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Computer Hardware, Software, Action!
How to Make Your Own Simulation Movies

by Guest Writer Frank "BA_Dart" Giger

Introduction

We all enjoy the films made from various simulations, as they show them in the same way we see them. Some are historically correct, some are humorous, some are sweeping and moving.

Since I am probably one of the most prolific movie makers (though not the best — "gooder enough" is my motto), I thought I'd share the quick, cheap, and relatively easy way to make a movie based on the IL-2 series of flight simulation.

Tools

One can spend hundreds of dollars in software that will capture, edit, add effects and sound, compile, and produce simulation videos. Some of the very best examples are made with sophisticated techniques and commercial grade software, taking months of work in getting each frame and sound perfect.

We, however, are going to go the cheap route. Really cheap.

Capture Software

This is the tool that takes what you see on the screen and turns it into raw footage. The most widely used is FRAPS, which is available here as a trial version. For $29.95 USD one can buy the full version which doesn't have the FRAPS web address on it and has some additional options. This is the largest investment, past hosting costs, of the whole movie making toolkit for the casual filmmaker.

Processing Software

This is used to crop frames to remove online text, change color saturation, the codex used for compressing the video, and editing clips. We're going to use two programs, VirtualDub and Windows Movie Maker (included in Windows XP). Both are free, though if you make a lot of movies, I'd suggest a donation to the makers of Virtual Dub. Mr. Gates has been compensated through the purchase of the operating system, though I'm sure he'd accept your unsolicited cash.

Web Hosting

In order to share movies, one must find an Internet host for them. Finding a host can be problematic, though there are some that will do it for you. In my case, I wound up having to rent a dedicated server owing to the amount of resources and bandwidth movies can take up. And it can be overwhelming. A "common" server got me booted from two very nice hosting companies.

Planning

Taking a few minutes to figure out what you're going to make your movie about and how you're going to go about it before you start will save hours and even days. If it's going to tell a story and be a mini-epic, you might consider doodling a storyboard. A storyboard is a series of sketches that show the sequence of events in the movie. You can indicate notes, lighting, narration and which music you want in your movie.

Today we're going to put an online event into film, as it's the easiest film to make. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end already built in. Since it happened online, there isn't any mission building involved — we're making a "sports reporting" movie. The prep time is greatly reduced and we can make this puppy in an evening (if we're willing to stay up late).

The Scenario

A squad mate of mine was haunting my poor Hurricane IIb with his FW-190A5 the other night, and I gave him the devil's own in trying to shoot me down. It was a 20 minute fight where he slashed and I ducked and we narrowly missed each other quite a bit, including one time where I barrel rolled around him as he zoomed in, literally encircling his aircraft. Another aircraft joined the fray, sticking on my six, and as he whittled away, the 190 swooped a bit too low, hitting the ground and blowing up directly under my aircraft. The shock and debris of the impact took the wing off my plane and I augured in, wondering what the heck happened! Fortunately, I made an online track of the event for replay.

This is funny to me, so we're going to make a movie about the fight.

A twenty minute fight is a whole lot of "boring-to-anyone" watching. If you've seen a Folke-Wulf boom and zoom once, you've seen it a thousand times. We're going to cut the whole thing down to about three minutes of video.

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Making Many Tracks Out of One

Binding a key to start and stop online recording is a must, as we're going to make a new .ntrk file for each clip and angle. This file can be quite large. In this case over 4MB.

So we'll load the big track file first, ensuring we click on manual time compression and view:

We're going to have to introduce two of our protagonists right from the beginning to let folks know who's involved. The third plane is going to be a bit later on, as he didn't join the dogfight server until half way through the battle.

So once the track is loaded, we'll go to externals and make a track of both planes, the FW-190 and the Hurricane, pausing the sim to change views.

We'll do a quick zoom out, pause the sim, switch views to the FW-190, and do the same. When we zoom out from the FW, we'll quit recording the track:

We'll fast forward and move to key points of the fight, including the first strike on the Hurricane, which took a big chunk out of my tail! If we're going to do more than just show the last few seconds of the fight, we'll need this bit for "continuity" in the movie, pausing and even slowing down the speed of the sim in order to ensure we get it as pleasing to the eye as we can.

Note that whatever you do at half speed will show twice as fast, so go slow! Using a TrackIR and built in views such as padlock and F6 are better than a mouse, as it's smoother. However, I am an unrepentant "mouse panner."

Once your tracks are ready for recording, it's time to set up the sim for it.

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FRAPS and Simulation Size

We're going to set FRAPS up to record at 30 fps, in the full size of the simulation as displayed, with sound. One can reduce the frames per second and speed it up later in order to compensate for a slow running mission, but since there's little going on but the battle, we'll go full speed.

And set up the sim to run in windowed mode. I like 800x600, but 640x480 will give you good results and a smaller file size as well. The sim also runs faster as well.

Now it's just a matter of loading each edited track and recording them! Make sure you have the graphics settings you want, and for recording we're not going to change any time settings, views, or show flight information:

Raw FRAPS Footage

Because FRAPS is recording in "real time" the .avi files are uncompressed. They are also exactly what you see in the sim. This also means they are gigantic in size:

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Filtering and First Compression

Working with such large files is cumbersome and will probably cause all sorts of problems later on when we try to compile them with sound and transitions, so it's time to start up VirtualDub to filter, crop, and change the codec the files. And they're in...

First we're going to select "Video" and then "Filters" and then select "HSV adjust."

From here we can wash some of the color out (to give it a more "historic" look) by reducing saturation, increasing the "Value" to make it brighter as well. There's a preview pane so you can see what it looks like with the filter applied. Make sure you run the clip forward to ensure your sky isn't a deep purple!

There are lots of other filters available, but today we're just using the "HSV Adjust" because of a really valuable option that comes with it — cropping.

Since this was flown and recorded online, we have the connection bug in the right top corner and text lines where folks were saying hello, being accused of cheating, etc.

Highlight the "HSV Filter" and click on "Cropping."

Take 40 off of the top, which will conceal the chat lines...

...then click "OK".

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Compression and codecs

Those files are way too big to deal with, so we're going to compress them and recompile them with our filter and cropping.

There's a lot of opinion on which codecs are the best. As a lazy person, I hate having to go fetch codecs from the web. As a cheap person, I hate paying for things that are otherwise available as freeware when the quality difference is minimal to my untrained eye.

Dart says... "click on 'Compression'..."

...and select "Microsoft MPEG-4 Video Codec V2." As it's from Microsoft and has "V2" after it. The V2 rocket was pretty cool, if used in a terrible way.

Press "OK" and select "File". We're going to save these settings, in case we have to take a break to do something else. It's the devil's own to remember the exact settings we have, and we want our film to have the same look throughout.

After we save out the processing settings, we'll "Save as AVI," naming the clip either numerically (such as ZnB01, ZnB02, etc.), or by description of what the clip is (dart_intro, chief_crash_view, etc.).

Now all we have to do is open each FRAPS clip and "Save as AVI" with a new name!

Here's the clips I'll use, note the file size difference:

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Windows Movie Maker

It's free with Windows XP, and is surprisingly useful and easy to use.

Once open, click "Import Video" and bring in the first clip. Because I'm making the movie and so I get to decide who the star is. I'm the first to be shown!

Drag the clip down to the "Video" line and import the next clip...

And so on. The help files are pretty good for Windows Movie Maker, and it's fairly intuitive; let's skip ahead a bit, to adding music, making titles, credits, and saving it out.

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Music

Music can really set the tone of a film — whether it's emotionally sweeping, exciting, or silly, it will add to your films, and help cover up minor bobbles and mistakes in your editing. I prefer to use muzak and polka, as everyone loves muzak and polka, right?

Just import music and drag it down to the Audio/Music line, cropping it off as you need to.

Since I was pretty well bounced, I'm going to poke a bit of fun at that with a cockpit shot and some smooth tune. Sinatra had a 9.6 on the "smooth" scale, so let's hunt around our library. I'll also show my bias towards the Allies by giving the bad guys some light music — good thing I scrounged up all that traditional German music!

Here it is, all put together with music and ready for final compiling:

Click on "Save to My Computer" and select a size.

Note: Our just over three-minute-movie is twenty-six and half megabytes!

I really like the .wmv format, even though it's not as high fidelity as other formats simply because everyone with Windows can play it. As a stupid person I have found that I can spend many hours searching for a codec to play a must-see four-minute video.

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Publishing

Actually putting your video out on the web for enjoyment can be very costly — when it becomes popular, it will burn through many gigabytes of bandwidth in a very short time.

I rent a dedicated server for my own site because the throughput of videos can overwhelm resources. Most host providers have many sites on their servers and you can shut everyone else's site down. Your host will return the favor. Trust me.

There are a few things you can do to help conserve bandwidth, though.

Always .zip your video files to prevent streaming. Our 26MB film, if allowed to stream, will take up 26MB the first time someone watches it. If they don't save it down to their hard drive and decide to watch it again, the cache will update for another 26 MB (52 MB); if it's shown to a coworker during lunch, that's 78MB, and so on.

The other thing one can do is to get someone else to host it for you "OPB". There is no bandwidth like Other People's Bandwidth...

Resources

There are some great places to learn how to make movies properly, using advanced skills:

UbiSoft IL-2 Movie Maker's Forum

Virtual War Cinema

These are two places one simply must visit. Both are friendly and helpful to those new to filmmaking.

Closing

Hopefully this tutorial has given you a quick familiarization of how to make a movie from your favorite flight sim and demonstrated that it's not that hard or expensive.

Good luck and I look forward to seeing your films!

Our little movie is located here.

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