Neverending Nights

I am currently working on rendering the footage for Neverending Nights, episode 2 (which takes 6 hours on my machine, and pretty much hogs up every bit of resource, or makes everything so painfully slow that it’s not even worth touching the PC while its rendering)… but if the indication on the RvB forum about Neverending Nights is any indication, looks like we might have something good on our hands, which would indeed rock. I even posted it over on the NWN Bioware forum, and got a developer and someone from their QA team to check it out! Both of which had only positive things to say!

So anyway, Episode 2 should be done sometime this week. I typically render and edit the video, run it by Adam, we discuss what we might change/refilm and then finally upload it.

Thanks to everyone who has checked it out, and thank ye more if ye have checked it out and offered feedback!

Well, Adam and I had done the line readings (probably my favorite part of the process) a few weeks ago… and have a number of out takes from that which we saved… but we finally re-filmed the footage for episode one of our NWN Machinima project… and I got home at 6pm to begin messing with it. Well it’s now 12:04am, and I think I have the rough draft for it completely done. Talk about my poor PC. It only took like 6 minutes to render the effects in Adobe Premiere 6.0 … but then to export the movie took 3 hours. And seriously, it was almost 3 hours on the dot.

Then I imported it into Windows Movie Maker, because it saves it in a much (MUCH!) smaller size than Adobe does. (We’re talking 84 megs vs 14 megs…!)

So then, once in there, I had to splice all the scenes apart again. Then drop the full audio track. Then splice the scenes AGAIN to try to make it match.

The filming after process, I realize, is murder. It makes me appreciate what the folks at Rooster Teeth go through!

And although this is our first swing at this, and I hope to get better, and get to know Adobe Premiere more (cuz I am sure it can do so much more than what I am using it for!)… hopefully future episodes will go more smoothly.

Gonna pass the rough draft to Adam, to have him check it out. Future episodes, I’d like to record in a higher quality, cuz this one looks kinda grainy. But hey, it’s a learning step! Hopefully each episode after the next will always be better than the last!

The episodes will be hosted on their own site (once we get a few episodes under our belt, and make sure this is something we wanna stick with, before purchasing a domain, which is cheap these days – but when yer broke, ye count the pennies!) Reason being, we want to advertise this stuff, once we get it on the web, to a BUNCH of forums – so I would rather have its own website, than possibly attract users who are gonna disrupt these forums here and such. So a new site and new forum will be awaiting this thing once we’re done. So keep an eye here on it. And if Adam okays it, maybe even preview the first episode on here, so we can get feedback from folks here (not like many of ye download stuff from here when I did offer it, but still!)

Already showed it to my wife, she said she did like it (for being our first time) but found it weird that the character’s mouths don’t move when the speech is going on. So helmets may be in the future of our would be heroes eventually, to cover that up, and make it easier.