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[nubee2010]

Has anyone "played" The Movies? How versatile is it at making Machinima? I've got a little project brewing on paper right now and am looking for flexible tools without a steep learning curve.

[Incitatus]

Well, a Dazzel DVC is the cheapest way to go for quality. as an analogue-digital Converter, it can process almost anything you throw at it. It also comes with Pinnacle Studios Plus, which is a great and highly versatile program with a very small learning curve in comparison to other enviroments like Sony Vegas or Adobe Premiere.
All of the beekeeper productions videos have been done on one flavor of Pinnacle or another, and they show my progressive learning of the enviroment.

Though if you have the money and the will, Sony Vegas and a heavier integrated Digital Video Converter may be more suitable. It all depends on what the project calls for and what camera equipment/TV output you are using.
HD or a full sized DV Camera for instance would require an integrated converter, whereas component, SD or standard retail Digital/anolog camcorders can be easily used with an external DVC like the DVC150 or even the base ports on most media center PCs.

Higher end footage demands higher end editing enviroments. Pinnacle Liquid can be most usefull for the higher ends, however be warned, that Liquid is designed to be the ONLY application running and will assume itself as a priority boot with the operatiing System. It also costs over $1,000. So use this only if your ready to dedicate a machine to editing.
Otherwise smaller stuff, like the machinimas that Rooster teeth and Beekeeper productions do, you can simply backwards force an anologe splitter to feed a TV and a DVC at the same time, capture the footage via a common program like Pinnacle studios Plus, and then use that same instance to edit and render the final video.
Using it with the multitude of effects that pinnacle can offer, and your own experteese, you should be able to manufacture a video of quality in no time.

[twiztedmatt1007]

Another program that I'd suggest you look into is TMPGEnc it's free and is a nice little piece of software, the free version is 2.524. The thing that I like most about it is that you can output the entire video frame for frame as picture files and then recompile them as a video. The reason I like that is if you have a photo editor you can edit each individual frame to whatever your heart desires and it gives you options for the format of the photos as well. It also will allow you to output the video file as an mpeg1, mpeg 2 (for a limited time), or an avi. You can use many different codec's if you wish to encode in avi format, including uncompressed format so you lose less quality between edits, but you have to use their mpeg encoder which actually isn't all that bad. Also you can separate the video and audio and output them at the same time if you wish. Audio is output in wav format and video can be output as stated above.

To use the software just unzip it into a folder and double click on TMPGEnc.exe.


For an audio editor I suggest Audacity which is also free and can encode in many different formats.

As for a photo editor I use what came with my printer, which actually works very well. It's called Adobe Photo Deluxe but since you can't download it, from my knowledge at least legally, a program that I haven't personally used much is but have heard many good things about is GIMP.

I hope this all helps you out in some way, shape, or form.

[Incitatus]

We are looking for Voice voulenteers right now.
I have all the footage I think I'm going to need for a long while, (Plenty of death singing and purly hysterical glitches/scenes)
But still need that audio
Jump on skype and hit up incitatus4 any time or PM me here, we can work out a time and make it quick and clean.

[Nola]

Hey you guys could do:

SNAKES ON A PELICAN

...we got motha##ing snakes on da motha##ing pelican

[Incitatus]

I almost laughed into peeing myself envisioning that.

[Nola]