The Making of the Kallisti & Kallora Videos

My video method (updated!):

Got a new PC with a GeForce FX5600 256MB video card, and can now use the TV out funciton to send qood quality pictures to my TV/VCR, resulting in a much better picture to begin with. This clone screen view is then recorded on VHS tape (picture quality degradation stage 1)

I then play back the tape and use a TV tuner card in my PC to capture them. I use a Hauppage Win/TV card. I capture only the scenes I want as at this stage I use uncompressed frames at 320x240 pixel size (30 seconds of which is about 75 MB!) I tried using compression on this stage but the results were appalling! :-) (picture quality degradation stage 2)

Next is to edit the video clips and add music. For this I now use Ulead VideoStudio 7, which I bought end 2003. Before then I used Ulead VideoStudio 6 LE which came free with my video card. VS 7 finally gives me a decent crossfade filter as wel as several other enhancements sucha as changing the clip speed which is very useful. I then use the DivX 5 codec to encode as the final output stage. With the movie's I've done so far I've output at 320x240. This give me an output file of 5-7MB per minute. (picture quality degradation stage 3)

I decided on the DivX codec because I'd heard good things about it and a test I did with the WMV format produced much bigger files for no apparent improvement in picture quality. Possibly this was because the picture quality had degraded already :-)

I hope this explains the process... what is sometimes annoying is to have a great battle in RvR and then realise I hadn't connected up the video beforehand!!! They take a long time to make, but its a lot of fun :-) and the feedback is a great ego boost ;-D What is funny is when in RvR now I get people asking me if I'm filming plus I've lately had mids emote kisses and salutes at my corpse instead of the usual things ;-)