If you’re aiming for a more professionally produced machinima piece then the following tips are for you, in no particular order…

Hardware
Use a beefy desktop if possible. You need a decent graphics card  and plenty of RAM. A fast hard disk really helps capture smooth video, slow disks and low RAM will cause you headaches as your buffers will fill up before the video can get writen to disk.

Record in as high quality as your machine can manage
If you’re filming on a decent desktop machine and it can cope then go for 1024p resolution, this will give you the best quality playback if you’re projecting onto a large cinema screen or using a High Definition plasma/LCD display. Go for 720p as the next best option (this is what i use most of the time)

Playback at an Event (trade show/conference)
Always playback from a computer hooked up to the monitor/projector. dont be tempted to put the machinima on tape or DVD the resolution is much worse than you’d think. If doing a live broadcast event using the video have a machine for backup, as last resort use a tape or DVD backup.

Hiding the UI
Unless you’re doing documentary or event capture where you need avatars chat text you’ll want to hide the UI, do this using CTRL-ALT-1

Avatar chat
If you’re filming a scripted piece then put the captions on afterwards, the standard SL chat is small and hard to read when playing back at a lower resolution save your viewers eye strain and add the captions afterwards along with any other titling. This also gives you the option to quickly do changes when your client comes back to you and requests a script change (which they will).

Things to tell your client
Make sure they know that filming machinima is a vary similar process to RL filming, you’ll need props, actors and a script. You’ll have to do  multiple takes and post editing. It all takes time. If you are able to have influence on the script etc try and keep the number of characters in each scene to a minimum.

Actors
As mentioned before, if you can keep actor numbers low do so, if you’re lucky enough to have access to multiple machines use alts and control the characters yourself when numbers permit. I use three machines on occasion which lets me use 3 avatars with one being the camera.
If you do end up using a lot of other avatars try and get them to all go on a conference call. its much easier directing by voice rather than typing when you’re trying to use you avatar as a camera.

SecondLife tools
Filming Path HUD is essential for getting smooth camera shots - panning, top shots etc. it’s the best tool around and allows you to lay out the path you want your camera to follow. You can set a focus target on another avatar to smoothly follow them while they and the camera moves. You can also set static focus points so that you your camera will stay fixed looking at a set point even when moving through complex curved paths etc.

Be creative with angles (but don’t over do it
Filming machinima allows you the freedom to use creative angles more easily than RL filming. try shots from above, below, panning, swooping and aerial. make sure  they will fit together nicely when you edit afterwards though i.e. keep continuity in mind.

Don’t forget composition
If you’re new to filming or photography then look up some of the composition rules of thumb, leading lines, rule of thirds etc.. once you know these simple guides you’ll spot them turning up again and again in hollywood films. They’re not hard fast rules but they work as a starting point and will help make your machinima a more visually pleasing experience for the viewer.

Film more than you need
play with different angles and capture scenes more than once. You can edit afterwards and pick the best pieces to use, if you have a script change then some of the excess video you’ve captured might come in useful.

Hope some of these come in handy in some way, if you have any more tips then please add them in the comments

Well I haven’t done any machinima posts of late, but I can feel a few in the offing having just completed one concept video for a client and with the promise of a few more lurking not too far in the distant future.

The machinima I’ve been doing has generally been of the type you use when you can’t do a live demonstration of SecondLife, it’s been produced to either illustrate potential scenarios/concepts or show case existing business aspects of secondlife. The venue for displaying this machinima has been at trade shows or during large presentations.

Video and particularly Machinima seems to keep cropping up in my day to day job at the moment, a client I’m currently working for has a need for a streamed video service for use at events. We want something reliable but cheap that we can use for the occasional streaming of a live event etc. into Second Life (any suggestions welcome

The one service I have been playing with at the moment is a startup called Veodia (veodia.com) which is currently in beta. It’s very similar to another beta startup
called ustream (ustream.tv) the one distinct and important difference (with my SL oriented slant) is that it makes available the video stream in quicktime format. Meaning that it can be streamed straight into Second Life with no conversion faffing or trouble finding dedicated servers to run a Darwin streaming server on.

Ian pointed me at Veodia a few weeks ago, however it took my account registration email some time to materialise (it was trapped in Hotmails spam catcher) so I was a bit slow off the mark in checking out what format the streaming was done in. Kevin Aires as ever the video streaming investigator got in there and found it was quicktime compatible and blogged within IBM about getting a Veodia stream into SL.

After finally getting into my account yesterday I started up my softcam desktop streaming app, set up a quick feed on veodia, grabbed the rtsp link from a view source and set the media url for my land parcel in Ukanipo.

Here’s the result a slightly disturbing world within world effect…

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So what you are seeing here is the result of softcam capturing my desktop video display output, streaming it up to veodia and then it being streamed into SecondLife. Infinite loop complete. (ps the quality is better when you don’t go for this wheels within wheels effect)

So whats this useful for ?

-video conferencing: pipe your webcam into SL without the need to host your own streaming server.
- live demos:   do desktop sharing to a crowd in SL so you can do demonstrations from other apps (shared browsing or 3d app tutorials anyone?), simutaneously visible on the web stream too.
- world tours: get all your guests into one place with a screen in SL and then disapear off streaming your secondlife journey back to the assembled SL crowd.
- video link parts of SL: running a live event over several islands ? then provide video linkups between each of the islands so everyone can see what’s going on.

best of all veodia which is in beta is currently free, oh and it records too

I’m running on a Windows XP machine so my choice of toolset is going to be dictated by that, I have plenty of friends who rave about the Video editing capabilities of Macs and Quick edit pro but i’m not to splash out without good reason besides I recently aquired a rather well endowed dual core intel machine with a kick ass graphics card, for err… no other reason than i managed to melt my laptop through excessive SecondLife usage… ahem

Soo, after extensive research… i.e. quick google search followed by search of SecondLife forums and a quick jaunt on the awesome Machinima.com I chose to use Fraps for video capture and Adobe Premiere Elements for editing. After being a bit suspicious to start with of Elements; fearing It was vastly cut down, I discovered to my pleasant surprise that for such a cheap product it is amazingly full featured and allows editing of video in real time plus layering of multiple video tracks on top of each other, I got to grips with it within an hour or so and was very pleased with the results.

Recently my evenings have been taken up exploring the medium of Machinima, in particular machinima made using SecondLife. It’s been a fun experience trying to transfer any skill I’ve picked up from photography into composing interesting moving images.

Using a virtual world like SecondLife to experiment in opens up a whole world of possibilities that just aren’t feasible in real life, for one i’m strongly influenced by anything i see in the professional domain of any medium; so my immediate urge is to go out and take dramatic sweeping camera shots that would require some serious equipment to pull off, with Machinima I can do this at virtually zero cost. In the real world I’d also need actors, cameras and props. In SL I can build all the props myself and I can control the actors to a certain extent.

Of course the end result probably won’t have the same impact without proper actors and recorded dialogue, but that’s not the point. Machinima is all about freedom of expression and having the simulated environment to allow the mind to wander free and be creative.