Experiments with video

Hi Everyone,

I've started playing around with AVI recording in Sapphire. You can see some of my early handiwork in this panorama AVI [1.4MB], which is also on YouTube (see below), albeit with poorer quality.

If you'd like to try this yourself, there is a tutorial on the subject over here. Please note that the AVI capture process requires L3DT release 2.7, which may or may not be released by the time you read this [1].

Please note that I still have quite a bit of work to do to make the AVI capture feature 'nice', such as adding a user interface (it's currently controlled through scripts) and adding support for compression [2]. I intend to include a nice AVI capture interface in L3DT release 2.8.

Cheerio, Aaron.

Bootnotes:

1. L3DT release 2.7 Standard Edition is now available. Professional and Pro for Torque are coming soon.
2. The above AVI was compressed off-line using MEncoder in Linux, which crunched the file down from the raw AVI size of ~230MB to ~1.4MB.

Update:

I've added support for writing compressed AVIs using the Microsoft 'Video for Windows' API, and updated the tutorial accordingly.

— Aaron 2009/02/21 19:17

Update 2:

Great success!

I've hooked the AVI recorder up to the Sapphire user interface to give you a nice and handy 'record' toolbar button for recording AVIs. This means you'll now be able to record 'freeform' videos, rather than pre-scripted movements as with the panorama example given above. Here's an example of a video captured whilst I walked around on the terrain:

… and here's an example of using the bulldozer brush in Sapphire:

This is all coming soon in L3DT v2.7 Professional and Pro for Torque.

— Aaron 2009/02/21 22:22