Play - Record - Edit - Upload -- How to make gameplay videos

[sardine]

Hi there,
Once again I at least try to help you guys to increase your skills and know-how concerning Nexuiz/Xonotic.
You can find my other guide here.

The topic here is to help you spread the word of Nexuiz/Xonotic.

• ? How do we do this?
  ! Youtube-videos
  ! Forum posts
  ! Telling friends
  ! Advertising

The focus is on videos. Since I mainly use Linux as an OS, I had to find a nice video editing tool. I have found a nice one, you can look it up here.
There are a few simple steps to create your own ingame gameplay video.

Step 1: The game
Of course, you need a demo of your gameplay. A demo is like a recording of what you were doing and everybody else too.
To start recording demos, you have to check a checkbox ingame.
Press ESC -> Multiplayer -> Demos -> Checkbox: Record demos while playing
This will from now on record everything you do and type.
Caution If you leave this checkbox checked, the demos might start spamming your harddrive. They are not that big, but after some time it's a massive amount of data -> clean it some times!

Step 2 (optional): Find the demos
Sometimes other people do not want videos but the demos. This is how you get them:
There is a slight difference between folder where you can find these files, depending on your operating system.
They are all named like 2010-05-09_16-33_lostspace2.dem. It is YEAR-MONTH-DAY_HRS-MIN_MAPNAME.dem.
Where you can find them [Linux]

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/home/<username>/.nexuiz/data/demos

Because all .foldername folders are hidden, you might press CTRL + H in your home directory to show all hidden folders.

Where you can find them [Windows]

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Nexuiz/data/demos/

Step 3: From demo to video
There are quite a few commands to make sure the video is exactly how you want it.
First of all, how to make Nexuiz convert the demo into a video:
Go to Settings -> Input -> User defined -> toggle recording .avi (there should be something already called like this) and bind it to any button you like.
I used the button Page-Up located near to the arrowkeys.
If there is no predefined button named like this, define a new binding:

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Name:                  recordvideo
Command when pressed:  toggle cl_capturevideo
Command when released: 

A lot of cvars help you to define the video.
To run or change them, you need to open the console and type them in.
The most important ones here:

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cl_capturevideo_ogg 1 / 0 // (Set to 1) -> Records all videos as *.ogv (Set to 0) -> Records all videos as *.avi

Caution! The video editing software I mentioned above does not fully support *.ogv videos. So please work with the (larger) *.avi's.

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cl_capturevideo_fps 30 // This cvar defines the frames per second of the video, I recommend 30 fps

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cl_capturevideo_height 900
cl_capturevideo_width 1440
// If you do not want to record in your full screenresolution or above, you can change it with these cvars

Now that you set up how you want Nexuiz to record your videos, you need to actually record them.
Go to ESC -> Multiplayer -> Demos -> double click a demo to watch it and press the button you defined before to record videos.

Warning! Do NEVER start recording while playing online, only record when watching a demo!

While capturing the video, your computer may slow down to 1-5 frames per second. No worries, the video will have the fps you typed in into the cvar above.
This might take a long time, depending on your system and on how long your video will take to be done.

Step 4: Finding the *.avi / *.ogv and editing
Again depending on your operating system, the videos will be in a specific folder.
If you browse your Nexuiz folder, you will find them soon.
Cut/paste them to your desktop to have quick access.
Now that you have your video, you probably want a backgrounds music for your video.
You can choose as you like, I prefer electronic sounds.
Also a splashscreen is nice to have a few seconds before the video starts to show up your name.

So, open the editing software:


Next: load your video, the music and the splashscreen and arrange them something like this:


And the very last step: Create the video with these settings:


So this was a export for Youtube-HD 720 300p
Export it as MP4!
You can reduce the soundquality to 128kb/s it's fine like this.
Video should have at least 5mb/s.

Youtube-HD videos should have this format:

• Resolution: 1280x720
  Scale: 16:9
  Format: mp4
  Videoquality: 8mb/s
  Soundquality: 128kb/s
  Frames per second: 30

There is also a very nice tutorial how to upload videos onto Yotube. You can find it here.

And you are done!
You can upload it onto Youtube or any other video platform.

Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNyj5as3h44

I hope this howto helped you,
greetings,

sardine