Basic Machinima Questions

Hi machinima folks -

I'm pondering using SL to make a corporate presentation video, because a) all these videos are cool, b) the possibilities are really interesting, and c) ANYTHING has to be better than bloody PowerPoint!

My question is about size and, I guess, quality. I've seen a bunch on YouTube and they're all small; when you got to full screen, the quality is pretty pants. What *are* the limitations for final production values and what controls them?

Thanks!

The quality you see on YouTube is determined by the limitations forced by YouTube's needs They need to miniimize bandwidth and keep upload simple. I accept that quality because YouTibe has the traffic.

I am capturing video at half-screen, for example. i could capture at full-screen, but that would be lost in passage through YouTube.

The limits on technical quality of capture come from the software, cpu, and graphics card. I have not tested the upper limits on the machines I have.

As part of my campaign agains the Brain Borers (here represented by Power-Point), I would be wlling to work on determining what is the best quality I can get. I believe it will be close to what you see on your viewer screen. But I will not spend time on that unless I see a practical outlet.

So tell me what you will do if I show you a high quality capture.
TM

Yes it can be way better than it looks on Youtube. I capture my movie with a DVD Recorder i got as a preset, connected that to my TV out and i got a very good picture with no drop in framerate, wich is important as i have a weak PC and Fraps would hit my Frames notably...

On the other Hand if you have a decent Computer you could even do it in HDTV. Only problem that you might run into is that it takes a lot more time to cut a video then to do a powerpoint presentation

I've been meaning to make a patch cable between my graphics card and DV Camcorder for this reason, I've made some videos with Fraps though since I was uploading to YouTube (and my computer is weak) I kept them very low quality.

I've heard of people using two systems one for playing SL on and the other to capture the video from the first. A little over the top if you don't have the spare kicking around.

My advice would be to go down the route of digital video capture off-computer such as DVD recorder or DV Camcorder etc. as this will allow you to push your PC's graphics to it's true capabilities. Remember though that a good network connection can improve things too (objects load faster and moving objects get updated on time). Private islands, empty of other avatars not in shot, and void of unnecessary prims can only improve speed too.

I was running my video out to a DV camera but found that I got way better results just using a screen capture program (iShowU for Mac). I'm able to get 1280 x 720 resolution on my MacBook pro. Check out a sample here - http://michaelverdi.com/index.php/2007/01/20/720p-machinima/

I sent out word about iShowU to my Vidders group. Geo, who has been trying for months to get good video out of this Mac tried it and is enthusiatic. $20. I think this may have resolved the question for Geo. Maybe for other people. Thanks Aren.