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Converting a Demo to Video Tutorial
by Tzeentch
| 1. Config--- |
If you're making a movie, in my experience it's best to first copy your Quake 3 config, rename the original to 'gaming.cfg' and the new one to 'video.cfg'. In your video.cfg, you will want to maximize your graphics settings to capture the most detail and make Quake look as pretty as possible. Since you'll be recording, there is no reason for FPS to be a player anymore. Go crazy, used stenciled shadows (cg_shadows 2), anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering and all that good stuff. You will also want to set your resolution to a multiple of your final movie. If you want your final movie to be at 640x480, set your recording resolution at 1280x960 or something close. The point is, NEVER record at the resolution you'll be displaying at.
Commands you will want to bind are:
cl_avidemo 0 <--- To stop recording
cl_avidemo 30 <--- To record at 30 fps
timescale .3 <--- Playback demo at 1:3 slow-motion
timescale 15 <--- To fast forward at 15x
timescale 1 <--- Playback demo at normal game speed
You can bind multiple commands to a key...such as cmds to alter the timescale or even shut off your timer and HUD display the instant you begin recording. You can daisy-chain as many commands under a single key as you like. Just make sure that none of your commands require a vid_restart and the record command is last.
bind F1 "timescale .3; cg_drawtimer 0; cg_draw2d 0; cl_avidemo 30" <--- This cmd will start recording at .3 timescale, turn off the timer and all 2d graphics automatically. |
| 2. Demo Prep--- |
In order to do the cool defrag camera tricks with a *.dm3 (protocol 43) demo, you will need to first use q3dc.exe (which comes with Seismovision) to convert it to a *.dm_48. That done, you can watch the demo with SDC and re-record it in order to get the footage up to a *.dm_68 to manipulate the camera in Defrag. I'm not going to go too far into camera manipulation, Defrag has extensive documentation with it that will guide you through recamming.
Assuming that you will not be doing any camera tricks and are just recording from first person, you can keep the demo in *.dm3 format.
Watch the entire demo and note down what time(s) you want to start recording at. |
| 3. Recording--- |
Time to dump some screenshots!! WOOHOO! Having already watched your demo, fast forward to within ten seconds of the annotated time, drop to whatever speed you like and hit the record button as you come within a few seconds of the right time. Quake will bog down as it dumps the demo to screenshots. Be aware, you will need LOTS of HDD space for this! A 1024x768 Targa is about 2.5 megabytes a piece! If you're trying to do this on a dinky 40 or 20 GB HDD, forget it.
Watch the on-screen action and keep in mind that Quake can not dump more than 10000 screenshots to a folder at a time, so if you're trying to film a long sequence you may have to do it in multiple tries and patch the footage together.
Do NOT hit the console key at any time, or it will show the console dropping down in your footage. While Quake is printing to screenshots, anything you do to disturb or change what will be displayed WILL be printed to a Targa. Guaranteed.
After your air-rox or whatever is finished, hit the stop button and exit Quake. You will now have a ton of huge screenshots in your baseq3/screenshots folder.
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| 4. Screenshot Processing--- |
Access Photoshop (or Irfanview, for you cheap people 8-) ) and create an action to reduce the image size of an image from whatever you set it at to whatever size you want your movie to be. Actions in Photoshop work the same way as Macros in MSOffice, they let you execute several commands (or in this case, one) very quickly and repeatedly.
You can also use Irfanview to do batch operations on Targa files. I'm not going in-depth on how to do this in either Irfanview or Photoshop...as tutorials on it are available. If you are in need of knowledge, I suggest  .
With your action setup, set it to work on your screenshots. Grab a drink and listen to some music, this will take awhile depending on the amount of screenshots you have and your machine. |
| 5. Sequence Range Selection--- |
Now it's time to narrow down our huge batch of shrunken screenshots to a sequence range of frames. Fire up Irfanview, and with it open up the first screenshot in the folder. Now, hit the right arrow key and hold it. If your machine is worth it's salt, you will start to see some animation. Cool, huh?
Using this, you will be able to 'scrub' back and forth and determine at precisely what points you want to start and end your clip. Record these numbers, keep in mind that you will want the number in the filename of the SCREENSHOT not what frame number Irfanview is telling you. If in doubt, look at the title-bar (the blue bar at the top of the window for you computer illiterates) and go with that one. You should end up with a range... i.e. (shot0200 - shot0530) is eleven seconds of footage (530-200 = 330/30 = 11) at 30fps.
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| 6. Clip Compilation--- |
And to think...you thought this would be difficult. 8-) Now you just have to access your compositing program (relax, there is freeware for this like "bmp2avi") and compile your sequence range into an Uncompressed avi.
There are a number of ways to do this, with several different programs. I prefer to use After Effects to do a RAM preview on the footage before I compile...but you can just as easily do it with bmp2avi or Virtual Dub.
For bmp2avi, fire up the program, navigate to where your files are stored and be sure to click the option for "Targa" rather than "Bitmap". Your files should now be visible. Select the files in your sequence range, change the name of "out.avi" to something that might actually make sense and compile that piece!
Once compiled, you will have an uncompressed *.avi taken from a Quake 3 demo. You can then edit it in a compositing suite or compress it like any other digital footage. While my actual in-shop workflow for making Quake 3 movies is far more complicated than this, this should be more than enough to get anybody who wants to film their content in Quake 3 started. |
Cheers,
~Tzeentch
~Chaotic Productions |
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