By Pia Klaar

It’s a Piece of Cake!

I have spent a large part of my life as an artist, photographer and educator. When I entered the world of Second Life, I was delighted to find the countless ways that a person could create. Building, scripting, photography, art, and machinima are only a few of the many possibilities that Second Life can offer for those who create. Yet machinima became the area that fasinated me the most for it seemed to be one where the opportunity to create became the most varied. Many Second Life residents have also taken an interest in creating machinima. The reasons are as varied as the types and genres.

For although it is something that many people are doing or want to do, it is not as easy to do as it might appear. Second Life is am amazing platform for creating machinima. It allows you to create avatars, animations, sets, lighting, as well as tools for capturing video on your computer. It also requires an amazing amount of skills and a high learning curve. For actually getting everything to work takes a fair amount of research. This is what I want to explore and pass on here in the article.

One of the main reasons is that there is no one tool for which to capture the online media, nor is there one type of editing software, nor ways to upload or render etc. They all depend of the type of computer you have, the operating system that is being used, as well as a variety of other factors that play into this menage of confusion.

So when I was asked to write a How-to article on machinima, my first thought was “Where do I begin?”.

When I first began to have an interest in machinima, I realized that there was no place inworld that would give me all of the skills and knowledge needed. Wanting to create machinima and knowing how to do it were two very different worlds. What did I need to know in order to create machinima and how was I going to get that knowledge? These became questions that I quickly learned had no simple answers.

One of the first places I went to when I became interested in creating machinima was a Second Life workshop that were being offered by HVX Silverstar. I remember the class focused mainly on camera controls which I realized that I needed in order to be able to control the camera. But then...what do I do now ? .. ...became the next question.

The only thing that I can say is thank goodness for the search option on the Internet. I spent countless hours researching in order to understand the next step.

I downloaded Fraps and basically taught myself how to use it. I knew how to edit movies using Moviemaker, but wanted to use a more robust editing software so bought Adobe Premiere.

So, I filmed some video, edited it using Premiere, and then had to stop. I didn’t know how to convert the movie file so that I could post it onto the web. The file that I was given was an .avi file and I could not use that to post onto the Internet. Nor did I know how to compress or render the file so that it was not so large in size.

Again I researched. I bought the Quicktime Pro which allowed me to export the .avi file to a .mov file which Youtube and other web hosts sites could use.

But that was then, and this is now.......

1) Turn off the User Interface.
You need to turn off the UI so that you do not have everything showing on your screen. If you record the standard view then your recorded images would show whatever you see on the screen – your avatar, the menu bars of SL, chat and IM boxes, etc.

To hide the UI just hit Ctrl-Alt-F1 to toggles it on and off.

2) Recording

Right, so you have the UI hidden, and the scene is set – you are all ready to go. But how do you record what is on the screen? You have to use a third-party external program. Here are some:

FRAPS – Only for PCs. This is probably the best known of these programs. Very simple to use and the basic, limited version is free The full version costs around $40 US.