Need help on making an inworld video...a question

Can anybody tell me the best way to make a video, for example, of two people dancing and then give it to the person to view, like what you would do if you take a picture of them. I looked at previous posts but I think I am asking something different than what is there.

Thanks,

Your question is complex, I will try to break it down and answer:

1. To make a video of two people dancing, you need excellent camera controls for one of the two avatars, or a third, fourth, fifth, etc person also there, acting as camera avatars.

2. Each camera, either yourself, or the onlookers, will set their screen to the same resolution.
The File -> Set Window Size -> NTSC or PAL option can give everyone a standard window size easily.

3. When it is time to film a take, each camera person turns off their user interface using CTRL-ALT-F1, and starts a desktop recording program like FRAPS for windows, iShowU for Mac, or Istanbul for Linux.

4. The actors begin acting out the scene.

5. The camera folks record the scene, panning their heads around, moving, or otherwise changing their view to capture the scene by looking at it.

6. When the take is over, the camera folks stop capturing, save the files with a GOOD naming scheme to remember which scene/take they filmed.

7. Then, it starts all over, doing steps 3-6 as many takes as needed to capture all of the coverage needed to assemble the entire film.

8. Once you are done filming clips, you pull them all into an editing program like Windows Movie Maker, iMovie, Pitivi, Premiere, Avid Free DV, etc. and assemble them into the start to finish movie using "tracks" for video and audio.

9. Add titles, end credits (for your cast, loyal crew, and anyone else who helped)

10. Tell the editing program to spit the movie out as a movie file.

11. Since its for sharing, file size is king, you may have to render the movie to file several times with various codecs and options, then review each, to see which is the best quality for smallest file size. If you want to show the movie *in* SecondLife, then you will need to be sure to save out at least one quicktime version.

12. Upload one or more movie files to blip.tv and share the link.

13. Optionally, if you own land, you can set the land's media URL to the blip.tv download link for the quicktime version.

14. Create a movie or TV screen object to show the movie on. One texture will be the "screen" itself. Set that texture as the media texture in the About: Land window and put that same texture on the object.

15. When someone comes to the parcel and presses PLAY on their Media panel (at the lower right of the screen, above inventory, IF the preference is enabled) they will see the movie start on the movie or tv screen.

That's the bare bare bones steps to grab an SL movie as machinima.

Wow,

Thank you for taking the time to type all of that out. I will reread it again. So much info.
No way did I think it would be like that. I guess SL doesn't have some kind of rudimentary video taking system.

Thanks again,
Bob

There used to be a built in movie function on the main menu. It never worked very well, and is now considered obsolete.

You can use any screen/video capture software you like. Fraps seems to be popular, and it is easy to use. There is also something similar on OS X, but I forget the name.