Friday, June 15, 2012

GW2 Video Reception!

As you may have read earlier, I put together a time lapse video during the last Beta Weekend. (If you don't know, well then you should go check it out because apparently the whole internet is talking about it!)

Wow! First off I couldn't be more happy with some of the comments I'm getting. You people are amazing! And secondly, 16,200 views in 4 days is no laughing matter! I had an idea that people would like what I was putting together, but this goes way beyond what I could have imagined. So thank you to everyone who's watched, reposted, shared, talked about, or in any other way contributed to spreading my video around the internet. You are all gentlemen (or women) and scholars. I salute you.

Also, I figured I'd take this opportunity to answer a few questions that keep popping up.

How do you hide your character in a screenshot?
Hopefully ArenaNet will change this and allow for a first person view mode, but if they don't it's actually quite simple. 1) Type /sleep. 2) Zoom in the camera a little. 3) Your character should now be hidden. If your character is still in the screenshot you may have to play with the viewing angle a little so they are hidden, but it shouldn't take much. I've found that using a Human works best since out of all the races right now they're the smallest and the Charr's horns have a nasty habit of getting into your screenshots regardless what you do to hide them.

How did you take that many screenshots!?
I used a handy program called chronolapse. It's super easy to setup and you can set it to take a screenshot at whatever time interval you want. Then you set a folder you want it to save the screenshots to and voila! There you have it! 10,000 screenshots, every 3 seconds, all saved in one place!

On the usability side I did find out that in order for chronolapse to actually work right you have to set Guild Wars 2 to "Fullscreen Windowed" mode, under screen resolution, otherwise for whatever reason chronolapse will just take screenshots of your desktop, which is very much not what I want everyone looking at. Also, once I had taken all the screenshots I did reorganize them so that each location was separated into it's own folder, this made for putting the final video together a lot easier since I could edit each segment individually instead of having to cut up one clip a bunch (23 to be exact) times.

Why did you take screenshots instead of video?
The short answer is: I wanted to save disc space. 10,000 screenshots comes out to about 2GB, whereas 8hours of uncompressed 1080p video is on the upwards of 1.4 TERABYTES!

The long answer is: If I'm taking 1080p video at 30fps and then speeding it up to the rate at which I made the time lapse I would effectively be cutting 89 of every 90 frames out of the videos. That's a lot of wasted footage. If you do the math, 8 hours of video is 864,000 frames and I would only be actually using 10,000 of those. So instead of wasting all those (854,000) frames, I chose to cut out the middle man and just go straight for the screenshots. This speeds up the editing process, since I'm using smaller file sizes (2GB of screenshots instead of 1.4TB of videos), and I don't have all this extra footage wasting my disc space that will eventually just end up on the cutting room floor.

Where is this Sylvari area?
It's in the southwest corner of Kessex Hills. Lychcroft Mere.




In the end all I have to say to everyone is:

Thank you for your support and yes I will definitely be making more videos down the road.



16 comments:

  1. Hi! Love the video.
    I have a different question: Do you know how many real hours, GW2 have in a ingame day?
    Thanks :)

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    Replies
    1. The day night cycle is 2hrs. 80mins of daytime and 40mins of night.

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    2. Nice. :)
      Thanks ^^

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  2. absolutely beautiful..it brought tears to my eyes

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  3. Could you make a list of all the areas you took screenshots in? The area with the bridge is a spot I don't recognize.

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    Replies
    1. Of course! I'll do as best as I can. I don't remember the names of all the points of interest but to my knowledge here's a list of all the scenes as they appear in the video:

      Queensdale
      --Godslost Swamp (Shadow Behemoth spawn area)
      Kessex Hills
      --Viathan Lake (from Manefire Hills)
      --Waterfall south of Greyhoof Meadows
      --Dominion Killing Zone (destroyers in Kessex Hills)
      --Lychcroft Mere
      --Swamp west of Lychcroft Mere
      Black Citadel
      --Mustering Ground Entrance
      --Great Imperial Smelter
      --Memorial Quadrant
      --Ruins of Rin
      Queensdale (again)
      --Top of the Abbey near Krytan Freeholds (just south of the waypoint)
      --Windmill in Shaemoor Fields
      Divinity's Reach
      --Upper City
      --Plaza of Balthazar
      --The Great Collapse (from plaza of Melandru steps)
      --Western Commons (from plaza of Melandru steps)
      --Plaza of Lyssa
      Lion's Arch
      --Mystic Forge
      --Grand Plaza
      Hoelbrak
      --Wolf Lodge
      --The Great Lodge
      --Might and Main (from trade commons ramp)
      Lion's Arch (again)
      --Tenanera's Pit "ArenaNet Logo"

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  4. Well done. I really enjoyed that. Nice song choice too.

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  5. Great job and effort on the video! A guildmate had posted your work at our guild site and we all love it. We just set up a youtube channel of our own to have our archived livestream footage of GW2. It is quite new so there isn't much there yet. Can we put your video on the front side of our channel (with credits to you of course) since we all think it does such a great job of showcasing Tyria? (search youtube for: heetvids channel)

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    Replies
    1. Yes! Feel free to post the video on your channel. I'm glad you guys enjoy it so much!

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    2. Thank you: http://www.youtube.com/user/heetvids/featured

      Please favorite our channel too! We are in Ft. Aspenwood BTW. Drop by our guild site as well. And see you in-game :)

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  6. Awesome video !!
    I'll be having tears in my eyes when i take my 1st step into Tyria :P

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  7. One more thing. We would be happy to also showcase any of your upcoming videos at our channel. Just drop me a note any time and it would be our pleasure to promote your work. Congrats again :)

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  8. How many song choices did you have to go through, because music is a big part of the over all feeling.

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  9. How many song choices did you have to go through, because music is a big part of the over all feel? :D

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