What Capture Method Did Valve Use for the Hi-res Bink videos?

[NewbyNewb]

Im interested to know what method they used to capture the hl2 bink movies

 

[Fireindaho]

I believe they used the command to record a demo of the action, then the command to render the demo into TGA files, then use Bink tools to make the final file. I'm pretty sure I read that somewhere.

 

[Ames]

Right here..

http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread.php?t=55945&page=2&pp=15

demoui and stuff.

 

[Ultimape]

The game itself supports frame by frame output at a constant fps rate. its like a built in renderer.

sequences of files are really easy to make into a bink exe with rad game tools

 

[NewbyNewb]

Oh I see, thanks everyone.
Though what sort of hardware setup would they would have had?
Because they were capturing at such hi resolution wouldnt the system have been bottlenecked to a point where it couldnt maintain decent fps?

I thought maybe they used 2 computers, one to play and the other to capture...

Does anyone know how you could capture hl2 using 2 computers, one playing it at 1920X1440 and the other just capturing it at full resolution using some sort of capture card.

hmm the latest ati/nvidia cards have dual dvi I wonder if theres a capture card that could use that

 

[DreadLord]

Oh I see, thanks everyone.
Though what sort of hardware setup would they would have had?
Because they were capturing at such hi resolution wouldnt the system have been bottlenecked to a point where it couldnt maintain decent fps?

no, it renders at 30fps no matter what, whether a second is a real second, or 5 minutes long, makes no difference. it takes FOREVER sometimes, but it comes out nice.

 

[Ames]

Oh I see, thanks everyone.
Though what sort of hardware setup would they would have had?
Because they were capturing at such hi resolution wouldnt the system have been bottlenecked to a point where it couldnt maintain decent fps?

I thought maybe they used 2 computers, one to play and the other to capture...

Does anyone know how you could capture hl2 using 2 computers, one playing it at 1920X1440 and the other just capturing it at full resolution using some sort of capture card.

hmm the latest ati/nvidia cards have dual dvi I wonder if theres a capture card that could use that

The game can set a specific framerate for you to record at. It doesn't matter if your computer can handle it because it will churn out the frames at the speed you wish. If you set it to 30fps, the renderer will create 30 .tga's (or whatever format it is) per second of demo time.

This allows you to have highly-detailed demos without the cost of framerate speed for the demo. You don't need an extra computer to record. However, at such a high resolution, the movie would take a very long time to be strung together by VirtualDub or whatever.

Or at least that's what I've heard.

 

[switch]

A note on how Valve kept the video's high quality:
They encoded the .tga files and the .wav into a massive, couple of gigs, .qt (quicktime) file and then imported that into bink tools to be changed into a bink executable.

(This is as far as I remember it, Chris_D posted an old email response he got about it about a week ago)

Not recomended for your solution though, the others have pointed iout ways which are more suitable.

Anyway as a short version; here are the appropriate console commands for one you have recorded the demo:

host_framerate 30 (forces fixed framerate for playback)
playdemo xxx (starts the demo playback)
startmovie css (starts dumping demo frames to file and writing the .wav)

Leeched from Chris_D again who got it from Yahn Bernier at Valve (just the host_framerate was new to me)

I usually use videomach to put the images and sound together into a video, check it out here: http://www.gromada.com/videomach.html

 

[Snowknight26]

They could have done it this way, then converted the end product to a bink executable using the Bink and Smacker tool (it takes forever to convert a file).

http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread.php?t=54048

 

[NewbyNewb]

oh, i get it, it doesnt capture in real time, you make the demo, then capture the demo, thanks everyone.

Does anyone have experience capturing eg. 20 minutes of HL2 @ 1920X1440 on highest quality settings?

If I wanted to capture other games at 1920X1440 how would I do that using 2 computers?

 

[switch]

oh, i get it, it doesnt capture in real time, you make the demo, then capture the demo, thanks everyone.

Does anyone have experience capturing eg. 20 minutes of HL2 @ 1920X1440 on highest quality settings?

If I wanted to capture other games at 1920X1440 how would I do that using 2 computers?

For other games to record high quality I can only see two decent ways:

You could have a TV Capture card on the recording pc and connecting it up to the TV out which is on most graphics cards. So the PC playing the game spits out the data across a cable like it was just another monitor or a tv and the recording pc records it like it was a tv feed or whatever. This would probably only work well with a decent TV capture card and you would need all the right cables.

Anyway the other option which I have seen work well for some Machima (films done using games) is to hook up a camcorder (could even just be a VCR but that wouldn't be good quality) to the TV Out of the graphics card and just hit record.