Video material - Intro,gameplay,trailer

[PhaD]

I can make an Intro, a gameplay video or a trailer, but i need your help! All i need is a lot of footage! All what you got about UFO:AI would be helpful - render sequences pictures artwork sounds and so on.  You can sent it thru icq 92818615 and sometimes i am in #UFO:AI
 
I talked with mattn, he said it is a little bit difficult to capture ingame szenes with the engine, cause it heavy slows down the game speed. Everything you have, and if it is a simple picture would be helpful! I am working with AEF7PRO, so you can also sent psd, fla and prodj files as well!    

At last: If you have an Idea of an intro, or you wanna make a rendering sequenz which i can master with sound, animation and effects - go do it !

Thanx - PhaD

[Psawhn]

Sounds good.
I am already planning on rendering stills of the aircraft for loading screens and that. It won't be too much more work to make some quick animations of the aircraft.

[PhaD]

Yeah, landing aircraft captured from the ground would be great! (I can add some landing lights, dust, fog, and so on)
I dont know what exactly you can do, but just a simple flying airfraft with blue sky in the background would be very useful for me!

[Psawhn]

Oh, yeah... post-pro. I'm used to doing everything I can within blender that sometimes I forget about post-pro.

Unfortunately, I only have two of the aircraft ready to go. I've been working on upping the resolution of the Saracen (And adding landing gear and weapons bays and other animatable stuff), and I designed my Stingray to be high-poly and animatable from the start. I don't know if the Stingray has much of a place in the intro, though, as it's a alien-human hybrid craft that gets developed much later in the game.

I can get some simple flying Saracen done easily. Can you take a stream of .png files for the animation, or should it have a specific codec?

[PhaD]

An unkompressed avi is the best you can do, or with dv-codec.  a episode of png files is also great, but a little hard to handle and it would be very large. An unkompressed avi is large, but better to handle.  If you can, put the alpha channel into the avi, then i can extrackt the channel with AE7. Do what you can, everything is great and try to integrate the alpha plz!

Thanx - PhaD

[Psawhn]

On the rendering side, it's almost always best to render to a sequence of images. That way if something goes kaput, or there are a few frames messed up, it's easy to just continue or rerender those few frames. (With blender, importing a sequence of images into the compositor is really simple, too.)

I didn't know .avi's could have alpha. That's neat.

[PhaD]

A sequence of images  is the best way to make some effects, i can also go to manipulate frames by Photoshop ya. But its very large feel free, to send them thru icq when you have a sequence complete.    
Long time ago i worked with a friend on a video with 3d models in it, they had to move in the correct perspektive, he works with maya and integrated an alpha in his videos 4 me.

[inquisiteur2]

A cheesy cartoonish x-com defense style introduction would be fantastic in my opinion. If an intro movie is planned, it would be better not end like Ufo extraterrestrials one...

[Destructavator]

Hi,

I didn't realize until after I uploaded the video trailer I put together that someone else was interested in making videos for this project.  Perhaps we could work together on some video content - Here is how I'm looking at it:

I have a recent (only 2-3 months old) fast computer that has the ability to capture full-screen content and record it as a video file and still run this game at the same time (this is how I put together that video), but for video editing all I have is low-end cheaper software, some Ulead Videostudio package.

I know some of the other members who post on this forum have access to better editing software, and if I transfer raw footage of entire game sessions and missions, perhaps other people could use it to make nicer videos?

I have a password protected section of my website where I can place raw recordings and someone else with high-end software could download them.  I can't just post the login and password here where the whole world could read it by reading the forum, but if anyone is interested, you can email Mattn or myself and we can send you the login information so you could download the footage.

As far as format, I can encode the video in almost any codec, when I make the recordings it is originally encoded in AVI with the Lagarith codec compression, which is open-source and 100% lossless (still big files, but no loss in quality whatsoever).

Is anyone interested in making more video content as a group project?  We could also get more music tracks from other people, and I have some creative commons soundtracks on the publicly accessible portion of my own website:  www.destructavator.com, (They are under the "download" section from the menu).

[Destructavator]

...Forgot to mention, the video I put together is also now in the Internet Archive: www.archive.org

Just type "UFO Alien Invasion" in the search engine, it is listed under moving images/video.  To get the full-screen high-quality playback you have to download the MPEG-1 (the biggest file), if you just let it play on the page (streaming) it has lower quality.