Making Il-2 movies
 

How do you do it?

Do you hit save track after a single mission and then use fraps to record it?

:yep:

It's quiet simple actually,
you first record it with the IL2 in-game recorder.

then run the recording, and enable that you can control the views/time compression.
so you can pause get the camera in position run & record

Well get ready for my first movie from the Il-16 cup race course.

And after you capture with fraps you would be advised to run through virtualdub and comress the file,as the resulting file from fraps is quite large.Comress with xvid or divx codecs,and if you want the movie even smaller run it through windows movie maker,there will be a loss of quality but it makes the file a decent size to upload to u-tube / google video or a hosting site of your choice.hope this helps ;)

The free version of fraps, what limitations does it have?

WWW.FRAPS.COM text on the top of the video and limitation of 30 seconds continuous recording. Might have some limitations on the settings too, not sure.

I think the only other limitation is screen caps get saved as bitmap.

so do you just hit record every 30 seconds?

When you think about it, 30 seconds in a flightsim is a very long time. I think I have never recorded anything over 30secs in IL2. I just stop the record & pause the game when I want to change camera angle.

But if you do record for 30secs, FRAPS will automatically stop, so you have to play the record button again.

I have 10 AVi clips from fraps, and I have Ulead video studio but it is a bit cumbersome, what is a good one to use to add music. Then do I convert to DivX after I have put it all together?

If you have WinXP, the Windows Movie Maker is another easy program to use. It comes with Windows XP, so you should have it installed by default.

i do, just the quality is a bit pants.

Yes, you cant get as high quality out with WMM.

Fraps has FPS limitations. I evetually went to a dedicated system to record the output from the video card. You could make one from another system using a frame capture card like an ATI 550 - which would produce excellent results, I instead opted for a hacked Tivo series 1 (A couple buttons on the remote - and you're already recording). You soldier an ethernet cable to the mainboard, and then install a telnet client, so you can get to a BASH script, install and start a server if need be. The Tivo is a simple Linux box with a capture card is all. Then you just start your server which will pull the .ty stream off the Tivo to your mainbox, then mux it into an MPEG-2 stream from the ty stream (it is already an MPEG-2 - just that it needs to be put into a proper format that can be read).

The ATI x1900 XTX will output 1024x768 over the S-VHS out on the board, so the Tivo is the perfect device to pick that up as it is a dedicated platform in a small package. The S/VHS spec calls for 480x480, so that will be your true capture size, but don't think for a second that will be too small. Then you simply scale it for 4:3 aspect ratio which is 640x480, then crop the black borders, which leaves you with an excellent looking 572x432 resolution video. The only problem is, file size. Figure for decent looking MPEG-2 video that you should account for 1 GB per 30 minutes of capture, and for decent MPEG-4 video, account for about 2/3rds that. MPEG-2 uses more I frames so it will always be the better looking of the 2, but MPEG-4 looks excellent in much less space - just remember that any errors in the I frame will continue on for a very long time as it bounces between P and B frames before ever getting back to an I frame.

-S

PS. I forgot to mention - the Tivo series 2 is locked down. You can't hack it like a series 1. No problem though - you can find series 1's all over the place on Ebay - http://cgi.ebay.com/Philips-Series-1...QQcmdZViewItem - This one ends in less than a day and only has a $0.99 price tag so far.