A small experiment with Movie Maker.

Pirate1019 · Post by **Pirate1019** » Thu Apr 19, 2007 2:29 am

So, a few days ago I discovered that my computer has Microsoft Movie Maker on it and I was bored. This is the result. I figured I'd share it with all of you. The video quality is pretty terrible but to my knowledge there wasn't much I could do about it.

Since this is made from a bunch of superplays off of the internet, see if you can spot any cameos from members of this site as pilots.

EDIT: Youtube'd.

postman · Post by **postman** » Thu Apr 19, 2007 3:12 am

Nice man! You should start a youtube account if you plan to make more.....

Pirate1019 · Post by **Pirate1019** » Thu Apr 19, 2007 3:20 am

Thanks. The worst part was that some videos were horribly deformed my Movie Maker. An example is VTF-INO's double play videos. Even though they look normal in Windows Media Player or anything else, MM insisted on stretching it out. The first thing I plan to do is *ahem* aquire Adobe Premier or something.

I have a Youtube account. It's just not a director account (if that matters?). I guess I might decide to change that.

DJ Incompetent · Post by **DJ Incompetent** » Thu Apr 19, 2007 3:30 am

Good stuff. You are attuned to the music in transitions. I like. Yeah. Do more. Get up on Virtualdub and do the video resizings through that. At least I think Vdub does that.

Pirate1019 · Post by **Pirate1019** » Thu Apr 19, 2007 3:38 am

DJ Incompetent wrote:Good stuff. You are attuned to the music in transitions. I like. Yeah. Do more. Get up on Virtualdub and do the video resizings through that. At least I think Vdub does that.

Thaks a lot! That was actually what I spent the most time on. Getting the transitions. Some of them came by accident though. If you notice, besides the fade in during the beginning and fade out at the end, there was one transition between clips in the entire movie. That's because I put all the videos in and then tried adding transitions and they all messed up the timing.

I think I will make more. It was pretty fun and I was expecting it to be a lot more difficult.

postman · Post by **postman** » Thu Apr 19, 2007 5:02 am

I use camtasia, I think its a great program.......

I made a TF tribute here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrgdnDcmHPA

and a general shmups one here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2MP13spBA4

Converting them to .mpgs might help the quality a bit, wmvs are the worst from what I hear.....

The director account doesn't really mean anything........I went with guru, it's pointless.......

They are fun to make, hope to see more....

icepick · Post by **icepick** » Thu Apr 19, 2007 6:00 am

Very cool!

I thought that a lot of it went along nicely, but for some reason, the Ikaruga portions stood out a lot when I was watching. The Border Down parts were really sweet as well.

Nicely choreographed, nice job, thank you for sharing.

... I just watched it again, I think that the Ikaruga parts go along with the pacing of the song very well. The whole thing is good, though, I'm sharing this with people. (Most of them aren't into shmups, but, it's cool and it's quick and it's YouTube, I think they'll take a look.)

I feel very disconnected, but, what song is playing in that video?

RotateMe · Post by **RotateMe** » Thu Apr 19, 2007 7:52 am

I get an error when I try to access the youtube'd version. Maybe it's been uploaded too recently.

sven666 · Post by **sven666** » Thu Apr 19, 2007 8:35 am

cool vid man

henry dark · Post by **henry dark** » Thu Apr 19, 2007 9:24 am

I'm getting the YouTube error too

Pirate1019 · Post by **Pirate1019** » Thu Apr 19, 2007 1:39 pm

icepick wrote:Very cool!

I thought that a lot of it went along nicely, but for some reason, the Ikaruga portions stood out a lot when I was watching. The Border Down parts were really sweet as well.

Nicely choreographed, nice job, thank you for sharing.

... I just watched it again, I think that the Ikaruga parts go along with the pacing of the song very well. The whole thing is good, though, I'm sharing this with people. (Most of them aren't into shmups, but, it's cool and it's quick and it's YouTube, I think they'll take a look.)

I feel very disconnected, but, what song is playing in that video?

Thanks for the compliments. They really just sort of fell into place after the third clip.

I was worried that everybody would complain that I used a well known artist. It's a song by Rise Against called 'Behind Closed Doors' from their album The Sufferer and the Witness. I chose it simply because of the chorus and the bit at the beginning.

I'm not sure about the Youtube problem. I'll check it out and see if I can't fix it. I watched it fine last night.

EDIT: Still works fine. Are you guys using Mac's or something? A friend of mine had problems downloading it from filefront and he was using a Mac. Worked the second time though. If it won't work on Youtube then you can watch it at the filefront link. No download necessary.

tuoma · Post by **tuoma** » Thu Apr 19, 2007 2:12 pm

I wondered about the music... Im sure you like it but wouldn't a track from some shmup OST be better there?

But make more, always nice to look at!

henry dark · Post by **henry dark** » Thu Apr 19, 2007 2:13 pm

It's working fine now. Good video. I had to turn the sound down though

Fenrir · Post by **Fenrir** » Thu Apr 19, 2007 2:53 pm

Why! WHY OH WHY do you people keep on using stupid white thrash college greendaysh rock in your darn ytube movies!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111111111111
It's like there's only that kind of stuff on earth >_<

Nonetheless, great movie (with 0 volume

)

DJ Incompetent · Post by **DJ Incompetent** » Thu Apr 19, 2007 6:32 pm

LOL don't get me wrong. Movie is cool as-is, but:

Fenrir wrote:Why! WHY OH WHY do you people keep on using stupid white thrash college greendaysh rock in your darn ytube movies!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111111111111
It's like there's only that kind of stuff on earth >_<

Quote of the month right there!

Frederik · Post by **Frederik** » Thu Apr 19, 2007 8:58 pm

Fenrir wrote:stupid white thrash college greendaysh rock

Next time, we need some Darkthrone!

That was pretty nice - maybe next time, you could edit it in a way that the ships have the same position during the transitions, I think that would look really cool. For instance, the ship in DDP would be at the down right corner, and KAZAM! - cut to a Batrider replay with the ship starting in the same spot, to have some sort of coherent movement in the whole video.

And man, Gradius V really freaks out in the later loops.

poieo · Post by **poieo** » Thu Apr 19, 2007 9:32 pm

Someone once posted a tutorial on how to preserve the aspect ratio on Youtube. It's for a different app, but maybe it'll give some clues on how to preserve it with Movie Maker.

icepick · Post by **icepick** » Thu Apr 19, 2007 11:59 pm

Pirate1019 wrote:I was worried that everybody would complain that I used a well known artist. It's a song by Rise Against called 'Behind Closed Doors' from their album The Sufferer and the Witness. I chose it simply because of the chorus and the bit at the beginning.

I thought that the chorus was nice for the video as well; in fact I found myself kind of singing what I remembered of it afterwards, while thinking about my favorite scenes.

Thanks for telling me about the song! If you get inspiration/bored again sometime, I would be interested in checking out whatever you come up with.

I agree that VirtualDub would give you maybe a little more flexibility. You could always "sketch it out" in Movie Maker (I've never used it) and then put together the final copy in VirtualDub. I'd also like to humbly request an MPEG format video instead of WMV, just as a personal preference though... WMV and YouTube are fine.

tuoma wrote:I wondered about the music... Im sure you like it but wouldn't a track from some shmup OST be better there?

I was thinking about what music I would use and what scenes I would show, if I made something like this. Shmup music did come to mind, as well as the electronic music that I tend to listen to and anything else that I could think of. I decided that I most likely wouldn't use any shmup music, because one can already hear such music in these games.

I love shmup music, but I decided that I would try to use something else. Some of my favorite songs (electronic and others) lack the 'transitional' nature that DJI mentioned, and even if I loved it, most of you would probably be bored and I could still have done something better.

One of the decisions that I came to was that I would probably use something popular. Mainstream music can still be good, even if it's overplayed; Plus, videos like this one by Pirate1019 give me the option of showing them to friends that don't even know what shmups are, yet. They'll probably know the song, and admittedly if they don't like it then they're less likely to watch the video... but again, if it's a well-liked song for good reason, then it should work.

DJI's Superplay Mix 01 had a good disclaimer: "If you like music itself, then you'll probably like this," or something along those lines. There were some popular songs in there, some older well-known ones, a few that I actually knew, and a bunch that I'd never heard before (some of which I'm still interested in and will check out).

Nonetheless, maybe I'll make a quick video for all you guys with "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" as the music.

Just kidding!

(I don't mind Green Day at all, just to note.)

Pirate1019 · Post by **Pirate1019** » Fri Apr 20, 2007 12:34 am

Fenrir wrote:Why! WHY OH WHY do you people keep on using stupid white thrash college greendaysh rock in your darn ytube movies!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111111111111
It's like there's only that kind of stuff on earth >_<

Nonetheless, great movie (with 0 volume )

Bit of a violent reaction.

I thought about using a different tune, but I decided to brave the "Mainstream music sux!" comments. Personally, I liked it. I thought about using something else, but decided to go with this because of the pretty obvious transitions to make things easier. I also thought about a song from a shmup soundtrack, but like icepick mentioned, we already have plenty of that. I didn't feel like simply putting X game to Y game's music. Hopefully next time I'll use something a little more to your tastes.

As for video quality/format:
Like stated, it was a bit of a boredom inspired experiment. I'm gonna make another (hopefully) higher quality one with something other then Movie Maker. I didn't plan to have the video as a wmv but I didn't read any help files for Movie Maker and didn't know it could make it in anything else so that's how it turned out. VirtualDub will probably be involved too. I might also use fraps and do something besides mooch off of other's recordings, so I could be able to fix the horrendous quality.

EDIT: Just be happy that I didn't use a Linkin Park song