How to Make Your Own Simulation Movies Page 5

By SimHQ on March 2, 2005 in _air3, hide

Compression and codecs

Those files are way too big to deal with, so we’re going to compress them and recompile them with our filter and cropping.

There’s a lot of opinion on which codecs are the best. As a lazy person, I hate having to go fetch codecs from the web. As a cheap person, I hate paying for things that are otherwise available as freeware when the quality difference is minimal to my untrained eye.

Dart says… “click on ‘Compression’…”

…and select “Microsoft MPEG-4 Video Codec V2.” As it’s from Microsoft and has “V2” after it. The V2 rocket was pretty cool, if used in a terrible way.

Press “OK” and select “File”. We’re going to save these settings, in case we have to take a break to do something else. It’s the devil’s own to remember the exact settings we have, and we want our film to have the same look throughout.

After we save out the processing settings, we’ll “Save as AVI,” naming the clip either numerically (such as ZnB01, ZnB02, etc.), or by description of what the clip is (dart_intro, chief_crash_view, etc.).

Now all we have to do is open each FRAPS clip and “Save as AVI” with a new name!

Here’s the clips I’ll use, note the file size difference: