See it right here, tentatively titled "Movie help". It's still got a lot of meat (or veg, if you prefer) I'm fleshing/vegging out, but one of the nice things about a wiki is I can do incremental passes on the material as I alternate between research and braindumps (not as messy as it sounds).
I just started it this morning, and it's done from my colorful perspective for a couple of reasons: (1) the general machinima page already contains a broader overview of tools and what-have-you-nots and (2) as I've learned from experience, actual examples of what's worked for me has been that much more relevant. YMMV of course.
Video tutorials are included to show tough-to-word things like camera angles in action.
This, thus, is like a spiritual sequel to my Guide to High-Quality Photography.
If you have questions and/or suggestions about making movies in Second Life and how this could be most helpful for you, post them here and I'll answer.
Happy machinimaking!
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
WOW!
Its really awsome that your making this (i never could make a sl video)
probably because my computer is just a 3GB ram core2duo.
But i will try when it will be ready
I recently did some research on screen capturing software on Macs, I can add some info.
For example, screencast-o-matic.com uses Java and a webbrowser. Thus it's cross-platform. After shooting, you get the option to upload the video directly to screencast-o-matic, where it will play in a Java player (which for me is not such a happy choice, but it works) or you can download it as .mov file. Unfortunately though, in my experience longer takes, like more than 5 minutes, somehow don't download correctly. Sometimes the resulting vid won't play at all, sometimes only half of it, crashing QuickTime. Maybe the server needs more time encoding it, I didn't test it.
Quality is very good, screen size minimum is 800×600, max is 1024×768, frame rate is variable, I've seen it change in one vid from 4 fps to 27 fps. It depends on what's happening on screen.
The cursor is not recorded, but at least on mac, it is overlayed with a standard cursor. So you won't get the alt-zoom-type cursors, always the black with white edge standard Mac cursor.
@Alvi: It's well underway now! Thanx!
@Daed: I've seen the few Second Life videos on screencast-o-matic. Thanks for the info! Generally, I find Java kind of inelegant because of slow load times on some systems, and because it's not as slickly embeddable as Flash. The framerate was disappointingly inconsistent as you pointed out.