World of Warcraft Movie Making Guide (Pinkkis) - Part 1

* This WoW Movie Making Guide was created by Pinkkis, Alliance Druid on Twisting Nether (Europe)*

Pinkkis' World of Warcraft Movie Making Guide for Dummies

TADAA!!! "Ooh, Pinkkis! you're so awesome! i wish i could be just like you and have your babies and marry your sister!"

Well, now you can! I've decided to put this little tutorial on how to capture all your favorite World of Warcraft moments and share them with all the people you love. I'll go by a few basic things you should remember, but I’ll 1. Keep some tricks to my self 2. Leave things for you to try out for your self, because that's the best part.

Now Let's Get Going..

Pinkkis' World of Warcraft Movie Making Guide - Preparing

What you'll need first, is a computer capable of running World of Warcraft. Duh…

The second thing you'll need is lots and lots of hard disk space. There can never be enough to be honest. But that's cheap these days. Then there's some software you'll need to first capture the events. There's not really any competition in this market.

Fraps is as good as it gets, and I'm not really complaining. Then to edit them;

I personally use Adobe products. There's Premiere for cutting it all up, After Effects for the “bling” and Audition (formerly Cool Edit Pro) for sound editing.

Although you can just compile the movie to be ready with these, I prefer to render the movie to an uncompressed file and then use VirtualDubMod to encode the final movie. The codecs used are XviD for the Technicolor experience and Lame MP3 for the sonic menace.

I'll leave it up to you what method of delivery you use for the final production. But now I think we're ready to begin..

Pinkkis' World of Warcraft Movie Making Guide - Lights, Camera, ACTION

Before getting in to the game let's look at the capture settings, so fire up Fraps and check the settings:

Set a directory where to save the captures and make sure that drive has loads of free space. And I’m talking about 10gb at least.

Set a hotkey for yourself, that's easy to use and doesn't interfere with anything else ie. in the game. Half-size means the movie resolution will be half of your game resolution. Fraps will automatically change to half-size if you have a resolution over something something, can't remember, but half-size is enough.

25fps is enough, no use to set it higher. You might be struggling to get more in some hairy situations in-game anyway, and the more data fraps has to process to more cpu-power it'll need.

Yes, we do want to record sound. Detect Best works for me, but if you can't get TS recorded and you want it to, make sure you're recording the Stereo Mixer. That's everything you'd hear from the speakers.

No Cursor, if you don't want people seeing what you're pointing at. You need to have Hardware Cursor set in-game for this to work. DO NOT enable No Sync unless you know what it is and you're absolutely sure you want it. Read up in fraps manuals if you want to know what it is..

After this there's only one thing to do:

and after your wonderful session is over and you got some nice stuff on film, let's see whet you got:

This is why you need a lot of space and also why even if people say they too can record stuff for me, I don't want it. I'm not downloading that much :) Now, firing up the editing apps...

Pinkkis' World of Warcraft Movie Making Guide - Adobe Premiere

Fire up Premiere and then create a new project with these settings. You can save them as a template as I have:

Of course the resolution of the video depends on your capture. My laptops widescreen is 1280x800 and the half-size makes it into 640x400.

This next image is way too big to fit here, so I’ll link it and you can open it in another window, and then we'll go through it bit by bit: Here's the picture!

Pinkkis' World of Warcraft Movie Making Guide The Project Window

At first this window is empty, to import files into your project just right-click in it and select import file.

Get all your videos that you need, audio tracks, pictures... anything you need. The small box in the upper part is a small preview and to the right of the screen it will show the properties of the selected item. (The smaller window on top is the audio level monitor; it probably won't be visible by default)

Pinkkis' World of Warcraft Movie Making Guide The Timeline

To put stuff on the timeline just drag them from the Project menu on to the track you want them on. note a video with sound will take up one of both types of tracks. You can move them up/down on different tracks and along the timeline.

If you want to separate the video from the audio, right-click the clip and select Unlink Audio/Video. When you click and hold in the middle of a clip you can move it in time. When you move your cursor near the end it will change and you can trim that end. There is always the entire file in the clip even if you have cut it in the razor or just trimmed it. You can get the material back just by dragging.

Also you've noted that I placed the music track on the lower audio track.

The red line with the blue bobber on top is your current position on the timeline. The topmost grey bar with the "hook" on the end let's you move through the timeline and if you grab it by the "hook" .

You can zoom the visible area of the timeline. Also the controls at the lower left corner are used to zoom.

Pinkkis' World of Warcraft Movie Making Guide The Monitor

Not much to say as it's quite self-explanatory. You have loads of different knobbs and doodads to move around in the movie. The other monitor to the center is used to preview ie. a clip. Drag it from the Project window and see what it contains.

Cutting is pretty straightforward and depends on what you need to do. It might be that you just need to trim on clip a bit and that's it. Just play around and see what you come up with.

About the timelines, the topmost video track is visible of course. if you want to add fades you can do them here, but I do them in after effects. When you're done editing you can save your project and head straight to After Effects, but I've noticed that AE doesn't sometimes work well with multiple audio tracks, so I mix audio separately in a program called Audition. to do this we need to prepare the tracks for it.

First let's do the music track. Mute the other channels by clicking the small speaker icon and then go to File->Export->Audio and select where to save the file. Do this for every track you want to be able to edit separately.

Then all that's left to do is one final save and then you can close Premiere.

Pinkkis' World of Warcraft Movie Making Guide - Adobe Audition

Load up the tracks you exported from Premiere and drag them on the timeline.

Moving the tracks once they're on the timeline is done by holding down the right mouse button, just so you know. The button in the top left corner switches between single and multitrack views.

Now let's add some volume envelopes. Make sure the two buttons that i marked with arrows are pressed down. The volume envelope is by default at the top (100%) just click and drag to add a new point.

If you want you can double click a track to open it in the single track mode where you can do a lot of stuff with it.

What you'd expect from this type of software: effects, editing, noise reduction, equalizers, you name it.

Finally, when you're satisfied with the result, right-click on an empty track and select the Mix Down as shown.

This will mix the tracks into one. Then double click it to open it in the single-file mode and make last checks, effects and whatnot.. Then save the file and fire up the next phase, After Effects...Continue to Part 2