Introduction | Record a demo | Demo to TGA | Demo to WAV | TGA to AVI | Compression with Gordian Knot
| Demo till *.tga |
| The next step on the road to a movie is to convert the demo to a
sequence of screenshots. There are frame grabbing applications capable
of capturing on-screen events and outputting them to an AVI directly,
without having to go through the step of outputting alot of screenshots
first. One such application is Fraps, and a trial version can be
downloaded from www.fraps.com. I will
not be using that application in this guide, since I have found that the
image quality tend to be lower when using Fraps. An AVI file basically consists of a number of images sequentially stitched together so as to produce a moving picture. What we will attempt here is to convert our demo to a number of screenshots and then putting all those screenshots together into one AVI file. Luckily for us the Q3A-engine comes with a handy command to do exactly what we want, namely produce screenshots while playing back a demo. The command we are going to use looks like this: /cl_avidemo and is entered into the console once the demo is running. We should also add a number to the command which tells the engine how many frames per each second of the demo it should output. So for example /cl_avidemo 25 will save 25 screenshots for each second of the demo. A word of caution might be in place here. At a resolution of 1024*768 each saved screenshot will have a size of 2305 KB. At a rate of 25 screenshots per second this means that the amount of screenshots equalling one minute will take up 2305*25*60 KB which roughly equals 3.4 GB! In other words, unless you have alot of space available you should lower the resolution. A lower resolution will also mean that the screenshots are saved in less time. As with the option of binding keys which starts and stops the recording of a demo, we can do the same for the output of screenshots. If you add the below to your config, you can start and stop the output with the press of a button.
When you start saving the screenshots you will probably notice a significant drop in frames per second rendered and, depending on the resolution, a decrease or increase in playback speed. This is normal. The screenshots that are saved during the playback of the demo is found in the folder \screenshots located in the main-folder. |