|
|
 |
 |
 | | | | |
 |
|||
 |
||||||
          |
 |
 |
||||
|
Ten Digital Video Game Disasters 1. Bad bluescreen. Do things look funny around the edges of your actress’s long hair? Is the background either too visible or not visible enough? That’s the product of bad bluescreen. These sorts of effects can be expensively fixed in post with frame-by-frame tweaking, but it’s much better to get right in the first place. See The 7th Guest. 2. Interlaced video. In analog video, the even lines are captured 1/60th of a second apart from the odd lines. So, when objects are moving rapidly, you see a stair-stepping pattern. It’s ugly, increases data rates, and is easy to eliminate. Every digital video program out there can deinterlace, so do it, or we’ll make fun of you at E3. See Dune 2000. 3. Uncropped video. In analog video, there’s almost always crud around the edges of the image that isn’t seen on TV. Computer monitors show every last pixel all the way around. So you need to crop out the crud on the edges. See the Longbow series. 4. Wrong aspect ratio. Pixels are always square, right? Wrong. Many high-end digital video standards use 720x486 pixels per frame, where the pixels are taller than they are wide. So if the video is played like that on a computer, everything looks wide. Scale the video so that the pixels wind up square and circles aren’t ovals. 5. Bad actors. It’s an old saw in video production that many good stage actors don’t work out well in front of a camera, because their performances are aimed at people thirty feet away in the audience, not two feet away in a close-up. See almost every FMV game made. 6. Poor voice acting. In many ways, poor voice acting is much more of a problem than poor video. There are two main reasons for this: audio is everywhere in games, and voice acting looks easy. Voice acting is not easy. If it was, it wouldn’t be obvious which computer games had the engineers do voice-overs. Voice acting requires skill and experience, and it’s a lot more expensive to spend eight hours in a recording studio with a volunteer than two hours with a professional. Ask this question before using someone as a voice actor: "Are you a member of AFTRA?" If they respond yes, then they’re almost certainly a skilled professional. If they give you a speech about how they don’t like unions, at least they know what business they’re in, and might be okay. If they say "What’s AFTRA?" smile and go somewhere else.(AFTRA is the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.) See the Resident Evil series. 7. Wrong frame rate. Video runs at 30 frames a second, and film at 24 frames a second. The final frame rate of digital video should be an integer fraction of the original frame rate in order to preserve smooth motion. For example, video should play back at 30 FPS or 15 FPS, and film at 24 or 12. Note that if you transfer film to video, you still should restore the frame rate to 24 fps. Media Cleaner Pro does a great job with this conversion. See virtually every game with content shot on film, such as Close Combat. 8. Eight-bit audio. Never, ever, ever use 8-bit audio for anything. Ever. Really. With modern audio codecs, 8-bit always produces bigger files and sounds worse than 16-bit. 9. Mismatched foreground and background elements. So, you want to shoot actors on a bluescreen, then incorporate computer graphic elements in the background? The video looks great, and so do the computer graphics, but why don’t the spaceships look like they’re in the same universe as the talent? Lots of reasons, probably. In order to make elements match, they need to have similar frame rate, grain, motion blur, lighting highlights, and so on. A good animator can make a great looking spaceship. It takes a great animator to make it look like part of the set. 10. Video technical requirements out of sync with the rest of the game. While I like codecs as much as the next guy (well, a lot more than the next guy), it’s a mistake to have the processor requirements for your cutscenes be higher than for the rest of the game. Yet, it happens. Sometimes, testers get so used to skipping past the video that they never check cutscenes on low-end computers. Great looking video doesn’t count if users can’t see it. See Civilization II and Close Combat: A Bridge Too Far.
For Further Info • Filmmaker's Handbook, by Steven Ascher and Edward Pincus (New American Library Trade, 1984), is still the best primer available, and a new version should be available by the time you read this. • http://www.codeccentral.com is a Terran-hosted web site that’s a great source for codec information • Game Developer’s sister publication DV is a great source for information on video production and technologies. More information can be found at http://www.dv.com.
|
|
|
Features
