Jan 13 2013
Star Trek Online Mission Video
In my desire to learn movie making basics, I had reason to make a quick game-play video for a project and needed to add voice over to video captured game footage. This was my first real test of video editing, beyond cutting the splicing that I’ve done in the past. I needed to capture about ten minutes of footage and then explain what was happening and cover some game mechanics in the video. I opted to record video and audio separately as I could later tweak my narration as needed and not be tied to having to do the mission over again if I messed up or was interrupted (which happened during this project a LOT).
Step one was to capture in game footage. I used FRAPS and set my “record” button to NUM LOCK. That way I had a built in “recording light” on my keyboard to let me know when I was rolling. I chose a (typically) short space based mission and captured it all at my full 1920 x 1080 resolution. Final file size was about 12GB.
Next, I watch the video a few times to get a feel of the action (and see what I missed, as I was more focused on recording than playing). I recorded my narration on my iPhone 5 using an app called MicPro. I got good clean audio from this and was able to send it to my computer using the wi-fi setting. VERY handy.
My first problem arose when my computer and my video editing software wouldn’t recognize the .aiff file that MicPro generated. A quick Google search gave me the answer. I was able to add the file to iTunes and then save it again locally after making a quick adjustment to the iTunes encoder.
Once I had my .MP3 audo track and my .AVI footage, I was able to open them in Windows Live Movie Maker and merge the two. It was a pretty straight forward process of adding a “music” track, but the tricky part was balancing the audio channels so the game-play sound didn’t blend in with or override the narration. There is a tool under Music Tools>Options called Music Volume. I found out I needed to select the film itself to adjust the volume for that track even though visually it looks like footage rather than an audio track (at least compared to most video editing tools).
I finally saved off my project, encoded it for HD and posted it. You can see it below.
All in all a good start and even though it was a seeming simple problem, there were a few technical hurdles and I learned a bit. And that’s what this is all about.
