by Oozo
With time off during the winter break, I have decided to invest some time to learn some new tricks using Sony Vegas to make movies. You can probably tell that I generally don't like the UI taking up a lot of screen space. There are a couple of reasons for that. First, I personally don't like cluttered UIs from an aesthetic viewpoint and I think they can distract from the action and movement of the clips. Second, by zooming in it makes it easier for those who only watch streams to see what is going on better.
That was the idea behind the massively flamed "Oozo Lives" experiment.
The main reason that movie failed, IMO, is that it left the viewer detached and not understanding what was happening in the movie. They couldn't see my health and they often times completely missed key events in the movie (through no fault of their own). For example, I got flamed for missing a kick on some warlock. The thing is, I didn't miss the kick. I nailed it. It just so happens that the warlock was wearing a battlegear set that gave them a chance to resist interrupts and that is exactly what happened. You could see that in my combat log, but the viewer couldn't see it because I had (naively) cropped it out.
And, of course, people will latch on to those kinds of things like a bulldog (you see the same thing in politics) to discredit and defame even when they are completely wrong. Not that they would care even if they did know that they were wrong. But, I suppose that the ever-increasing decay of our society's morality is a story for another day.
In Moozo's movie, I made a compromise by zooming in but leaving the combat log in place so people could doublecheck to see exactly how badly I was playing. But, character health and abilities used could still be hard to track. I play at a high resolution, so they are hard to see at times on a youtube stream.
Iwl's movie is meant to correct that. Check it out and feel free to give positive/negative feedback on the presentation of content.
Friday, January 1, 2010
Iwl Reborn
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4 comments:
A few suggestions that you may or may not agree with:
1. Range classes in general strafe often to kite so the person they are attacking are off to the side rather than the center of the screen. I don't know if a zoom or cropping the view is the best method for a Spriest movie.
Best for melee classes like your druid. If you have ever seen Nerf Sap 7, minti's rogue is completely zoomed (in game though), but I can't imagine watching a mage or hunter movie like that.
2. Having two health bars on opposite side of the screen is a gap for the eyes to cross and may take away from the action. Making them in one location and right underneath each other could be better.
3. Make sure to keep opponent's cast bar, and debuffs viewable.
Whoever complained about Oozo Lives was eating a nice big warm pile of steaming bullshit. That movie rocked, and probably rocked the worlds of all those guys that farmed arena gear like monkeys. THAT WAS THE MOVIE WITH SWAHILI GODDAMNIT.
Now, for me, that i've played rogue for years now, some details are pretty obvious, like, i don't know, kidney shot or rupture animation and more importantly, why you used rupture over eviscerate and so on. See dude, your movies are not for beginners or for people not playing the class you recorded. Or for retards. Remember what they said about iwl2 i think, stuff like "omg you took a whole second to trinket !" and you said "i was waiting for the hamstring". That was one piece of the puzzle that didn't even cross my mind, i knew there was a reason a man of your caliber does things in a certain way, i just didn't know why.
Also, your editing rocks. Do you know that i actually searched for an addon that does that screen-shaking thing when shadow word: death hits, like you did in.. iwl 3 i think, man that was awesome, when i saw it i went all berserk, "yeah, suck that Word !!!"
Anyway, enough ass kissing, i agree with Cory about the placement of health bars, maybe it's because i keep mine on the bottom of the screen and i tend to look there by instinct, but i think they would be much better placed in the left and right of the casting frame, other than that, well... i miss the screen shaking thing :)
Oh, and... happy new year, man
Happy New Years. :)
Solid point on ranged classes, in general. So much of the action is off screen or at the edge of the screen and that did create difficulties.
I could try to resolve some things with a UI mod, I suppose. I've been trying to avoid using outside mods since I've come back. Only using SCT atm.
For some reason it's much harder to pull off "picture in picture" effects with Sony than it was in Adobe. But, I'll see if I can get the unit frames closer together somehow. Moving them out of the corners will be challenging, but probably worth it.
Opponents cast bar should show up under their nameplate. Don't think there was anybody with casting times in the short clip.
Buffs/Debuffs are a problem because of the amount of space they can take. Will probably *have* to use a UI mod to make that manageable.
Thanks for the feedback. :)
I'm using SBF (satrina buff frames) to keep track of certain debuffs on my target - though mainly i do it for pve purposes, to track bleeds and poisons on target and SnD and HfB on myself, give it a go, i found it to be awesome, you can put those buffs/debuffs wherever you want to, make them whatever size you want, and of course, filter them so they show only what you want them to show. Maybe you can set them up to display on a non-rendered area and then crop them ?
I'm not much of an addon guy, i even gave up SCT, mainly because my screen became just a bunch of numbers and text and bars so i started to hate it. I've been a fan of discord mods back in the day, and i like things to be clean and simplistic. Right now my UI is basically some 4 addons working together to do what discord did before it was discontinued.
One thing that made sense was what Dance (from the shadow word: dance series) said on his blog -- disable the combat text for a more "cinematic experience". If you noticed, in his movies he only keeps the "show target damage" option and it does the trick quite nice, you can still see the damage and crits, so no combat dynamic is lost.
One thing i forgot to mention about that screen shake edit you did was that it really really increased the dynamic of the movie for me. It was like.. i don't know, a finishing move, i saw the screen shake and i just knew the bitch was going to die. It was almost poetic, like Godzilla stomping a car, or a hammer crushing a skull or something.
Speaking of Oozo Lives, in the same manner, the blood fury+trinket+/dance macro was a nice touch as well, it gave some meaning to that particular moment, like "the chips are down, i'm going all in" sorta thing. Maybe i'm a bitch for dramatic moments, but i just like those details. Basically that's how a movie stays with me.
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