Try Making a Video In Second Life – Machinima (Part 1)
I have taken and shared many photo’s in Second Life, and some of those captured moments shared in photo form have been very touching. Those of you who know about Second Life know what I mean. There is still a feature within second life that will allow you to actually makes moves of what is happening on screen.
It seems kind of curious to me, well maybe not, that I have been playing the in Second Life metaverse for about a year and a half now, and I have never tried this feature. Perhaps it is like the real life version of me, that although I love taking photos, the thought of taking video of life seems like I would be spending too much time with my eye looking in a view finder and not enough time looking at life (or in this case Second Life) itself.
This post is about my first attempts at making a video using the built in video recording functionality within Second Life (also called Machinima), but it is the first in explaining a number of tools that you can use to create Second Life (SL) home movies – DV
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Making a video in Second Life is fairly simple. Here are the steps you can use to make your own Second Life home video:
- Install a copy of Second Life and then create your account and AV. Both of these things can be done for free, so this tool fits within the “Free” requirement
- Enter the Second Life World using your account
- Put your AV in a place that you would like to create a movie about
- Select “Start/Stop Movie to Disk” from the “File” pull down menu
- Select the name of file and the path to where to store it
- Select the video compression and it will begin recording your movie
To stop recording, select the “Start/Stop Movie to Disk” option again.
It really is that simple.
OK Dharma… Nothing is that simple, what is the catch.
This feature seems to work just fine for me. But only if I am recording video. When I switch from screen to screen the video capture seems to make the SL client a little unstable.
The other problem
When I looked into the feature more I found an article in the SL help archives (click here to read the article) that mentioned that Linden Labs were actually going to remove the movie recorder from the client. This still hasn’t happened yet in the current release version of the client but it has already be removed from the release candidate of the client. The article link about also describes other tools including some additional FREE tools that you can use to perform the same capture function more reliably.
Well, until they remove the video recorder from the SL client, we can experiment with it, or try some different tool. The next couple articles talk about using VisualDub as a tool to perform AVI editing and adding sound to the video.
Note: I had tried to get VisualDub to perform screen capture in order to capture my Second Life screen and create a movie but I could not get it to capture in Vista. It did allow me to capture video from my cam though. I would have liked to have all my video editing in one piece of software, but it appears that VisualDub is not going to be my free tool for screen capture. An easier much route to take, although it doesn’t not allow you to capture based on selected window is CamStudio. An easy little capture tool that works with no configuration right after install, and it is Free. Here is a screen shot of the simple CamStudio interface:
The posts to follow will describe my various experiments where I used VisualDub to edit the AVI I captured using the Second Life client, add sound to that AVI file, and upload the AVI to the Internet so I could show it on my blog. It also details the interesting bumps in the road I found along the way. -DV
Articles that may interest you:
A list of some other tools I found interesting
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