Bit of fun with fraps and Trainz

[AlanBradbury]

I was messing about with FRAPS and decided to string a video together with some music. Not the best video ever made, but still not bad:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=249DQIP7khY&list=UUHrETrGXqHI2AnowkWcsNZA&index=1&feature=plcp

Al

 

[jrfolco]

Nice video. Well done.

Joe

 

[Jaymom]

Love the video Al, very well done. I've used Fraps for the same thing quite a few times and its fun to watch as time goes by.
Keep making those video's !

Harold

 

[cascaderailroad]

I like the slow speeds, and short video segments that are best kept to less than 5 seconds (keeps the viewers attention span).

 

[AlanBradbury]

Yup, that's the MTV generation for you. Shots which are held for longer than four seconds are very frowned upon by many, especially in Hollywood these days, although ironically it isn't always the case; The 2007 movie, I am Legend, which was a remake of the 1971 movie The Omega Man and is notable for very many long, lingering shots more in the vein of 1970s-style movie direction which the original uses, is in spite of that older movie making style, among the top-grossing 100 films of all time, having pulled in nearly 600 million in profits for its total budget of about 150 million.

That said, when I have to teach people video editing, since they will end up seeking and doing editing in today's industry, I always point out that what most directors want these days is lots of jump-cuts. Tony Scott's style which you see in the 2010 runaway train movie, Unstoppable, is an extreme example of that style, and whilst personally I think he overdoes that signature treatment to the detriment of what is on screen in terms of sympathetic pacing on occasion, clearly many disagree, so there you go. Of course when you don't have to make something commercial, you can go with what you want, and when people pay Tony Scott the 9 million bucks he gets as a typical fee for directing, they want him to end up with something commercial in the can, so you can't blame him for wanting to put his stamp on things with post-processing when that movie will invariably end up in profit. Ironically enough though, Unstoppable made about 168 million for a total budget of about just shy of 100 million, so although that's no small sum, it doesn't even come close to what the aforementioned I am Legend pulled in with its much more liesurely editorial style, so maybe there is hope after all.

Al

 

[Euphod]

Pretty impressive video, you guys are getting closer to my vision of a dramatic Trainz video. I liked the beginning especially.

 

[JCitron]

Al,

Very enjoyable video.

Thank you for posting.

John

 

[AlanBradbury]

Glad you liked it.

Al

 

[ivantr]

Wow. Im impressed a lot. Very good work. And two questions
Where is avaliable the 3rd NS engine?
And the zoom movement comes from trainz or video editing?

Greetings

 

[AlanBradbury]

Kind of hard to remember where all the bits and pieces are from, although wracking my brains I am pretty sure that the third locomotive is 7008, which is a GP50, and if that's the one you mean, then it is a payware RRMods one: http://rrmods.com/pgp50.shtml

On the offchance that isn't the loco you meant, the lead engine (59) is a payware Virtual Motive Division SD9 http://www.virtual-motive-division.com/?page_id=340

1593- the middle engine - is a payware SD40, again from RRMods: http://rrmods.com/pimages/nssd4001.jpg

The zooming is a combination of zooming in on the footage in Adobe After Effects and tracking the zoom levels with keyframes, or using the 4 key in Trainz (free camera view) and then moving the view with the mouse whilst recording that with FRAPS, although because doing that puts a compass icon on the shot you get in FRAPS, I had to then zoom and pan the view then crop it in Adobe After Effects to lose the compass icon, which ends up with the shot being about 200 percent zoom. Which means the quality starts to get a bit ropey, and that means using FRAPS on fairly high settings, which accounts for some of the jittering on some sections, as FRAPS uses a lot of RAM.

One or two shots zoom in a bit more than 200 percent, and you can see the quality really noticably dropping because of that. I did consider shaking the viewpoint a bit on the zoomed shots in order to make it look like footage from a chase helicopter and also to mask the drop in quality, but decided against that, although it might have made things a bit more dynamic. I've got an idea for another video in the works which might use that technique.

Anyway, glad you liked it. Thanks for the nice comments, although to be honest I think the audio track great as it is and which is nothing to do with me, adds a lot to the feel of the thing with its mood and subject material about mining. Without that music track, it wouldn't be anywhere near as interesting.

Al