Miramare Infohub Demolished...

to make way for the new Nova Albion Infohub. Check out the short video I shot while at the site today. The new hub is in the center of the city where the four neighborhoods of Grignano, Sistiana, Barcola and Miramare meet.

Streaming version - click here *

or download the 20 meg .mp4 file.

The video can also be viewed inworld at the mini-mockup site just east of the permanent hub location.

Truely a moment in Second Life history. I'm going to get the video!

Residents interested in the background of Nova Albion can read the SL History Wiki article, and of course, Salazar Jack and other City Slickers are here and they can be asked! They have their own group forums too.

The streaming page is not just for Mac users - it works fine on Windows.

Perhaps it WORKS, but your filthy kind is not welcome there.

/me pats his G5 protectively as he snorts in disgust

Thanks for posting about that. This is my first attempt at doing a video and I was unsure that page would work for the Windows folks. I'll change my first message to reflect this.

Good to know!

/me pats mine also and realizes that after working on the new Infohub, he is pretty filthy too!

Here's a photo of what the new Nova Albion Infohub will look like for those of you unable to watch the video.

Can't wait to see it finished Sal!

*Secretly becomes very proud when he sees that last photo.*

You're an asset to Nova Albion, Salazar.

Coco coco.

Just waiting for the Lindens to add their standard hub content. The City Slickers group will be adding city-related content, like games, art displays & city-wide event activities over the next few weeks. The two year anniversary of the discovery of Nova Albion is coming in March so watch for some special things to happen soon!

Salazar; the video was much longer than I had expected, nice surprise there. It was nice to be taken along on the tour, and your explanations were excellent. Loved the artifacts section of the video. Looks like your group is taking this project seriously and its shaping up very nicely. I'm glad LL let you guys do something with the land, rather than let it become a clustered mess of ads. Keep up the good work, it's looking great! lol I see that trolley still has a mind of its own, you be careful now

Cat

Thanks for the kind words, folks. It has been a lot of fun getting this off the ground. Lordfly got the ball rolling by approaching the Lindens with the idea and laid the groundwork for it. Jesse Linden, Torley Linden, and the Linden content team have been very helpful with getting us set up to make a go of managing a portion of our city infohub.

I understand that the Linden textures used in settting up the Nova Albion area will be available in our Inventory Library folder in a future update. They really appeal to me and it's nice having them to use on other projects. I've put a texture cube out at the new hub that's free to copy. You can always send me an IM request for it too.

I watched the video, awww gosh it makes me emotional! I wasn't here for the beginning of Nova Albion, but to see this now!!! Wowee.

Sal, can I ask how you made that? Did you film it and record your voice at the same time? I liked how it was really a nice stroll, "here's so-and-so"...

He probably used Fraps Torley a lot of ppl seem to use it in SL.

Cat

Torley asks if the sound was record at the same time as the movie or if it was added later.

Torley, your suggestion that I should take lots of pictures, for historical preservation, while working at the new Nova Albion hub site really made an impression. I did take quite a few that day and then realized that it would be fun to do a short video status report midway thorugh the process. I mean, if a picture is worth 1000 words... how much would a video go for?!?!?

So I picked up my handheld and walked around the site for a few minutes rambling off the little bits of knowledge I have about the area and trying to help folks visualize what was going to be coming down the pike. It was all done in one take. I did run through it a few times for practice and had taped 3 takes by the time I got to the one where I almost got run over between Miramare and Grignano. I decided that was too good a take to pass by so I ended up using that one. Then I transferred the digital video to my Mac, downsampled it to an agreeable, streamable size and uploaded it to my web space at .Mac.

Okay thats a bit simplistic and not too practical for those of you who don't live 100% inworld 24/7. So, if I were to use my imagination and work out how someone would be able to produce something like this while viewing a remote virtual world through a computer interface (cough), it would go something like this:

Equipment/Software used:
Macintosh Dual G5 2.5 Ghz w/1.5G RAM & ATI Radeon 9600XT w/128MB Video RAM
iSight Camera (for the microphone)
Broadband w/3000DL and 750UL bandwidth
Second Life
Snapz Pro (video & audio capture)

Preparation:
In order to produce a video report such as this quickly and not require any additional editing, everything would need to be done in real-time. Both the video, voice over and any sound effects would need to be done live to avoid any need for post production editing. No dissolves, fades or wipes and no rolling credits. The entire video would simply consist of one take.

To maximize frame rates, shoot during the day and turn off Second Life's Local Lighting graphics preference, it's a fps (frames per second) killer. Also remove all your attachments for the same reason. Leave the Shiny option on (looks better). If people are not required for your video, shoot in an area without them. View Second Life in a window as close to the final video size as possible. A video this long in duration (about eight minutes) would be huge at 640x480 (regular TV resolution) so choose the smaller one (320x240). This video was shot in the city, so including as much of the cityscape as possible would be beneficial. Set the Draw Distance at 128 meters and Fog at 1.5. Frame rates using these settings on this type of equipment would be about 15 fps in Nova Albion.

Once the graphic settings and window sizing is done, attention can be turned to how to creatively shoot the video. Worry about the actual video capture later. For now just run through the sequence of events you want to cover and the things you want to talk about. Get familiar with what you want to cover and practice how you're going to say things and how you want to make the transition between areas. This video was shot in mouselook to give it that hand-held video camera feel. An additional benefit to making practice runs through all the locations of your video is that all necessary textures and sounds get loaded. For instance, the first time you step into splashable water, the sound effect for it may not play right away. It has to stream to you and load on to your computer before you hear it. By the time you run through the scene a few times, the sound effect for the water will be in synch with the onscreen action.

This video depended on capturing live footage, narration and ambient sound simultaneously in SL's city of Nova Albion. An added benefit in this scenario might be that if you are shooting SL footage that is set in a city and you happen to live in a city in RL--open the windows to your RL apartment and let the noises from outside become part of the ambient sound you will be capturing. It would add a lot of richness and depth.

The Snapz pro software allows you to capture a selectable area of your screen as video, the Mac audio channel (ambient SL noise) and a separate microphone (narration and RL ambient noise). Be careful with ambient RL noise (telephones, TV, etc.) as it isn't always a match for what you might be capturing live. If you're going to be doing a lot of editing later you have much more control over how to produce your audio and video production. But this was a one shot live deal, so ambient RL (and SL) noise played important roles.

Now we're ready to actually capture the live video and audio to the hard drive. It's late and I want to be fresh for this next part so I will continue this little mini-tutorial tomorrow.

Until then...

its fantastic, it gets a barnes stamp of aproval

Nice Salazar That's a lot more info than I was hoping for! And here I thought you used fraps, silly me

Thanks, Cat

I am truely in awe and have learned a lot!

I fully intend to finish this litttle tutorial on the video I made. Spare time has been elusive this past week and a half. I'll do my best to get it finished up this coming weekend to include the actual video capture, processing for web streaming and linking possibilities.

Clearly this belongs in the Places Formerly Known as Telehubs Forum. Just kidding - great job on the redesign, truly.

Damn Telehubs! *shakes fist*