From Tactical Wiki

Demo Playback Commands and Tips explains the motivations for watching Natural Selection games you're not playing. This article provides some helpful information for sharing what you see with others by recording a video "movie" that you can share with anyone, even if they don't even have Natural Selection.

[edit] Capturing the Action

To capture the video, use software specifically designed for that. There are several options. We'll focus on Fraps for this article, but other titles will offer similar features. Using video capture software is the easy part. You're just capturing the raw experience to a movie file on your hard drive.

Fraps allows you to specify a hotkey to toggle whether or not you're recording while you're in the game. You can also specify the size of the capture, the framerate of the capture, and whether or not to include sound in the recorded movie. Recording in-game will tax your machine and decrease overall performance. How much? Try and find out. It really all depends on the performance of the components of your computer.

Once you've opened Fraps, you're in the game, and you're ready to record what's on your screen, press the Fraps hotkey (while you're in the game) to enable recording. When you're finished, hit the same hotkey again to disable recording. That's it. You've captured the video.

You'll find a very large, uncompressed, and unedited video in the directory where you installed Fraps. The next step is to refine that file into something you can share.

[edit] Creating the Movie

To create the movie, use software specifically designed for that. There are several options. We'll focus on Windows Movie Maker (WMM) for this article, but other titles will offer similar features. Using video editing software can be as complex as you want it to be, but Windows Movie Maker keeps things simple with a limited offering of features that allow for several creative possibilities.

The following text comes from the WMM help documentation, and it really helps a new user understand how resources are managed in the software:

Collection
A collection contains audio clips, video clips, or pictures that you have imported or captured in Windows Movie Maker. A collection acts as a container for your clips, which are smaller segments of audio and video, and helps you organize the imported or captured content. Collections appear in the Collections pane of Windows Movie Maker.

Project
A project contains the arrangement and timing information of audio and video clips, video transitions, video effects, and titles you have added to the storyboard/timeline. A saved project file in Windows Movie Maker has an .mswmm file name extension. By saving your projects, you can open the project file later and begin editing it in Windows Movie Maker from where you last saved.

Movie
A movie is the final project you save by using the Save Movie Wizard. You can save a movie to your computer or to a recordable CD, send it as an attachment in an e-mail message, or save and send it to the Web. The saved movie can be watched in a media player, such as Microsoft Windows Media® Player, or in a Web browser. If you have a DV camera connected to your computer, you can also record your movie to a tape. You and others can then watch the movie on the DV camera or on a TV.

Basically, you create a project in WMM, adding your raw video capture file to it, as well as any music, other sounds, other images, and whatever text (it can create some for you) that you plan to use in the finished product. WMM will display a timeline of your final movie, on which you can place each resource. It has basic features like fading video and sound in and out, and it will animate text for you in certain pre-arranged ways.

When you're finished creating the movie, it will save the sharable movie, greatly compressing the filesize in the process.

More information will be added here.

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