Recording and editing video on a Macintosh

Video Capture

Patch 2.2.0 brought a built-in video capture utility to WoW on the Mac.

Examples of videos captured and edited on Macs:

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=3547624003&sid=1

AFTER PERFORMING A FIRMWARE UPDATE, Video Capture native to the WoW UI can now be enabled on mid-2007 iMacs (see several stickies in the WoW Mac Tech Support Forum linked above to see if you're affected and what the in-game command to 'ForceEnable' the video capture options are). Capture/Compression/Editing/Publishing is still a potentially very cumbersome process, with a fair amount of possible pitfalls for the not-so-technologically-savvy, and I'm not posting the process to Force Enable it here since it's a bit of a big deal and I'd rather you go get the word from someone who gets paid to know this stuff. Go look at the stickies. NOW.

Another problem is that Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Express, two expensive and now commonly bought video editing software programs for newer Mac buyers, are unable to load the .mov (QuickTime-format no less! *DOH!*) files that come out of the WoW native recorder/compressor process.

Aralesh on Bloodhoof-US had this to say: "FinalCut (Express or Studio) won't open files with anything other then [sic] PCM (Uncompressed) or Apple Lossless audio. And make sure your frame rate is at 29.97. "

Go figure. No idea what the frame rate must = 29.97 is about. You therefore, as of December 2007, need one of the following intermediary programs (please add alternatives if you know of them, or edit out if this issue gets fixed):

• MPEG Streamclip - free, tons of options (too many for the casual user), fast as a speedhacking farmer and with a decently intuitive interface

• Vlc - free, but not as fast as Streamclip, and just as problematic, but may be a little easier if you're more focused on playing downloaded videos than on converting your own stuff.

• Quicktime Pro - $30 upgrade from Quicktime Player (the free QT Player will play the files, but the ability to export them as .mov files that can be read by FCP/FCE is turned off (this just blows my mind, you have to turn a .mov file into a .mov file due to some sort of sound/framerate issue). To upgrade, boot up Quicktime Player, first drop-down menu should have 'Buy Quicktime Pro' - this takes you to Apple.com where you pay, get a registration key and go back to unlock the Pro features with the registration key. QT Pro is quite simple to use, doesn't bother with all the options of the other three and is reasonably fast, plus it has all the weight of Apple, Inc. behind it, which means a GUI you'll recognize and a simple, logical layout.
• iMovie - bundled with newer Macs and also bundled with a bit of a learning curve, if you want to use this to get video into FCE/FCP you're basically stuck with a bit of a big process and learning two video editing programs instead of one. Go figure. UPDATE: Apparently not all (if any) sizes and formats of .mov files that come out of the WoW recording process are importable into iMovie. Beats me how this works. UPDATE 2: You can't just right-click on a file and select 'Open With iMovie', you actually have to go into iMovie and use the Import Movie tool. UPDATE 3: Not an all-together horrible final editing program, and absolutely rocked when rendering. Lack of documentation means you'll have to mess around, changing one option at a time and rendering the same little learning project about ten times before you understand what's going on. Frequent trips to google or wikipedia also helps for learning what different compression options mean. About 10-15 video tutorials on www.apple.com are an absolute must-watch before you get down and dirty. U4: Note that you have to leave out any sound when you export from QTP in order to be able to import into FCE. Ugh.
• Apple Compressor - seems to be a support program for Final Cut Pro.

Two of the above are free downloads, but not necessarily your best option. I've been learning about this for two weeks straight now, and I'm confused as all ... In either case, the information you need is hidden in the stickies in the WoW Mac Tech Support Forum. iMovie is also capable of final-editing of WoW Movies, but afaik not halfway as powerful as FCE/FCP, more along the lines of Windows Movie Maker compared to Sony Vegas.

The guide for using VLC Player as an intermediate to get your video into FCE/FCP can be found at: http://www.tombfury.com/modules/newbbex/viewtopic.php?topic_id=5&forum=4 Imho, VLC Player is quite the lumbering cumbersome giant, though it does have its other uses (plays stuff easily that QTP doesn't or does with a painful process). Using iMovie to get to FCE/FCP is a bit of a mess unless you know what you're doing, and can take even longer. QTP seems reasonably quick and smooth (ok, at least smooth if not quick). I'll be back about MPEG Streamclip, which right now seems pretty darn powerful, tons of options, and also is a program much more focused on video conversion than any of the other three. Good luck understanding all the options though, unless you have a 4-year degree in this stuff.

Advantage of using Quicktime Pro over iMovie just to get audio AND video into FCE seems to be the following:

1. Simple process:

2. record video/audio in wow and compress using wow

3. open up in QTP, hit Command-I to see a little more hidden info about your clip.

4. Command-E to export, decide where to save it. (Command is the funky weird Apple button, equivalent of the Windows button on PCs). Export: Movie to QuickTime Movie - unclear if this makes a difference for FCE.

5. Options button. Enable both Video and Audio.

Video Size: don't really know if this should be compressor native or current, Deinterlace Source Video doesn't appear to be needed, I hardly understand the stuff on wikipedia that I found about it anyway.

Video Filter - no need to mess with this afaik.

Video Settings: H.264, frame rate 29.97 - needed by FCE afaik. Key Frames Automatic (I actually understand that concept - but no clue how to make that knowledge work to my advantage). Data Rate Automatic, optimized for download. Compressor Quality High. Encoding Multi-pass.

Sound settings: Format Apple Lossless (PCM may work too, but I just don't really know much about this, ok? ok.) Rate 44.100 since that's what came from WOW afaik. Render settings Faster - dunno if this affects audio much, but I'm not much into audio quality in pvp/pve videos, there'll be music to cover it anyways. Preview button seems to work ok if you're in doubt.

6. Leave unchecked the box 'Prepare for Internet Streaming' - I can't stand WoW videos on Youtube and like, the visual quality is just too bad. Anything I write about will be HD, or close to it.

7. hit OK.

8. hit SAVE.

9. now you'll get a little window pop-up that'll have a floating bar showing exporting progress. with luck your average 1min pvp clip of about 1min footage = `70-100mb filesize will now be compressed into roughly 50-60% of that.

10. Now you're ready to import this into FCE. You can either open FCE and then import, or right-click the file and choose 'Open With'.

11. Advantage is that this entire process, once you've messed with the QTP settings, doesn't take all that long, since the export settings are saved. Open file from wow, stop video playback, Command-E, Enter and DONE. D-U-N, done. Now you're ready to edit and finalize in FCE. How to export there to a divx or avi or mov format is beyond me. Good luck.

Video Editing

Available Codecs

A codec is a computer process that takes raw video, which contains massive amounts of information, and uses very complex algorithms to turn this information into something manageable by taking little shortcuts, like ignoring all the blue sky in the background for 40 frames while a player-character stands still. E.g., that blue sky only needed to be compressed once, with a note for how long it lasts. There are four available codecs to compress with (not record with - more on that later) and, as of December 2007, the H.264 codec seems the hands-down winner for the casual WoW movie-recording user. From a few test runs I made with a 15 lock at the entrance to Deadmines, using a brand-new aluminum 24" iMac with 2GB of RAM:

• MJPEG - turns out to actually be "Motion JPEG A", 1min 02sec footage turned out to be 675.5MB with 2.2 mobs pulled and a fair amount of camera spinning. Seemed to have pretty bad color, which I'm assuming could be manually corrected in an editing program.

• H.264 - 2.2 mobs pulled, some camera spinning with possibly slightly more graphical effects than other pulls (caught a flamestrike at the end), 1min 01 sec of footage = 141.5MB, and with nearly as good visual sharpness as Motion JPEG but without the colour problems, I don't see why in the heck I would ever use Motion JPEG over H.264 unless there's an editing program problem.

• Apple Intermediate - 2.3 mobs pulled, some spinning, 1min 01 sec = 331.9MB. Had some audio tearing, but who knows what that was due to? Little discernable A/V quality difference to H.264 leads me to believe that I'm just better off with H.264.

No Wikipedia article, not much other info either that I could find easily. http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301599 http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/appleintermediatecodec101.html http://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php?title=Apple_Intermediate_Codec http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=397547

• MPEG-4 - [3 movies all turned out to be 1min 02 sec, with final size being 215.6MB, 192.8MB, and 244.5MB. 4th one was 1min 10sec and 229.9MB]

Sneaky Faster Video Compression Process While You Make A Sandwich

According to Tigerclaw, a Blizzard employee poster on the WoW Mac Tech Support Forum in the Movie Recording Sticky:

"By the way, the programmer for this feature reminded me that if you trigger movie compressions while logged in, and then log out but leave the game running at the title screen, the compressions will continue (you can open up the movie dest folder and watch it consuming the temp files and generating the .mov result as it goes). To really speed this up, do this in chat before logging out:

/console maxfpsbk 2

then log out and leave the game running at the title screen, and put it in the background (some other app frontmost). This will max the available CPU for the game's compression engine to do work.

We'll look into adding a little visual feedback on the title screen for a future release. The idea of a standalone compressor tool is not high on the priority list, however we do allow export in Apple Intermediate which is a great format to feed to other third party compressor tools. "

NOTE 1: These console commands have, as of 2.3, no visual feedback in the chat log and are not documented anywhere. And set values that are stored in either the WTF or Cache folders. And don't change back if you log out or exit WoW. You'll notice the effect if you alt-tab out with the game running in the background, it'll be choppy as all heck, exactly what you'd expect running at 2 frames per second. Should the time come, there is a way to change this back, but how to is hidden on either the Mac Tech Support, the regular Tech Support, or the UI & Macros forum - posted by a blue.

NOTE 2: As far as compressing videos is concerned, it seems to matter little what your codec choice is when you record the video in-game. It does, however, become crucial when you start compressing. I learned this the hard way, thinking I could record a few movies with different codecs and then go make a sandwich while they were all compressing using the above sneaky speed-up thingy. They all of course ended up compressing with the last codec I had selected. Go figure.

Changing Recording Location

This may be useful if you wish (as you should, rumour has it greatly affects video recording) to record your video to a separate hard-drive from what the game is running off, though I don't recommend using an external drive for that purpose, unless it's faster than anything I know of. Or if you want to record to your desktop, in order to give yourself a very nasty graphical reminder that you need to compress a bunch of video or leave a hopeless cluttery mess on your desktop. Again, Tigerclaw:

"SET MovieRecordingPath "/Volumes/MyOtherHD/etc/etc"

in config.wtf.

If in doubt about the precise path to a given older [sic], just drag the folder into a Terminal session and the full path will appear there (though our paths do not need spaces escaped with backslashes). "