I am 1/2 reluctant to post this on this forum. I haven't seen any threads like this own here, but I would appreciate some constructive feedback on my video I created.

I used Windows Movie Maker. I feel as if I could do so much more with a better video editing program. I tried Macromedia once but it was way too over my head. Those who have never used any kind of video editing before I highly recommend trying Windows Movie Maker out. Its free on your computer already and had a very small learning curve for me.

First PVP Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fUV9jYCGPg

My first attempt at Video Editing. Notice how in some of the slides the transitions cut off the death because I miss timed how much the transitions actually overlapped. Also the huge amount of random transitions. I got a tip from a video editing major to only use one through an entire video. Overall though I was very happy with my first attempt at creating a video.

Second PVP Video

http://files.filefront.com/FlyingFun.../fileinfo.html

This video is slightly better then my first in terms of editing. This is probally the last time i will use WMM. I would of like to have added some on the fly pointing arrows to certain things I was killing or abilities an enemy used.

For example:

I run in with 2 allies.
have a pointer giving each name and guild.
Point at the enemies we are facing.
Snap shot important moments of the fight like huge crits, clutch heals, other cool special abilities or items used.

Would also like to have my text appear in corners of the screen. With WMM I can only get them in the center or with huge obnoxious fly by words on the top or side of the screen. These would be used to accomodate what song is being played.

Constructive feedback appreciated.

If you guys have a neat video that shows off something cool feel free to share it.

I was thinking about making a video for some time, but after a few months of trying to collect footage gave it up.

Basically, WoW PvP is very, very boring. A huge majority of fights are obvious from the start. If you start a fight where your opponent is polymorphed, well, that's really boring. Actually, fighting just one person at a time is boring. There's not enough going on, you need to fight several people at once for it to be messy enough to become unpredictable and thus have some entertainment value. And you can't have allies, that's also very boring, because you can't really see what they're doing - unless you have your ally record as well and you cut together the footage nicely. Can't make a movie where the audience doesn't know what's going on now.

Additionally, it's good if you specc into something with really long cooldowns, as that gives you more abilities to make use of, which gives variation. Engieneering is good, as it gives you more abilities to use, but frowned upon - being seen as "cheating", completely ignoring that movies are made for entertainment purposes.

Getting good shots is really, really hard - easily the hardest part (yeah), unless you've never edited a movie in your life and only have Adobe Premiere to work with, or whatever. It's not like even half the people out there know what they're doing well enough, have fast enough reactions, are well geared enough or have enough tricks up thier sleeve to put up a tough fight. And you have to get them to attack you. Movies where you get the jump on your enemy, especially as a mage, means victory by default. I mean, when you land that 1500 fireball hit, or 2.3k pre-ignite crit there's not much they can do - and, besides, what challenge is there if you're fully prepared and they're half-AFK eating popcorn while farming, or something?

Of course, the fights can't all be the same. You've gotta have some where you win easily against opponents that play well (or blow alot of cooldowns, whichever applies - unlikely both), probably the only 1v1s you'd wanna show. Then you need some where you almost die, and a small amount where you do die, to create tension - unless you're into that whole "I'm a titan"-kinda thing.

To round it all off you need actuin-filled music of whatever taste you prefer, good editing and timing between fights and music - it's best if you don't cut the music, so try to squeeze in some short scenes (fabricate some, or just have fitting non-PvP related cuts) at the end of a track, good enough quality to preferrably see the names of who you're fighting (no fun to see somebody fighting Murgughurg and Grublubug of the <Ayodl ...> guild) but low enough enoug filesize that people'd wanna download it. Personally I think 250 is a nice number, and never download anything above 300.

Oh, and you've gotta fight in interesting places. Wow, Tyr's Hand, huh? WSG? AV? Wester Plaguelands? Booooring! Go to some weird out-of-place location where nobody ever travels and start pretending to be farming mobs there. Make sure you look really easy to gank at the off-chance that somebody in full epic gear happens to stroll by looking for an easy victim. Remember: always be on your guard, you never know what danger strikes!

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After a while, though, I found out that collecting footage of myself getting ganked by several equally geared opponents, against whom I win easily in a cliffhanger, while farming in moonglade, were hard to get on tape, especially when considering that you'd almost need to be running fraps for good enough quality, and you'd have to be running it all the time while logged on - to make sure you don't miss a great gank-fight.

The time required to get good footage, to learn how to edit properly, to get the right music and to cut it and compress it so that it doesn't take alotta spece was just too much work.

In the end you'd probably wanna arrange fights against interesting opponents that you play out in an organized fassion.

"Real" WoW PvP just plain sucks.

Disclaimer: Not that this is my personal opinion and that there are indeed great PvP movies out there, but, I mean, why do something that's already been done? Either do it better, do something different, or don't do it at all - unless as practice. In retrospect, I haven't really accomplished much during my time.

Quick question: how much disk space do you want to have free in order to be recording? 1GB? 10GB? 100GB? Does the speed of the hard drive matter much? I was thinking about buying a new hard drive to make videos. and store old porn videos.

the best way to make a good pvp is to fraps fraps fraps. the best moments are unexpected and often come and go before you can get it on. A really good pvp video will have been recorded over months and months, not just one weekend of aggressivly strolling through sillithus.

No one is impressed by a bwl/aq40 geared warrior MS critting a priest in blues while they drink. Dont put that in your video. Do put in your video when you are a shadow priest casually drinking in sillithus and some asshat comes up looking for the easy kill. Show that you can take any disadvantage (being jumped) and spin it around so fast on the guy that people will go "whoa... i dont want to try and gank that priest".

In the world of pvp videos, the 'im a titan i kill all in 1 swing' is the worst aspect. pvp videos of david vs goliath are MUCH better from david's POV. One of my guildies had multiple run ins with a lvl 57 prep rogue (he being a MC/zg/aq20 geared MS warrior) in which the prep rogue completely mopped the floor with him. I would LOVE to see a movie from that guys POV. i would practically pay for that.


Another cool aspect in some pvp videos is the 'hero' theme. These are the people that go to desolance/stv whatever and seek out the opposing side lvl 60s ganking, hunt them down, and turn them into a fine bloody mist.

1min = about 1 gig from full fraps.

I'm a sucker for well timed grenades (and them being used X v 1).

Theres some CWOW Mage video.. the guy is insane. I think the opening scene is 1 v 8.

spirit, your stuff is always fantastic, and i want a 1920x1600 version of your background there >.>

I am quite the novice when it comes to videos. I started on Windows Movie Maker, it is not a bad program, but if you want some of the more 'professional' looking videos, I'd reccomend a program with a bit more depth. I chose Sony Vegas, and while the learning curve was a bit daunting, it was well worth it.

One of our warlocks tried his hand at making a few PvP videos. This was his first creation. We gave him specific feedback in this thread for his future creations.

He went on to make a short soullink video and then finally this lovely piece of work with our feedback here.

Just a bit from another player who went through a similar trial and how his turned out.

Thanks man, here is the original wallpaper.

http://spiritwolf.zinwrath.com/Comics/GM_gone_crazy.jpg

Oh, and this is my old PvP video. I used Premiere CS2 and Map/Model viewer to do the intro. Used the "Fast color corrector' filter to get the dark stormy effect. As for the actual PvP... well...

http://video.google.com.au/videoplay...3&q=spiritwolf

Thats really cool spirit. What program did you use for eiditing your pvp video?



I'v picked up engineering twice due to wanting grenades and mind control cap and other awsome pvp abilities with it. Unfortunatley I would never get used to using them and always ended up respecting because I was broke. Some enginerring items are hacks with what you can do. Rocket helm one guy, poly the other. Burst a third down with POM AP or whtaver combo you like. Kill a 4th guy and pray to god your poly and helm lasts.

If you haven't been, i highly recommend http://www.doom9.org and http://www.videohelp.com for software info (and freeware links/reviews) as well as "how-tos" and lots of information about encoding. I'm a big fan of small, high-quality videos and containers that don't end in .WMV ;)

I think we might see some "renewal" of PvP videos once the big arena matches start. There's already quite a few footages on warcraftmovies, sadly most of it are from some random PvE guy PoV, so you have clicks, bad play and the general feeling after watching them is *yawn*. They show the new skills but in 2vs2 arenas or ganking in hellfire, with classes that are currently vastly unbalanced(most of you have probably seen the bugged double paladin+judgement of righteouness video). However I think a few months from now, when BC is released, classes are a bit balanced and we can start seeing 5vs5 and not stupid 2vs2(I'm sorry but 2vs2 is far from anything balanced), more videos might be interesting to watch. After all, with a few different PoV and good editing, you'll see Teams videos and not just 1 vs X videos, where you can see TeamA strats vs TeamB etc. Teamwork is more interesting to watch imo than single skill, since you can only go so far when it comes to fighting alone. Especially on some of the "lesser" solo PvP classes with no powerful CC. You'll rarely see a 1vs3 druid or shaman fight ^^

As for the technical part of the thread, I started using sony vegas right after I made my first video(which was more of a fun video than anything, it was Hillsbrad Aimed Shot Contest ^^). However, most of the best fights I wanted recorded were well, never recorded, because you definitely want fraps on most of the time you expect to fight, and for this you need a dedicated harddrive. Just pressing the filming key when a fight starts usually doesn't work so good because you won't have the early part of the fight, maybe showing you drinking or getting ambushed while riding around. 100gb from my experience seems a minimum to have enough space to both film and keep records. 200gb is probably closer to what I'd want to make a PvP movie tho. And I download so much stuff that it's annoying to keep more than 40gb free out of my 450gb :( Having Dvd-rw s tho might help, you can stock your unmodified footage on them to free space and keep them for later.

What are your guys' preferred codecs to use. With premiere it seems it's been crashing every time I try to export it as xvid or divx (I wish I could figure out why.) So I tried H.264 because from what I've seen it can compress things incredibly small and still retain high quality. And whenever I try to export it uncompressed to encode in VirtualDub the video files are horribly aliased.

Here's a clip of an opening sequence (sorry for the nub vid, print's my forté) i'm working on that I compressed to see how it would look (filefront):
1280x1024, 24sec@30fps, 20mb H.264 Quicktime file

Is quicktime a bad thing to encode in? Can you encode H.264 into a mpeg file? All I ever see are divx/xvid encoded movies so I'm not sure.

Thanks for any input from people who are more familiar with video editing than I am.

My opinion is that DivX and XVid are both codec that are well-cuited for this type of application. H.264 is good, but I've got admittedly little experience with it. I can't think of any reason not to use it, though.

I'd advise against encoding in quicktime because, IIRC, it's a proprietary container. That may not be as much of a problem now as it has been in the past, thanks to applications like VLC. H.264 should be fine in a MP4 container. From what I've read, I think the MP4 container may actually be preferable.

I gave up on frapsing my PVP when I forgot to turn it on before engaging three warriors at once by myself and won =(

About FRAPS.. I run some tweaked geforce drivers for my '9700xt go' and run wow at 1920x1200. So far any result I managed to get with fraps was blurred and pixelated.

Any advice on this? (tried replacing my drivers, but didnt notice any change) Changing from resolution would prove rather difficult considering my screen wil be blurred (not native resolution) and I'd have to rebuild my DAB/..

Is there another program to use besides fraps to capture video? It keeps on freezing up my computer or stallign it with long record times. I have to keep fraps on only when I know im going to be going into the action.

Some of the sites I have been looking at here show alot of capturing dvd and cam videos, still searching for something like fraps.

pre 2.8 fraps limits your resolution to record to 1024x768, or 1280x800 widescreen. after 2.8.x, if you have a dualcore+ system the resolution recording limit has been removed. If you try to record above either of those resolutions pre 2.8.x it will half the resolution.

Pre-2.8 actually limits it to 1152x864 or 1280x800.
Force your monitor to run at 1152x864 or 1280x800 resolution, and then in the drivers set it to "center the output" rather than stretch-to-fit. You get a black letterbox around your screen, but your videos come out quite clear because it will record at full screen instead of half. If you have a dual core processor, then you can get FRAPS 2.8 and record at essentially whatever resolution you want, as mentioned above.

Other notes on tweaking settings for FRAPS purposes: Anti-aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering can kill performance, so turn these off if you're having issues. Also, in the WoW video options set your video to "24-bit color, 1x multisample." The 1x multisample is the important part, as anything else yields ~1 FPS when recording, even with a very fast computer.

On the topic of fraps and resolution, if you, like me, have problems changing it because of UI modifications, you can simply run WoW in window mode and set your desktop to whatever resolution is required to record. This will leave the UI perfectly fine and still let you record, then you can just disable windowed mode when done. Though, I guess you'll get some rather odd icons and letters if you run an abnormally high res then change to a low one.