New editing suite and Astralis

My editing suite (small spare room with desk, darkness and - when God is smiling benevolently upon me - tea and biscuits) has been permanently repurposed and is no longer available for my editing needs.

In order to continue my work, I bought a cheap desk on gumtree and carried it home with Dee from an apartment about fifteen minutes walk away (fun fact - it becomes 25 minutes when carrying a desk while walking the dog) and I have relocated the computer to the bedroom, in what can only be designated as a nook between a monster wardrobe and the patio door to the garden (maybe this bedroom is supposed to be a dining room? Fuck it).

It is at this rickety desk I now sit, on a folding wooden garden chair that I had to de-muck and de-spider  thoroughly. On the plus side I can keep the back-breaking discomfort down as long as I constantly monitor my posture and I do have a hot cup of tea and a bacon bagel.

Right now I'm working through a backlog of Astralis footage trying to get the video ready for completion. New sample footage is coming in all the time and I've hit a bit of a wall with the editing because the codec of the video files means that the footage edits very slowly in Final Cut. Rendering 30 seconds of footage can take 30 minutes so I'm trying to seek a way around it. I'm running some exports of various footage to see if it works better. It's all putting quite a strain on the computer so there is not much I can do in the meantime except write this blog post. Or idly browse the net, but that's a death sentence to productivity.

I've only got the one day to get as much done as I can as I am at work for 8 hours on Sunday and filming a gig on Monday night. The good news is that the file conversion seems to be working. When it comes to codecs, file types and compression, it's all a strange voodoo as far as I can tell. I just cross my fingers and pray to the Lords of Kobol. I know that's not exactly a professional thing to say but I'll be the first to admit I have a lot to learn about that kinda thing. If all goes well you should be able to see Astralis in action very soon.

EAT LEAD YOU ALIEN BASTARDS

Well, this batch of files is going to need some time to export before I can continue. I wonder if Dee is up for another game of Carcassonne?

*blog update - she was up for a game and the video exports worked!

Filming with Houdini

On Monday 18th March I will be filming Houdini playing live. I really enjoy getting stuck in with live performance, moving around the throng of the crowd with the main camera to get nice close angles on the performers, with a camcorder set up on a tripod getting a good angle of the band and crowd to use as cover shots.

Sometimes I manage to convince someone to lend me a second camcorder so I can get two angles as cover which gives me a few more options when putting the final cut together. It's good to have more than you need when filming something live and unrepeatable.

Until the 18th I will continue to plug away at a new Astralis video. It was only yesterday that I finally got all the footage labelled, catalogued and inserted. So now I have my ball of clay, but I definitely don't have a sculpture just yet.

I'm still working with Final Cut Express as I haven't quite saved up enough for Final Cut Pro X yet. The difficult part will be the changeover, for simplicities sake I want to completely finalise all my projects with my current editing software before moving over. This means finishing Where's My Milk You Bastard and the Three Sided Football footage as well. The former is being polished up and added to on a weekly basis, the latter has been sadly sidelined while I wrestle other projects but should be receiving some attention soon.

Projects... so easy to start so hard to finish. Must be more disciplined.

NEW ASTRALIS VIDEO UNDERWAY

Last night Dan Dobson and I spent a few hours capturing gameplay footage from the latest build of Astralis.  The game is looking better than ever and we managed to pull about an hour of footage into 55 files, more than enough to get me started. Dan will be on hand to do any extra videos I need and send them to me using Dropbox.

The files themselves are huge so I'm going to use a trick that Alec (Astralis art director) taught me, which is to have a highly compressed version of the video loaded into Final Cut for when I am editing and building the video. The compressed version will be much smaller and easier to manage, reducing CPU strain and render times. Once the video is finished I find the source file for the videos on the hard drive and overwrite the compressed videos with the uncompressed videos (importantly, using the same final name). Final Cut then assembles the video using the full quality files.

The final render will be the only one that takes a little time. The hundreds of renders I will be doing before that will all be many magnitudes quicker. A simple trick, but one I never learned until now.

But first I need to compress all the full-quality videos. Once this is done I'll be ready to go!

Let's squish those files!

Astralis trailer

It's finally here!



Last night I finished putting together the trailer for Astralis, an upcoming Xbox game I've been helping to develop. Here is the trailer, showing the world the first glimpse of our game!

Astralis is still in development but we recently had a push to get the game to a playable state so that we can enter it into the Dream Build Play competition this year. I'm happy to say we made it!

Changes and improvements were happening constantly over the past few weeks, so we waited until the latest possible moment to capture the footage so that the video would contain the most representative imagery possible.

The game is now entered into the competition and we are really hoping to make an impression upon the judges.

Making the video was a fun process, the first step was getting round to one of my fellow programmer's place to see the newest build in action and to play through the level. Then we worked together to capture the footage and loaded it on to various CDs and memory sticks. Over the course of the weekend extra files, improvements and audio were sent over the internet (slowly, as they were quite large!) to bolster the range of footage I already had. In this video we are showing gameplay, letting people see the game in motion and understand how it works. What we couldn't show any of at this stage is the narrative of the game, but this won't be last trailer we make, so watch this space!

It was a very different style of working to what I am used to but I had a blast with it. I'm pleased with the results but ultimately I am delighted with the game itself and how far it has come. The progress has been amazing, and the talent of the team members has been hugely humbling.

There is more info about the game on facebook, where we have an Astralis group page. Join us!

I'll probably write a follow up about the making of the video in a later post, if you're interested keep an eye open. As always I'll be using page tags, so you can click the ASTRALIS tag to bring up all related posts!

Astralis - an Xbox Indie Games project.

Now that I've finished the Soup Studio footage I can take a breather from video work briefly. I can free up some evenings to spend time with Dee and the dog - beautiful carefree summer nights with dog walks, movies and good dinners! The "New Project" is waiting for me, but it deserves absolute devotion and I want a clean slate first. I have just one more job to clear, but I can't start on that for a few more days yet. That video project is for Astralis.

Astralis

As you might know, when I'm not working on video footage, I'm busy geeking out on video games. I'm realising a childhood dream by helping develop an Xbox Indie Game with a small team of very talented programmers. The game is looking great and we are going to enter it into the Dream Build Play competition this year. The final submission date is next week and my job is to assemble a video with the best quality footage we can muster to help showcase the game. Next week I will be dropping by one of the programmer's homes to pick up the raw footage and to see the current incarnation of the game in action on his computer. It is still a work in progress, but we are getting it into a playable condition in time for Dream Build Play. The prizes are huge, but so is the competition. This game has been a labour of love for all involved for quite some time now and we're ready to put it forward.

Astralis is a single-player third-person squad-based sci-fi shooter (I could have probably but it more succinctly). The game has grown into something quite beautiful and I'm really proud to be involved with getting it made. You play a Commissar of Earth's intergalactic army, you have been sent with three specialist soldiers to an impoverished industrial planet to quell a revolution, but instead you find yourself drawn into a conspiracy.

Here are some current screenshots (click for larger images)

If you want more information you can join our facebook group or follow our programmer Vince on Twitter.