Semi-noob looking for a little more advanced advice or help
 

Hello, this is my first time posting but I thought this might be the best source for getting some questions answered about movie making that have been brewing in my head for a while.

First off I'm not entirely new to making warcraft movies. I've made three movies so far using various editors and capture methods, one of which is actually posted up on warcraftmovies.com.

My problem is that these first attempts have been pretty amateurish in the technical department. I've actually had some education and experience in editing footage as well as some cinematography but I'm relatively new and mostly unfamiliar to the details of the frame capture and digital editing systems. Here's a link to the video to give you an idea of how bad my technical is: http://http://www.warcraftmovies.com...w.php?id=22508

I'd like to get serious about the whole thing and with one of the projects I'd like to put together I have an opportunity, in my opinion, to present something new to pvp videos that has never been done before. I need some help however to spruce up and put some technical polish on the projects. I'm not looking for anything fancy or flashy in the effecte department; just some solid advice for the best methods to capture, store and render to make a clean video that's of a managable size.

Right now I'm using FRAPS, standard issue from what I gather, and Adobe Premiere Pro to do my work.

This is my first specific of several questions that I was hoping I might be able to get some help on. Right now when I record with fraps, even at a half size setting I'm getting file sizes of 1-3GB. At this rate I can chew up all the room on my hard drive post haste. I realize I could probably cut some of this down by not recording entire BG matches but then I always end up missing the good parts when I forget that fraps isn't running in the heat of combat. I was wondering how I can cut these file sizes down so that I can actually build up a stock of footage to work with and not buy 3-4 hard drives to do it?

Well to give you a hand with the Fraps size there are a couple things to note. For one, the initial record is going to be that size, nothing can be done about that. Fraps pulls the video in a very close to RAW video form. Reason for this is it will slow your PC down to almost a crawl if it tried to do heavy duty on the fly encoding.

Here are some suggestions to "ease the pain".

1) After you have obtained your fraps for the night, you can compress the raw video to the format of your choice and delete the "raw" footage.

2) If your PC can handle full frame, record at that. There really isn't that much of a size difference between 1/2 and full.

3) Even though working with the RAW file people find more ideal, you will not notice too much of a quality degradation over encoding the video twice, plus it will make your work in Adobe that much easier, since files from fraps that are ~4gb compress down to about 150mb or so depending on your settings.

- If you need any other encoding help, just let me know.

I've got virtual dub downloaded, which I found a reference to being a good way to compress the videos but I haven't had much success getting them to compress quite right without serious degradation of the video.

Visit http://www.craftingworlds.com/forums...t=0&#entry1017

or

http://www.craftingworlds.com/forums...?showtopic=142

This should help ya a little bit more.

Thx for the help and advice, Xvid has gone a long way to solve a lot of my problems.