Recording Movies

The C4 Engine has the capability to record the video and audio output as you're playing a game or using the tools. Video is saved to a set of "sequence" files that can later be imported as a movie, and audio is saved to a standard wave file. A movie is generated from these files using the Movie Importer tool.

Recording is started by entering the record command in the Command Console as follows:

record name [-rate fps] [-noaudio] [-novideo]

The name parameter specifies the base name of the sequence files that are generated, including the path relative to the C4 Engine application. As recording progresses, the engine generates files named name1.seq, name2.seq, etc., each of which holds many frames of video data. The audio is saved to a single file named name.wav.

If the -rate parameter is specified, then video frames are captured at a rate of fps frames per second, up to a maximum of 60. For best results, fps should evenly divide 36000. If the -rate parameter is omitted, then the default recording rate is 30 frames per second.

By default, both video and audio are recorded. If either the -noaudio or -novideo parameters are specified, then audio or video will not be recorded, respectively.

Recording is stopped by entering any record command in the Command Console, with parameters or not, while recording is in progress. All parameters to a record command that stops recording are ignored.

In order to avoid showing the console in the movie itself, it is usually convenient to bind the record command to a key. For example, the following command binds the recording functionality to the F1 key.

bind F1 "record Import/MyMovies/Movie -rate 20"

After this command has been entered, the F1 key can be used to start and stop recording at 20 frames per second.

See Also

• Movie Importer
• Movie Player
• MovieMgr::StartRecording() function
• MovieMgr::StopRecording() function