hl2 binks. anyone able to make movies that level of quality?

[poseyjmac]

im wondering if anyones been able to reproduce the type of quality we see in the hl2 binks in their own hl2 movie, and can tell how they did it.

 

[Ren.182]

The best quality of movie you can get is a .dem (demo file) file i suppose. That way you get the qaulity your game is at.

 

[flycrusher]

The bink movies made by valve are done by using the demo recording. There is an interface in the game that allows you to edit demo files and when you are done, you can convert that demo in a bunch of high res screenshots. I don't think that we already have the tools yet to convert, but i think it will come in a future SDK update.

But you can still make very good quality movies using FRAPS. But you will need a very performing PC to do this that way.
I've done some movies in 800x600 at 25 fps with FRPS and HL2. The quality is close to perfect.

 

[Vegeta897]

Aren't there some BINK tools you can get online that do that?

 

[The Dark Elf]

Just use bink tools (free) once you've outputted the image sequence to convert to a bink executable.

 

[PvtRyan]

What TDE said, it's very easy to do, although I'm not sure the bink tools take image sequences, but you could always make an avi out of those first and use the bink tools on that.

But ffs, don't use Fraps... *shivers*

 

[Chris D]

I enquried about this back in August. Got some cool information from Yahn Bernier and Quintin Doroquez

Quintin does most of the moviemaking. Copying him in case I missed a step below.

If you want to record a fixed framerate playback movie with a properly synced .wav track, we generally do this (from the console -- we don't currently have a UI for doing moviemaking)):

host_framerate 30 (forces fixed framerate for playback)
playdemo xxx (starts the demo playback)
startmovie css (starts dumping demo frames to file and writing the .wav)

You do have to have a .dem file, obviously. Not sure whether there are any existing issues with .dem files in the CS:S beta, but if so, please let us know. They should work (or they did last time I checked).

Additionally, there is a demo playback UI available by pressing Shift-F1 when in the game, it's currently used internally only at this point so no promises that it doesn't have any bugs.

Yahn

Hello Chris,

Just as Yahn had mentioned, when creating Bink videos, we do indeed import the individual TGAs outputted by the Source engine and .WAV file into Premiere.

At Valve, we like to have our videos very hi-res and widescreen, so before even outputting the TGA's, we make sure the resolution of the game window is at 1024 x 576, and that the pixel aspect ratio is corrected with the command "r_anamorphic 1". In Premierewe also make sure that our editing space mirrors the outputting settings (1024 x 576, square pixel aspect ratio, 30fps). This takes alot of disk space, so make sure you have plenty of it.

Through Premiere, we add all the necessary fade in's/out's edits, and other post-production stuff like titling, motion graphics, and overlays. Then, when we are ready to output a "Binkable file", we will output a Quicktime file. We use the QT Animation compressor when doing this and the sound is non-compressed. The Animation compressor provides a very non-lossy, and a virtually NON-COMPRESSED file. We have outputted 1-minute trailers thru this methodology and have yielded ~2GB-sized files. So, again, make sure you have plenty of disk space!

The Quicktime movie file is now ready to be brought into the RAD Video Tools application to Bink (please see http://www.radgametools.com/ for more information). The critical settings we use for our videos are: Compress data rate to 1,000,000 bytes at 1024 x 576, audio is compressed at the 4 (barely lossless). Depending upon how much pixel information, and action in your videos (and we know HL2 has a lot), the compression process can take up to 4-5 hours on a 3.0 gHz machine.

The program will yield a much-smaller .BIK file which you can turn into an .EXE. We tend to use the "clear the outside window" feature to black when creating an executeable to create a more of a cinematic presentation (looks on-screen like letter box output), and we have used "preload entire file into memory" option lately in order to avoid streaming from the HD in order to create a smoother-playing file.


I hope this helps, please let us know if you have any other questions,

Q!

I would have thought, considering the 6 hour + compilation time, that it'd be advisable only to do this if you're working on some sort of big project that requires such high quality work.

I may liaze a bit further with Quintin in the future to see if we can get a bigger and detailed guide going. I think it'd be a great for mod teams to be outputting their previews and promo vids in BINK

 

[poseyjmac]

cool. good info, thanks.