Making an SBPPE movie?

[MarkShot]

From time to time, I like sharing the games I am playing with friends over at the www.wargamer.com. Last night, I created an SB thread featuring screenshots and little story line:

http://www.wargamer.com/forums/tm.aspx?m=386228

Last week, I had been thinking of making an SB movie of some of the game. Note, I have always posted screenshots of games, but never any video. So, this whole thing was new to me. However, the level of work involved doing a movie seems to dwarf taking screenshots. I was wondering if it was due to my inexperience that I was going about this wrong?

Here is what I was doing:

(1) Play SBPPE at 1600x1200/32bit.

(2) Use FRAPS to capture video at 30FPS at 800x600.

(3) Use Virtual Dub to splice and cut the raw video.

(4) Use Subtitle Workshop 4 to create a basic file of subtitle overlays concurrent with sampling the video.

(5) Use Substation Alpha to edit the basic SSA subtitle file to enhance the subtitles.

(6) Use Virtual Dub + DIVX encoder + Subtitler Filter to overlay the subtitles on the video, drop the FPS from 30 down to 10 and compress the video to 10% of the original. Even after this the file size was still huge with 5 minutes of SBPPE taking up about 250Mb. When you consider that a RealPlayer RMVB file captures 45 minutes of HD TV in roughly the same size the DIVX encoding is not so impressive. (But it does give my 4 processors something to do all at once.)

Well, I ultimately concluded that this is way too much work. Taking screen shots and posting them is much easier.

Just curious ... was I making this too complicated by not knowing what I am doing? (BTW, I hadn't even considered adding in a musical sound track.)

Thanks.

[Tacbat]

It depends on what software you have, but in essence you have the basic steps down. You can spend a lot of time putting together an impressive video. :wink: