Making demo videos

[Marinesko]

I'm not too literate on video production, so I need a little help. First off, what is the best way to make a video in the game(like RR's vids for example)? What I want to do is get a clip of a freighter getting whacked by three or four torpedoes, and then via the use of some program(I assume you would need some kind of editing program), mix in the theme song to Titanic. It would be good for a chuckle.

[Rockin Robbins]

You call? Well, I learned the hard way, so let me save you a lot of grief. First, you can use HyperCam, but you'll be a lot happier with the paid version of FRAPS. I know paying is a hurdle, but the pain of paying goes much quicker than the pain of low quality video.

I've found that you can start FRAPS either before or after you fire up Silent Hunter 4. I set the fps to 29.95, size for half-screen. That's as low quality as you can go. Your default key for starting and stopping video is alt-home. That can be changed if you don't like it for any reason.

OK, you have a microphone headset? Then you're ready to go. Fire up the game, set up your shoot and press alt-home. It's showtime! Press alt-home to stop recording and the video is saved on your hard drive. You can get into the defaults beforehand and tell FRAPS where you want your videos saved.

Did I mention that you better have lots of hard drive space? No huh. Well, 13 minutes of video are going to be about 4 gb. If you go over that, FRAPS will divide your video into about 4 gb chunks. Well now you've got humongous video files that you can't do anything with online—they look great on VLC Media Player though. Just about anything else just chokes on them!

http://i196.photobucket.com/albums/aa293/RockinRobbins13/Silent%20Hunter%204/RawVideoWindowsExplorer.jpg

You'll need to download a great program called Any Video Converter. This isn't the only program that will do this function, it's just the easiest and best I've found so far.

http://i196.photobucket.com/albums/aa293/RockinRobbins13/Silent%20Hunter%204/AnyVideoConverter.jpg

AVC has preloaded video profiles and I usually use either the DVD Video NTSC movie setting or the customized wmv setting. That boils them down to a size you can upload and people can still watch with decent quality. AVC will also join several separate clips into a single video file, a right handy item. I haven't played with overlaying audio tracks on video but it isnt hard to do. I have just used a media player to play the music I want while playing the game, setting FRAPS to record the stereo mix and doing the whole shebang in one shot. VLC media player and some other software will do the editing hocus-pocus for you though.