Quake tutorial: How to make a video from your demos

Since Quake Live is after the corner the hype got to me, so I started to look for Quake videos, and how I have lots of Quake 3 demos from the old days when I was playing  I started to make my own video. I’m not the best player out there but there are some cool moves in all these demos. I decided to make a small tutorial for all of you who were struck by “the hype” or are just good at quake and finally decided to show the world. Till now all the Quake 3 console commands work in Quake Live too, so you probably can make a Quake Live video using this tutorial but it is mainly designed for Quake 3 Arena. I assume you are familiar with Q 3 console commands and cfg files.

Here are the steps you should follow:

• first of all make some demos. I usually record all my games, you never know when you’ll do a cool move. To record a demo you have to enter this 2 commands: “g_syncronousClients 1″ and “record demoname”. demoname should be an intuitive unique name. To stop a demo you type “stoprecord”. You should bind these commands

bind F1 “g_syncronousClients 1;record”
bind F2 “stoprecord; g_syncronousClients 0″

• To playback your demos use Seismovision. You just double click the demo and it starts Quake. It has a cool config specially made to record videos “OJs Movie Config.cfg” Use it. Open the file in a text editor and see the key binds for record and other useful commands. I usually do some twicking like frame rate or video resolution and quality. You want to get the best looking demo, right? Adjust these settings in the config according to your system specs. Just hit the record key, the game will not run smooth when you record but that’s not a problem. Now for some theoretical stuff. You can skip these if you whant. Quake 3 has a real useful command for recording videos “cl_avidemo”. Although there is another way to record… using Fraps, I recommend “cl_avidemo” . This command writes TGA files in your screenshots folder. If you use “cl_avidemo 30” like I do, it will write 30 files/second on your HDD so you need loots of free space. This means your video will have 30 fps, which is great for action sequences. Most movies on TV have only 24 fps. Now for the resolution… DVD quality means 768×576 resolution. I recommend 800*600 or higher. The bigger the resolution is the more free space you need. You should use a wide resolution, it’s cooler. I use 1280*800 (16:10 aspect ratio).
• After you have your screenshots you have to transform them in a video. I use Virtual Dub, but there are other alternatives like Bmp2Avi. Just chose Open video file and chose Image sequence from file types just like in the picture.

• Now open the first screenshot. Save your file with File/Save as AVI option. By default VD saves an uncompressed avi file so  again you’ll be  needing a lot of HDD free space. You can chose to compress the file using a codec installed on your system like Xvid. Go to Video/Compression.. and chose your favorite codec like in the picture. Don’t forget to set the framerate from Video/Framerate.. (CTRL + R).

• Finally you have a video file with your quake moves. Now it’s time to edit this video files with your favorite video editing tool. You can use anything between Windows Movie Maker to Adobe Premier. It’s up to you. It really depends on your video editing skills and the complexity you want the video to have.
• Optional: You can record the in game sound and synchronize it with your video. I find that to time consuming with all the synchronizing so I don’t record the in-game sound, I’m happy just with the soundtrack.
• It’s time to publish your video. Youtube is the easiest way to go. If you have a web site and you want to publish your video there just convert your movie in a streaming format like flash.

When my masterpiece is ready I will show it to you and you’ll have the chance to criticize it all you want .