this and select the preset "16:9 Wide-screen TV aspect ratio". This gives your movies a cinematic feel as well as getting rid of any spammy text such as players left or the match score at the top and bottom of the screen. Adding effects to a clip by altering the colours, blur, sharpen etc is almost infinite in scope and I won't cover any of this here. Use what you think looks best to improve the appearance of your clips.
Finally I will show you how to compress your clips so that it is possible to store them on the internet and still look good. First of all make sure you have the latest XviD codec installed. Go to render the same way as you did before to make it into an uncompressed AVI. Where it says Video format, select XVid and configure it. There are many advanced ways of tweaking this, but the simplest way is to set the bit-rate anywhere between 3000 and 4000 which will give a quality that has a good balance of quality of file size.
You should now have a reasonably high quality clip of what you have created.
You will probably want to add a soundtrack and put many clips together but I'll leave that bit to you as there are many different ways of going about this.
