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Guide: Create your own gaming movies #2

It's not as hard as it looks, honest

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

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!

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Oooh! What does THIS do?

No, you can't click the browse button on the image.

I’ve been messing around with getting an image uploader to work on the site. It currently has it’s own page but I’m trying to work out how to embedd it into the blog somehow. In the meantime, the image uploader is free to use and you don’t need to sign up. An added benefit is that all images are publicly viewable in the ‘/images’ folder, so get sharing. I’ll try and get a gallery up so it’s easier to browse the images.

Use your common sense when uploading, for example don’t upload images here that you wouldn’t upload to any other image host. I will be forced to close it down if it gets abused.

Update: I scrapped this, I still have my own but YOU CAN’T USE IT Hahahhahaha

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