Posts Tagged guide
Bad Company 2: Shotguns
Posted by Sam in Gaming, Guides, Multiplayer, Shooter on 25 March 2010
I’ve been playing a lot of Bad Company 2 lately, for obvious reasons. It’s an incredibly good multiplayer game, with some of the best sound and visuals in any recent FPS. More specifically, I’ve been getting to grips with the shotguns in the game, which when you have the right perks can be utterly devastating.
I put together a short video guide slash frag video showing off what the shotgun can do, have a watch. Put the video in 720p mode for best quality.
Guide: Create your own gaming movies #2
Posted by Sam in Guides, Technology on 14 December 2009
This is the second part of the ‘Create your own gaming movies’ guide here on AltTabbed. To read the first part, click here.
You should now have a series of short video clips in .avi format if you have followed the guide. We will now put these clips back together, add a title, encode the video, and then upload it.
Open up Premiere Pro, or another video editing suite, and start a new project. Give it a name and continue. You will now select the settings you want for your video, select HDV 720p30 or HDV 720p25 depending at what FPS you recorded at. It doesn’t particularly matter if the resolutions on your video and these settings aren’t the same, you can always crop the video when you come to encode it.
The next few steps rely on a bit of knowledge with Premiere, however it’s all drag and drop so shouldn’t be hard to figure out even if you’ve never used the program before. Open up the folder you recorded your video in (‘Fraps\Movies’ for Fraps users), and drag everything relevant into the top-left panel in Premiere. You now need to drag each segment of video onto the timeline, and in chronological order. You can do this by holding CTRL and then clicking on each part one by one in the order you want them in (order is important), then drag everything selected onto the timeline. You can now use the panel in the top right to play through your whole movie and make sure everything is in order.
You could finish here, but there are a few tools you can use to spice up your video.
- Use the Razor tool (C) to cut up the video on your timeline to apply transitions and effects to small parts.
- Effect and transition presets are in the bottom left panel, effects apply a whole clip in the timeline and transitions apply to the start or end of a clip. Drag and drop them onto the timeline.
- Use the Effect Controls panel to adjust effect settings.
- Add a title by going Title > New Title and picking a title type. Give it a name and then add text and give it styling. Once done, close the window and drag it onto the timeline. Drag it onto ‘Video 2′ so it displays on-top of your video. You can apply transitions to titles as well.
- You can also add music by importing the music file and dragging it into an empty slot on the sequence (‘Audio 2′). You can delete any in-game sound by right clicking on the clip and ‘Unlinking’, then deleting the audio.
Remember that there are many guides for Premiere Pro already available online. Once you are happy with your movie, select the timeline and use File > Export > Media.. (this might be different on older versions). Here you can crop your output movie, change it’s resolution and most importantly the format. The best format for online play is .flv (and .f4v), so select that from the drop-down menu and then 720p from the preset menu. You will then want to fiddle with bitrate settings until they are a decent size for uploading, I usually go for 1.5 Target Bitrate and 2.0 Maximum Bitrate.
Segment your video if uploading to YouTube
If you are planning to upload your video to youtube, and it is longer than 10 minutes, split it up into 10 minute segments using the tool under the preview window, drag the pointer to just under the 10 minute mark and then click the out-point button. Premiere will only record the section between the in-point and out-point, so repeat this step for 10-19 minutes, 20-29 minutes etc until you have all sections done. When you are happy click OK and then Start Queue to start encoding.
Your video is now encoding, this could take up to a couple of hours depending on the length of your video and how fast your computer is. Once it’s done, check the output file and you’re ready to upload.
You have a number of options when it comes to uploading your video to the Internet. The most reliable and popular is YouTube, which is great if your video is under 10 minutes or you don’t mind splitting it up into segments. Other options include WeGame (which will massacre the quality of your video, but say they are releasing a HD soon), Gamerstube (which has excellent quality but is quite unreliable at the moment), and FileFront (provides a direct download link, and a low quality stream). Be wary of uploading to hosts who specify they do not allow gaming videos as they may delete your movie. Such hosts include Blip.tv and Vimeo.
After choosing your hosting service, all you have to do is follow the instructions on the website to upload your video, then share with your fellow gamers to show them how pro you are.
Important! If you get an unsupported file type error when uploading, rename the video file to .flv instead of .f4v.
That concludes this week’s guide on creating your own gaming video, I hope you learned something from it and that you will check back on this blog next week (and preferably every day in-between!) for great new content. Feel free to ask as many questions as you want in comments and I WILL respond to all of them. Good luck!
Guide: Create your own gaming movies #1
Posted by Sam in Gaming, Guides, Technology on 12 December 2009
This is the first in what will be weekly guides with the intention of showing you how to try out something a little different. Most guides will be tailored around gaming, so check back here often and leave comments if you have any questions.
In this article I will be explaining how you can record yourself playing a game and upload it to share it with your friends. Let’s get started. These are the programs you will need.
Video recording software – By far the best is Fraps, it costs $37 (roughly £23), and allows you to record video from any game at ful or half resolution, and with sound. In the newest version you also get the ability to record from the desktop, and to record sound directly from the microphone which makes shoutcasting (gaming videos with commentary) even easier. If you don’t want to buy Fraps, there are free alternatives such as Hypercam which perform the same function but with fewer features.
Video editing/encoding software – The perfect package for this is Adobe Premiere Pro, which will provide all the functionality we need. There are probably free programs available which can do the job, but I wouldn’t be able to recommend any without searching for and testing each one out one by one. You can grab a free trial of Premiere Pro from here.
Our first task once you have the software installed is to load up Fraps (or another recording program), and configure it to our liking. Your monitor resolution is important here, as it determines what resolution we record the video at. Chose a hotkey, preferably one that isn’t used by the game you want to record.
Next determine what resolution you want to record at. The optimal resolution for recording in HD (high definition) is 1280×720, note that this is for a widescreen monitor, if you have a 4:3 aspect ratio then use 1280×1024. The best way to record at this resolution is to set your resolution in-game to 1280×720 and then tell Fraps to record at full size. Another option if you have a large monitor is keep your native resolution and record at half size, for example your native resolution is 1920×1200 then half size would be 960×600.
Lastly, take into consideration the speed of your computer, more specifically your graphics card and hard drive speed. The best way to make sure your computer can handle the resolution is to test it out in-game. If you get stuttering, lower the resolution and make sure you’re not recording above 30FPS. You also need to have a large amount of disk space available before you start recording, 50GB per 30 minutes at 1280×720 is a good estimate.
All that’s left now is to record your footage, load up the game and when you’re ready, hit your record hotkey.
To summarise:
- Do not record above 1280×720 (or 1280×1024).
- Set FPS to 25 or 30.
- Make sure you have at least 50GB of free space per 30 minutes of expected footage.
- Ensure that you have tested that your computer can run these settings before starting!
After recording, you should have a series of short 1-2 minute video clips ready to be imported into your video editing software.
This concludes the first part of the guide, check back tomorrow for the conclusion, where we will be stitching together these video files and exporting as a video file to upload onto the internet.
Click here to read the second part of the guide.
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