Official forums for BZFlag.org

Just a small video, nothing special:

360p: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLdMl5QIKb0
720p: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLdMl5QIKb0&fmt=22

Cheers!

Quite nice it could use some sort of background music in my opinion though.

very nice snick.. its simple but really high quality and a more realistic version of the gameplay.

most of the youtube vids that I've seen have had really choppy framerates - but not yours.

how did you go about recording it? i.e using a screen capture program or?...

I'm asking because I would be interested in posting some videos myself.

me too, I cant find a good screen capture program anywhere.

I use Fraps on Windows (paid version removes the 30-second limit and the watermark, and allows screenshots in formats other than BMP). It works quite well, at least on my gaming system (3GHz C2D, nVidia 9800GTX+).

or- for mac, try iShowU

plasma kaz wrote:very nice snick.. its simple but really high quality and a more realistic version of the gameplay.

Thanks! What I've been trying to do for now is concentrate on playback quality - artistic merit can
come later .

most of the youtube vids that I've seen have had really choppy framerates - but not yours.

how did you go about recording it? i.e using a screen capture program or?...

Ok, I'm not saying this is the best way, but here are most of the gory details

For capturing I used Fraps on Windows 7, set to capture at 30fps. I selected the"Force lossless
RGB capture" option to avoid any loss of quality:

http://www.fraps.com/images/f3-movies.gif

In BZFlag under Options/Display Settings/Change Video Format I chose 1280x720. Recording at
a resolution lower than your monitor's native resolution can allow you to capture more frames per
second and it uses less disk space (lossless RGB capture uses a lot of disk space). I opted for
1280x720 as that happens to be a standard HD resolution (and one used by YouTube).

To avoid stretching to fit the display, here's the option for NVIDIA cards:

http://img32.picoodle.com/img/img32/5/1 ... 53c148.jpg

I also bumped up the settings in the NVIDIA control panel to 16xQ supersampling AA (anti-aliasing)
and 16x AF (anisotropic filtering) and forced vsync off (Energy Saver in BZFlag also off).

That's the capture side. For editing I switched to OS X and Final Cut Pro (but you don't need a fancy
editor for this - VirtualDub (Windows), iMovie (OS X), lots of good choices) and for the editing codec
used uncompressed 8-bit 4:2:2.

Then comes the tricky part: the transcoding. There's not much science to this: it's a case of fiddling
about with codec settings until you get something that is the right balance between acceptable quality
and upload size. In an ideal world you'd upload the original material to YouTube, because Google are
only going to transcode it again. But uncompressed original material is generally way too big to upload.

There are lots of ways to compress uncompressed material before uploading it to YouTube, and I'd
recommend using the free FFMpeg and x264:

http://ffmpeg.org/
http://www.videolan.org/developers/x264.html

I'm asking because I would be interested in posting some videos myself.

I'd be interested also in seeing others have a go at this and hopefully learning from their efforts.

Gamma wrote:Quite nice it could use some sort of background music in my opinion though.

Yes, indeed. That's my next project

Cheers,

Snick.

Awesome snick, great quality! Thanks for the screenshots and the information on how you accomplished that quality, too. I'll definitely give it a try sometime when I'm not busy.

thanks for the detailed explanation - I really appreciate it. That "Force lossless RGB capture" setting really works like a charm.

I just want to note that for those who have ATi cards: the setting to keep the aspect ratio and not stretch to fit the screen is found in CCC Digital panel (or something along those lines) -> Attributes and then under Image Scaling make sure that there is a dot by "Maintain aspect ratio".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJgb2n6bc38

quality isn't perfect but I didn't spend more than a minute fumbling with the codecs, I'll find a better one when I make an actual video rather than just a clip to get the screen capture & compression etc working together. Thanks again!

are there any good freeware screencatering programs?

I currently have no way of purchasing things online.

plasma kaz wrote: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJgb2n6bc38

I like the bzflag wallpaper you have in your config guide video, where is it from?

saturos made it - i got it from dexter though.

First thing: I've made another video, this time captured Mac-side.
I think the image quality is a notch up on what I posted last time
and I've used my custom high resolution BZ textures:

360p: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjM9ndG5BFU&fmt
720p: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjM9ndG5BFU&fmt=22

Maybe could be a little brighter with less colour saturation. A few
other flaws too.

One thing I've noticed. If you're casually watching matches, you see
great shots and moves all the time. When you actually want to find
one of 'em to record it ... so elusive!

Perhaps people could pm me/gu mail me if they see something truly
amazing (or stupidly funny!) and I could make a compilation video
(assumes moments are on a replay server).

slime wrote:Awesome snick, great quality! Thanks for the screenshots and the
information on how you accomplished that quality, too. I'll definitely
give it a try sometime when I'm not busy.

Thanks! I wasn't sure if I'd been a trifle over-enthusiastic explaining it.
But, you know me, I can't keep my silly mouth shut

plasma kaz wrote:thanks for the detailed explanation - I really appreciate it.
That "Force lossless RGB capture" setting really works like a charm.

Yes, definitely the way to go.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJgb2n6bc38

quality isn't perfect but I didn't spend more than a minute fumbling with
the codecs, I'll find a better one when I make an actual video rather than
just a clip to get the screen capture & compression etc working together.

I think you should be able to turn out something of quality. The sharpness
and smoothness are already pretty much there. I'll keep a beady eye on
developments

huttymuncher wrote:are there any good freeware screencatering programs?

I currently have no way of purchasing things online.

Which OS are you using?

Really nice video and exellent textures. Great work, snick!

snick wrote:Perhaps people could pm me/gu mail me if they see something truly
amazing (or stupidly funny!) and I could make a compilation video
(assumes moments are on a replay server).

If ever you start taking ideas for your funny/stupid compilation video, I have some ideas that you might like.
I don't know where to look on any replay server but I'd happily pm you any ideas and you can find a few actors to act it out?

It'd be good to see some more worthwhile BZFlag Videos out there on YouTube.

Which OS are you using?

Windows, although i also have access to a mac.