720p Machinima

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…

The 720p Machinima by MICHAEL VERDI, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License