Silla's Gameplay Site - Half Life, Half Life 2, Sin Emergence

This is a short information about movie making with Half Life

Recording

You have to setup in steam application, start the game with -console option to get the console while gaming. Than you pick up a level or saved game, what ever. After loading you press ESC to get the console back. Enter record name now all it will be recorded. So play ...

Be sure that the name you choice has no numbers in it, this causes later massive problems

DEMo File to Picture Sequence

Record is finish, all closed. Now you have a name.dem file. Now we have to render your play to a TGA sequence

BUT BEWARE this eat lot of hard disk space

Space Needed = (Height x Width) x Bit x Pic Per Second x Seconds

On a HD720p25 movie you need 60 GB per 10 minutes !!!

But ultra beware ... you need it twice !

To create these TGA files you can do this with console or commandline


game is the internal code, for HL2 it is hl2, width and height your video and frame rate how many pics per second you want

Sequence to RAW Avi

Well now you have millions of small TGA files, best is to convert them all to one big single AVI file. Use VirtualDub, open first pic and he detect automatically a sequence. Save this as uncompressed AVI. Do not save it with a codec, because you lost so much quality

Cutting

Drop all files in your cutter, i use Adobe Premiere (long time ago i use FinalCut). Then i cutting anything i want and save the final result to an MPEG 16 Mb/s file

MPEG to H264

After this i drop the file into Quicktime Pro, he generate all movies with all resolutions and bandwidth i need