The other day for I don’t know what reason, the idea of using iShowU to capture machinima popped into my head. I originally bought the program to replace SnapzProX which I use for screencasts on Freevlog. My initial experience was that it was much faster than SnapzProX (it’s a Universal Binary, Snapz isn’t) but I didn’t get like they way it captured the pointer (they’ve fixed this now!). Anyway, I thought to try it again because I don’t need or want to capture the pointer in machinima. What I found was not only does the new version work great, it works well enough that I can get acceptable results while capturing at 1280 X 720.
What I did was set iShowU to record with the Photo JPEG codec at 1280 X 720 (past experience has been that this is low cpu overhead and clean video). Then in Final Cut Pro I made a sequence preset that matched. Then I just imported the file I recored and edited away. The export for web was done using mulit-pass H.264 with the video bit-rate set to 1500kbps.
I also used this video as an excuse to test out animating mouths on moving video. For that I grabbed a still from the video and animated it with CrazyTalk and exported an mpeg4 avi of just the mouth area. Then I brought that into Final Cut Pro and put a mask around it and keyframed it to match the head motion.
All in all I’m pretty excited about this. Now if only I had time to do more…
Tags: machinima, secondlife, second life, hd.
The 720p Machinima by MICHAEL VERDI, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
9 Comments
the 720p HD version looks very very good on my plasma screen, better for me than just a little box…all clever stuff innit!
http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/ now works on Intel Macs according to their page:
Intel Mac compatibility
It cost $20 to upgrade and iShowU costs $20 to buy. Do you suggest buying iShowU?
Yep, Snapzpro does work on Intel Macs and I use it all the time but it does it through Rosetta. The problem comes in when you record a 5 minute movie and it takes 20 minutes to save the file (using lots of cpu and preventing you from recording something else). iShowU on the other hand, saves the file and is ready to go again in about 2 seconds. I haven’t tested it extensively for screencasts yet so I’ll have to wait on saying which is best.
Hey - one thing I didn’t like about Snapz Pro is that it refused to record anything when DVD Player was open. I get the DMR thing… but sometimes I need to record something off a DVD — a DVD I have rights too — like a film that was made by a client that I’m now building a website for.
Will iShowU let us do this?
Uh oh. I forgot to close a tag with . And now your sidebar is all in italics. Sorry. I think you have to fix this…
Pretty darn cool!!
I’ve been using iShowU for awhile, I’ve always liked it though I never really did an A/B test on that and Snapz. It just always gave me good results and was easy to use.
And that image is mighty purty.
With the new macbook pro all is possible now in SL. Whoot!
FRECK!
that IS pretty damn cool
Hi there,
I am working on macbook pro 17″ and trying out machinima on a mac using iShowU in HD. I was wondering if you could be a bit more detailed in how you capture - ie what kind of a computer do you use? I am having a lot of problems with the framerate and am suspecting that it has to do with the processor power of my mac.
thanks,
Brigitte
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