You can find my third, and so far best effort to create a video of an animation and post it on YouTube at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7r6BmaXUMdw
This is much better quality than the previous one, particularly with regard to the visual quality of the background scenery. For anyone who may be interested, I will document my settings.
I captured the program output into a large avi file using the free screen capture program named CamStudio. Then I trimmed the ends and converted it to a wmv file using Windows Movie Maker.
For the second step, I downloaded and attempted to use a movie editing program named VideoSpin but I couldn't get the editing portion of the program to work. The reason I tried it in place of Windows Movie Maker is because it can produce a Flash output file that is directly compatible with YouTube. This eliminates one format conversion that has the potential of degrading the visual quality of the video. I was able to use VideoSpin to produce the Flash output file, but once again, I couldn't get the editing portion to work the way I thought it should.
(Maybe the problem was simply a short between my ears but I gave up and went back to Movie Maker.)
Here are my settings for
CamStudio for those items that seem to be critical:
On the
Region menu, I selected the
Fixed Region option. This causes the program to produce a 320x240 rectangle when you click the record button. You drag the rectangle onto the screen and place it where you want the capture to occur. When you click the left mouse button, recording begins, and includes everything inside the 320x240 rectangle.
Options Menu
VideoOptions
Compressor: Microsoft Video 1
Quality: 100
(This is the maximum allowable value.)
Check the
Auto Adjust checkbox and all of the other values are set automatically.
I selected
Do not record audio for this video, because there wasn't any audio. In an earlier test of Chris101b's War Zone video with lots of audio, I found that it worked well to select
Record audio from speakers. Then under
Audio Options/Audio Options for Speakers, I set the
Recording Volume slider at about the 1/4 point from the left end. Any higher and I got garbled sound. Any lower, and the sound volume was too low.
Under
Program Options, I selected
Save Settings on Exit and
Capture Translucent/Layered Windows (I believe this is the default.) I selected
Normal for
Recording Thread Priority.
View Menu - I selected
Normal.
On the button bar, I selected
Record to AVI. I didn't record the Flash output because I needed to edit the file to clean up the ends and I don't believe that Windows Movie Maker will accept a Flash file as input for editing (although I didn't try it).
That is pretty much it for
CaMStudio. Just click the red button, place the 320x240 rectangle on the portion of the screen that you want to capture and click the left mouse button. Recording will begin. Start your Alice program running. When you have recorded enough, click the blue button to stop the recording. Enter a file name for the output file when requested. After the avi file is written, CamStudio will play it for you.
Editing the video
Start Windows Movie Maker
Start a new project on the file menu
Select Import video on the left and point to your avi file.
You should see your video being loaded. It will probably be automatically subdivided into a set of sequential
clips represented by rectangular images.
Read the help screen or search the web for instructions on how to edit your video. It is really straightforward to trim the ends and put a title at the beginning. I didn't do anything else.
When you are happy with the edited video, select
"Save to my computer" on the left.
Enter a file name and directory and click Next.
(Don't put .wmv on the file name, else it will appear on the file name twice.)
Check the radio button labeled
Other settings.
Select "
Video for braodband (512 Kbps)" in the pull-down list and click the
Next button.
Depending on the speed of your computer and the size of the video file, it may take a long time to write the output file. The computer in my office at the college required about 15 minutes to write the wmv file for Chris101b's WarZone video. My computer at home only took about one minute to do the same thing.
If you want to view the movie immediately, click the checkbox that reads
"Play movie when I click Finish" and then click
Finish. This will put you back in movie edit mode, possibly with the video running in Windows Media Player.
If you have a YouTube account, you can upload the wmv file to YouTube. Note that when it is displayed on YouTube, the wmv file will converted to a Flash file format and enlarged to 425x350. This enlargement causes some degradation in visual quality. This is where it may be advantageous to create a Flash output file instead of a wmv file. It may be possible to create the Flash output for 425x350 and avoid the enlargement of the 320x240 wmv file to a 425x350 Flash file. I haven't seen anything on the web about this one way or the other.
This is not a very organized explanation, but maybe it will help someone who would like to put their Alice videos on YouTube and don't want to spend the entire day experimenting with various program settings like I did.
Dick Baldwin
Free Alice tutorials:
http://www.dickbaldwin.com/tocalice.htm
Free programming tutorials:
http://www.dickbaldwin.com/toc.htm