Exporting workflow

After the two hour shoot I had a brief look over the material I had shot, I started keeping a tally in excel of the takes, noting the scene the take was for, the filename, size/length, quality and whether it had been exported. I’ve decided to expand this to keep while recording (not neccessarily in full detail, but just to keep track), I see this addition to the workflow will be beneficial further down the production line.

Demo naming conventions, as I had figured, are important. My first method was simply naming the demos take001 and incrementally up the number with each consecutive take. Im now moving to sc001take001 (using my scene breakdown to denote which scene is which) which makes reviewing and exporting your demos much easier. Im also looking into binds to automatically activate and increment the demo recording at the hit of a single key to start and stop.

For the tech details on exporting demos, the following wiki covers enough of the bases:

http://tf2wiki.net/wiki/Help:Recording_demos

When exporting, trimming your demos down as tight as possible is a wise decision as the .tga files that are exported take up a lot of space very quickly (about a gig per minute at highest quality). I found VirtualDub (suggested and detailed in the above wiki) to be fine for the task of converting the .tga images to .avi video, and making use of queuing up jobs is great to process later when you have grabbed all of the source images.

After throwing some of the .avi’s into Final Cut Pro I played around and things are looking great, the frames are smooth enough that it still looks good when slowed way way down (I think I went as low as 30%), im now delving into demo smoothing, just to get an idea if there is anything I can change in shooting the footage that might aid in later processing, but so far all it seems that is important is to be close enough to see the action (dont be so close that you interrupt the actors) and you can create entirely new camera paths before exporting. Demo Smoothing will be essential to this production, I can just tell.

Bye for now T.