Machinima and Movie Posters in Second Life
Good morning and happy Saturday you guys! I have a few quick announcements regarding creating machinima in Second Life, rules for Second Life recording, Second Life YouTubers, and an update to my movie poster challenge! But first, here is another dancing video I did recently and shared on my YouTube channel. I’m really enjoying making these and plan to do more soon!
Video on Youtube: https://youtu.be/LjEAx8Qu-xk
Capturing Video in Second Life
Ever since I’ve started making more videos in SL, I’ve been getting many people contacting me on a daily basis asking how I made these videos. I asked my friends on plurk to suggest some software they use so you can find all of that info in this plurk, but I am also going to summarize a few of the suggestions here:
- Camtasia – I use Camtasia to capture and edit the videos you see on my youtube channel. This software is not free. I also use a 3D MouseĀ to zoom around at times, especially for my dance videos. Please click over to my computer specs page to see a list of all of my current hardware and software.
- CamStudio – is opensource and completely free. They have a forum you can check out if you have any questions about it.
- Fraps – There is a free and a paid version ($37) of Fraps. If you use the free version, it will placeĀ the Fraps watermark on your video.
- Open Broadcaster Software – Completely free and was initially made for streaming but you can save the video if you prefer.
- Check this plurk for more info – There are many more suggestions in this plurk by my plurk friends along with a lot ofĀ tips and information regarding recording in SL, such as holding “CTRL ALT F1” to clear the user interfaceĀ inworld. I highly recommend that you read this plurk if you plan to make Second Life machinima.
Rules for Capturing Video in Second Life
Before you start on your vlogging or machinima making adventure in Second Life, please note that there are certain rules that Linden Lab has put in place that you need to be aware of. Please click over and read Linden Lab’s snapshot and machinima policy in detail:
If the convenant of the sim does not mention snapshots at all, then you are free to take as many pictures as you like there. However, if it doesn’t mention machinima (video) at all, then you must ask permission first before shooting your video at that location. This is something that not a lot of people are aware of. I sincerely request sim owners to please take a moment right now and put in your convenants that you allow snapshots and machinima, to make it easier on us who like to explore and shoot. Thank you!
Second Life YouTubers
There is a growing community of Second Life residents on youtube sharing beautifully coordinated machinima and also vlogging their second lives. I have been trying to add every SL account I see on Youtube putting out positive and encouraging videos to my subscribed channels page. If you are looking for residents to follow and watch on youtube, here are a few that I’ve noticed are vlogging or sharing SL videos regularly:
- Second Life – Linden Lab has a Youtube channel where they regularly share tutorials and other informative videos.
- Strawberry Singh – I’m trying to put out more videos reguarly. Mostly fashion related videos along with dancing and tutorials thrown in there from time to time.
- Cassie Middles – Cassie just recently started vlogging and has been sharing fashion related videos. She has the sweetest voice!
- Kawaiilian Resident – The Dreams in Motion Second Life vlog channel is run by Kawaiilian, also known as ChloĆ«-Dakota Rose. She makes adorable vlogs regularly sharing her fashion and style sense in Second Life.
- Morgana Hilra – Morgana has been vlogging for over a year now and shares her opinions and thoughts on a lot of the latest fashion releases in Second Life.
- Mericat Ireland – Meri puts out a dancing video almost every single day. She is a regular fashion blogger and for each look that she blogs, she does a video of herself dancing in that outfit so you can see how that outfit will look if you decide to go clubbing in it. I think it’s such a great idea and both her blog and channel are a must follow!
- Alicia Chenaux – Alicia has created a few videos in the past, one great tutorial as well. With her latest video she said she is interested in vlogging more often so please subscribe and leave a comment for her on her last video to encourage her to do more, she has the most adorable voice!
- Inara PeyĀ – We know that Inara has one of the most informative blogs about Second Life but she also creates beautiful machinima of different Second Life locations.
- Wendz TempestĀ – Wendz also creates beautiful machinima of different travel location in Second Life.
- Pepa Cometa – Pepa recently created one of the most inspirational and beautiful Second Life machinima about the 1920s Berlin sim. She has many others on her channel of different location in Second Life.
- Glasz DeCuirĀ – Very talented machinima artists with a wide variety of content on her channel.
- More Second Life Residents on Youtube – Please check out my subscriptions page and see even more talented residents sharing their content on youtube.
I just highlighted a few residents that I noticed released content on youtube within that past week or so. There are so many more doing amazing work there so please make sure to check out my subscriptions page and subscribe to them all. If you have a youtube channel that features Second Life machinima, please leave your link in the comments and I’ll make sure to subscribe!
If you are not on YouTube but wish to watch great quality machinima as well, I suggest signing up with SLArtist, they curate and share a large number of quality machinima from all over.
Update to my Movie Poster Challenge!
For those of you who are doing my Movie Poster Challenge this week, if you are also submitting your posters to Glasz DeCuirās flickr group, Lapiscean Liberty (founder of SLArtist and AviewTV) has donated money so now Glasz has made it into a contest and is offering linden prizes to the top three posters as well. You can find all of the details about the contest in the Flickr Group or her Facebook Page. Please note that I am not involved with the contest part of this challenge. If you have any questions about the contest, please contact Glasz DeCuir as she is running it. Thank you.
I think that about covers everything I wanted to share today. Please do leave links to other Second Life residents that are sharing content on YouTube. I am looking to subscribe to even more positive and inspirational channels! Thank you. <3
What I’m wearing in the video:
*Mesh Body: Maitreya Mesh Body ā Lara V3.5 by Onyx LeShelle
Mesh Head: LOGO Alex v3.0 by Maximillion Grant
*Skin Applier: Insol: āTatyanaā skin for LOGO Alex by Almercury
*Eyes: IKON Triumph Eyes ā Brown by Ikon Innovia
*Hair: Exile::Empty Pages by Kavar Cleanslate (@ C88)
*Outfit: Zaara : Chandni lehenga by Zaara Kohime
*Jewelry: Maxi Gossamer Maharani – The Complete Collection by Maxi Gossamer
*Tattoo: Letis Tattoo Diwali by Leti Hax
Dances: Bellydance from Animazoo and Shakira dance from MyAnimation
Location: Work in Progress Build by Zaara Kohime not open to the public yet
and another machinima I once shot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hl4PH1bd0yU
YouTube tends to chew up SL videos into such terrible quality that I moved to Vimeo. The machinima community there is certainly smaller, but I’m stubborn.
https://vimeo.com/kobukfarshore/reign
Thank you for all that information and for mentioning my video, Berry š
I agree with Kobuk, my main account for machinima is oalso on vimeo.
description
Don’t miss the Kobuk’s video for UWA contest, she wont the first award, it’s really great, one of the best I’ve ever seen.
(Please delete my previous comment, the link was wrong, that’s not mine) š
Erythro Asimov is my favorite machinimaker, he had made very beautiful videos
https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC0-b3mAe2rYJ3BhiOy1j_Fg
Also he has on vimeo a great and nice series of tutorials about making machinima that are super useful:
If someone is thinking about starting making machinima, these tutorials are a must!
Thanks for sharing you guys! I’ve made an account on vimeo just now and added a video to test it out, it’s not bad! I’ll see if I can keep up with it but I think my main focus will still be on youtube. I’ve followed you guys on there:
https://vimeo.com/strawberrysingh
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http://slmachinimaarts.ning.com/ Machinima Artist Guild is also a good longstanding SL machinima site. They also have a pro site. Aview http://www.aviewtv.com/ is yet another.
As Always, I learn so much from your blog. I only wish I would have found you years ago. I loved your Machinima in this post and I do have a question as how to you got the camera to smoothly fly around your dancing avi. It appears as if you have the camera on a crane dolly to get the fly-by and overhead shots. I tried using the camera controls to do this but it doesn’t seem I am good enough to get shots like yours.
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Quite a bit disappointing that i’m not in a single list of these.
I have checked your list, your subscriptions and SLArtist. None of which list any of my videos.
Devastating to see regular vlogs being so popular compared to less frequent video makers who focus on less but higher quality content. It seriously makes me question the worthiness of these videos, the time and skills used to make these.
Niran, I’m not sure why you seem to be offended that your channel/videos were not on the lists, it’s not like we are purposely leaving people out. I even requested those that I have missed to please add their links in the comments and I will add you.
It’s unfortunate that you find it “devastating” that I took the time and effort to promote residents trying to create positive and inspirational videos of all kinds, not just vlogs.
I’m also not sure why the “worthiness” of the others comes into question just because yours were missed. This is not a competition, we are trying to create a community and promote each other. If you leave the link to your channel in the comments, it will be included.
Thank you Kara, great resources!
Steffanie I used a 3D mouse to cam around: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000LB7G00?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B000LB7G00&linkCode=xm2&tag=zahra08-20
but you don’t need that or the camera controls to cam around. You can use the ctrl+alt+mouse trick I talked about in this video: https://youtu.be/maELk9Ih9fs
Hope that helps you out!
Fraps records large formats smoothy because it requires very little real-time rendering. The downside is that rendering later, in your editor, is very processor-intensive. Other apps render more during recording, which means smaller more manageable files – but your processor and gpu are taxed heavily during the process.
One minus for Fraps is that it’s PC only, befitting its gaming origins. For Mac, I like Movavi Screen Capture. It has delivered pretty much bug-free performance and is easy to use for larger resolutions. which we are all capturing nowadays because we imagine that 1) people will watch our stuff in a movie theater, undoubtedly in Cannes, Tribeca or Sundance, and 2) some day Yahoo and Vimeo will be able to share 4k, although they don’t even play 1080 today, because bandwidth will become magically available, like nuclear fusion.
The Pepa Cometa video about Berlim 1920 is so adorable. Thanks for sharing it.
I’m not offended, i’m disappointed, for many more reasons a general answer like mine can describe.
For this case relevant: my disappointment comes from my expectation that you (in this case you specifically) should know me and my work, you as someone who seems to get around a lot with machinima and photography, at least from what i’ve seen in the past. It makes it quite disappointing personally that you either don’t or forgot about me, which is fine on a human level, you can’t know everything.
I measure “worthiness” by the content’s message and how many people watch/read/use it, taking its own situation into account. A video is worthless if its educational but no one watches it, it tells me “no one” is interested in that kind of topic/content making it a wasted effort on the creators part.
I can give you an example: Whenever i finish an update for my Viewer, i write an extensive change log with every single change listed in it, a while ago i also wrote complete blog posts for every update, explaining changes, showing them pictures of said changes and what these changes mean for users. Now guess how many read the post or looked at the pictures. People constantly IMing me about said changes asking why stuff is like it is. This clearly shows me that no one reads it. It’s wasted time, wasted effort. Adding salt into the wound: browsing the internet and finding no-name random blogs, twitter posts, tumblr posts, forum threads about these said changes and how people don’t understand what is happening, complaining that said changes came out of nowhere or even declaring them as “bugs”, then finding said subject’s topic or blog being well visited and commented on is a slap in your face. I wish this was exaggeration.
I hope this gives you an idea where my disappointment comes from.
Oh darn and before i forget. There’s also ShadowPlay as recording software for NVidia users with GTX 600 Series or above. It’s free, captures 60 FPS at 1080p without any problems or noticeable framerate impact and can be used for streaming too, it also has a nice feature to shadow-record making you able to capture the past few minutes too. OpenBroadcaster can use ShadowPlay’s recording/encoding libraries but from my experience OpenBroadcaster was much slower doing so, almost as slow as any normal recording software, rendering the benefit of ShadowPlay entirely non existant again.
Niran, thank you for explaining your disappointment. I want to share with you something that my father always taught me: never expect anything from anyone, then you won’t be disappointed.
I apologize I missed adding your channel. I am unfamiliar with your work. I am not that deeply involved in the machinima world as of yet, I am just starting to familiarize myself with it now.
I am honestly surprised that you know me or my work, since I don’t think we have come across each other before. And that is usually the case with me, I am surprised when people know me or my little blog. But that’s just me, I don’t assume everyone knows me, nor does it really affect me if they don’t. I do my work for myself. For example, I do regular blog challenges and memes on my blog, sometimes 100 people participate, sometimes 5 people participate. That doesn’t deter me from doing them when I want and I don’t get disappointed when people don’t participate. That’s just the way life is.
And like I said earlier, I have requested people that I missed (since I am sure you are not the only person that I missed) to leave their links to their channels in the comments and I will of course subscribe so they are also added to the list.
Instead of getting disappointed and trying to guilt-trip me because I am not familiar with your work, if you had just said, “Hey Berry, I have a channel too, here’s the link…” I would have subscribed right away and would have discovered your work and been encouraged and excited to learn more about what you do in SL.
But once again, I apologize for disappointing you. That was never my intention. My intention with this post was to encourage and promote the Second Life machinima artists that I had stumbled upon while searching for the words “Second Life” on youtube. That’s it. I hope my apology makes up for any pain or disappointment I may have caused you.
Just wanted to note that taking a screen shot of the LL snapshot and machinima webpage does constitute “copying” which is stated as a prohibited activity right up there at the top š — at least screenshots were considered as “infringement” when that was my business, so you might want to check with someone official as I think you are breaking the TOS there. š
Meanwhile have great fun with you machinima!!!!
Cheers.
Chic, you know it’s funny that I asked people to click over and read that page carefully and I missed that part right at the top myself lol. Thank you for pointing that out, I’ve removed the screenshot! Loved your latest video about SL13B btw, can’t wait for it!
Awesome tutorial Berry.
Thank you for all the support.
My page: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9C6H_z7LEWImemKjjmQepQ
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You should give Debut a try. It’s awesome. I got it for my birthday last year, and I have used nothing since. It’s for video capture. http://www.nchsoftware.com/capture/
Just my yt Channel š
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkWG_qfN8CZ5SEM8jKADbig
Check this one out by Maylee Oh, I
didn’t find it in your list of subscriptions and she is really great š https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwAORc5dhDo
The performances filmed in real time in second life are also an interesting genre of machinima. I like very much this one: the creativity of many people!
Hello! I am a fairly new machinima maker and it is lovely to see all the great works from SL users. Here is my most recent one, about virtual reality.
[vimeo 209289979 w=640 h=360] Ode to VR: The Future of Virtual Reality from Amelie Marcoud on Vimeo.
This is a nice post explaining a lot about movie poster. I really appreciate your efforts to do so. Plz keep posting.
great article.