Your first task when starting to make a movie with the GTA4 video editor is caturing some game footage. This is simply done by pressing the F2 button. This implements 2 interesting concepts for clip capture.
First, caturing is done 'backwards' in time. That means the action that occurs PRIOR to pressing the key. The clip length is limited to about 30-40s depending on game settings and computer specs.
On the first look this is somehow confusing when being used to the standard way film footage is recorded: Defining the start and end point of your recording and always record forward in time. After some thinking it is indeedan amazing concept. For recording interesting scenes during gameplay it's great.
You don't have to record everything and then later select these parts and save. You never know exactly what might be look great before it had happend. This way everything is recorded by default (but not saved) and when you recognize something unique an useful had happend in the game, just press F2 and you have it saved.
And even if you are a forward thinking person, plan and setup a scene in advance this feature is not as bad as it looks. This way you only save when the scene happened as you have planned. No need to save several takes until you got the right one. Just press F2 when you are satisfied. This saves some disk space and time for selecting and organizing all the takes later.
Biggest drawback is of course that they have a fixed clip length we (yet) have no control of that length. That hurts. It's not possible to capture longer scenes (e.g car chases etc.) in one clip or even be able to save disc space and worktime to adjust clip length later for recording smaller clips.
I hope this will get fixed soon by either the game company itself or some clever modders.
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5 comments:
Thanks for pointing out how the editor works and for providing a perspective on the odd nature of the "capture backwards' idea. The clip length is a problem, but as you suggest, the modders will fix this soon. Modding community is great for this game and I expect a slew of interesting hacks.
Great intro to this feature, tahnk you.
Also of note:
The "clip" captured in GTA4 is not a video clip; it is a bona-fide "demo" recording of gameplay objects and events. For you really old school folks, think Quake2's .dm2 file, but at a higher framerate.
As such, while a "clip" can take up considerable space (especially if you're driving and, thus, encountering lots of new objects it has to save), it generally doesn't take up as much space as a video capture, and having the clip recording feature turned on has little to no impact on frames-per-second you get while playing the game.
This also means, as I'm sure CD is going to get into in a future post, that a clip can be truly "recammed" - and while the camera stays on a fairly short tether relative to the recording character, the recamming features themselves rival or surpass anything the legendary Keygrip2 could do (if you factor out the packetentities tinkering). It really is a remarkable tool / implementation here in GTA4.
thanks for the detailed explaination. exactly what i was looking for :)
lol I had no idea that it captured the stuff before pressing F2 :O
Thanks allot :D
And as Ricky Grove said. There will come some kind of addon or trick to extend the clip lenght, (I hope D:)
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