Movies

January 2007

Background:

I bought myself a brand spankin' new computer for Christmas/my Birthday. I have also been playing World of Warcraft more than I probably should.

The Problem:

I wanted to learn how to record and edit video taken of the game.

The solution:

Step 1: Buy a new computer. I went with a Dell XPS Desktop with several upgrades. It's very powerful. Much more so than my old computer by a long shot.
Step 2: Ask around for video capturing software. Most people pointed me to fraps. I tried the demo, liked it and bought the full version.
Step 3: Find a suitable editor. Everyone I asked said to use Windows Movie Maker that is free from Microsoft (yes, you read that correctly, FREE). It's extraordinarily straight forward and easy to use. It only took a couple slightly botched movies before I got it all figured out.
Step 4: Find somewhere to post the movies as I'm not alloted enough space here. I chose to post them on Google Video.

Here are the movies I've made so far. They are all from World of Warcraft.
TSG = The Silver Guard: My guild on the Silver Hand Server.
SHRA = Silver Hand Raiding Alliance: A group of people that tackle 40 person raids.

TSG vs Hakkar:
   The end boss of Zul'Gurub
SHRA vs Majordomo:
   The 2nd to last boss in Molten Core
SHRA vs Razorgore:
   1st boss in Blackwing Lair
SHRA vs Vaelastrasz:
   2nd boss in Blackwing Lair
SHRA vs Broodlord:
   3rd boss in Blackwing Lair
SHRA vs Firemaw:
   4th boss in Blackwing Lair
SHRA vs Ebonroc:
   5th boss in Blackwing Lair
SHRA vs Flamegor:
   6th boss in Blackwing Lair
SHRA vs Chromaggus:
   7th boss in Blackwing Lair
SHRA vs Nefarian:
   8th and final boss in Blackwing Lair
Oh Look! A Rare Spawn!:
   An early encounter in the expansion
SHRA vs a Fel Reaver and the Pit Lord:
   A couple monsters in the new expansion

What I learned:

The toughest part of putting together the videos is finding music of the right length that fits. It doesn't take too much time to put together the videos and I'm working on some longer ones of entire instances. I also learned that Google re-encodes the movies after you upload them. They're better quality if you download them but they still aren't the quality that I send them in as. With the last movie, I encoded it at much higher quality and uploaded that. It ended up better on Google so I think I'll just have to put up with a longer upload time.

page last updated January 29, 2007

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