Machinima Question(s)... Errr... Umm...

Hey Everyone,

Brand new to this all.

Very exciting time for virtual cine... some nice work in this thread!

Any/all help on the following questions would be greatly appreciated... (Also see 'P.S.' below)...

1) Following In-World basic tutorial, I press CTRL+ALT+A.... A 'save as' window comes up but that is all... screen size selection/compression/format prompts never display, no indication that filming/capture is occurring. Pressing CTRL+ALT+A again does nothing... no .AVI data is saved or search/findable!???

2) If you wanted to present your capture as a 'loop' whats the simplest and/or better way of doing so...???

3) Conversion to DVD from popular machinima formats???

Thanks folks,
EO

P.S. The project is a simple a 1-2 minute pan and zoom, slight rotating view of an existing multiprim object, then several avatars going through PG-13 animations... if anyone is up for actually doing a bit more than assisting on the machinima capture side of things, we would be happy to
make it worth your while in L$ and potential press/name;production credit.

Reply here with alt contact info/or message me....

THX again!

I'm having exactly the same problem as Evan (- though I think he means ctrl-shift-a) ... After the Save dialogue nothing happens ... no compression dialogue, and ctrl-shift-a does nothing more after that. I have to relog to even get the Save dialogue to appear again.

I have a 3.4GHz machine, with 1GB RAM and a Radeon X300 graphics card.

Forget the built in video solution, it sucks and even the Lindens recommend using Fraps, even the free version is very good, it just limits you to 30 second scenes which is not bad at all as most scenes are less than 30 seconds anyway. You can also use it to film any game pretty much.

Has anyone tried using Taksi?

With Taksi, I keep getting the original SL window recorded OK, but with extra garbled areas to the right and bottom. I probably have the wrong settings.

Like most solutions, there is an easy one.

Only use Ctrl+Shift+A after you have firstly used File, Start/Stop Movie, at the top menu of your screen, this will allow you to designate where the movie will be saved to on your hard disc. It will also open the same window you get with the Ctrl+Shift+A combination.

Once you have gone through the first process, you can then use the Ctrl+Shift+A key combination to start/stop any subsequent shots/sequence of frames, as SL will increment any further movies by 1 annotation.

Only limitations are:-
You cannot use different names per shot (see below).
You have to relog to change the names/file locations for more/different movies.

Have fun

Actually, there's a bug in the video thing whereby you *cannot* save to the desktop. If you try to save to the desktop, you get the problems mentioned in the first post.

Save it to another folder instead.

I would second the suggestion of getting FRAPS (assuming you are using Windows - I use iShowU on the Mac). It is a really good and easy-to-use product, and records sound as well. I paid for the full version and even though I don't use Windows much these days, I don't regret it.

The built-in vid capture doesn't even record audio does it? It's either Fraps or straight to an external PVR (Topfield TF5800) for me. The latter lets you grab video files via a USB A to B cable...but is overkill if you have Fraps and your movies are only intended for viewing on the web.