Fraps follow up

I posted yesterday about the new Fraps release and while I had tested it out a little bit, I hadn’t actually tried creating a video for upload onto YouTube.  I decided that as I was working on my Rune-keeper I would take a video of the scenery on the way from Saeradan’s Cabin to Candaith at the foot of Weathertop.  This was my first time on that new horse route so I was curious how it would take the player, but I figured there would be some good sight-seeing along the way.  I captured the entire trip on Ultra-high visual quality (DIrectX 9 though) so things do look pretty spectacular, see for yourself below:

I especially liked the part riding by the Bree festival as you get a good view of the hedge maze!

(edit) So most of this post is outdated but I’ll keep the rest of it as there are some other things in there too.  But Fraps released version 3.2.2 which should resolve this problem with Avidemux.  I haven’t tried it yet, and I will still potentially use the little GUI tool I mention below for batch processing. (end-edit)

Now the downside to this was I stumbled across a new feature of Fraps in a not-so-good way.  With the new “on-demand” recording feature they’ve put the MUST_USE_INDEX flag in the header of the AVI file and unfortunately some tools can’t recognize that flag.  And of course, the tool I use Avidemux is one of the tools that has this problem.  I do like Avidemux as it is a free open source application that’s not only flexible but intuitive (for me at least) and allows for lots of options in compression in addition to some video editing tools.  I posted on the problem on their forums and was expecting a “we’ll get to it in a future release,” but not only did I get quick feedback but a workable solution to the problem!  Now granted, it is a bit of a kluge in that I run a “pre-filter” app (that is now my new batch mode too as I routinely hit the 4GB file size cap and need to stitch videos together) that feeds the videos into Avidemux where I can then edit them as I wish.  So for me, running at 1440×900 resolution by default Avidemux works great as it allows me to use MPEG4 compression such that I get a reasonable file size with good quality.

Certainly Avidemux isn’t the only tool out there, but it is free and works for me 🙂  The Fraps support folks (also incredibly responsive) pointed me to VirtualDub which also looked pretty good and is free as well.  However, I didn’t have enough options for compression nor could I get DivX to work for my videos.  But it is certainly a simpler process that could potentially work very well depending on your machine setup.  The other tool I’ll mention which I found via a twitter recommendation from the folks over at CStM, is AVS which is a collection of a number of video processing packages.  I tried this tool out and it looks really slick and incredibly full featured and isn’t terribly expensive at $59.  It also has zero problems with the new Fraps format and seems to have all sorts of different compression schemes that worked great for me.  At some point down the road if I decide to do something more tricky with videos then I currently do, I may go back and check out AVS but for now I’m happy with my solution and work-flow.

Just wanted to put this out there as it caught me off-guard and I had a couple of folks ask about how I did things.

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Weekend news

So things have been a bit slow on the news side, but hopefully now that PAX is done we may hear some things from Turbine on what all they have planned for us down the road.  There were a bunch of folks (including myself) who sent a nice long list of questions to Merric and Goldenstar from CStM and they’re in the process of pulling all the info together. I’m not expecting anything earth shattering after Sapience’s comments on the forums, but we shall see.  However, Patience did chime in on a conversation between me and @wickedpt on twitter “@wickedpt Just because we are not talking about something yet doesn’t mean we’re not working on it. Stay tuned. :)” so I suspect they’re just phasing the news updates between DDO and LOTRO.  I would expect to start seeing some new diaries and such starting to filter out as we near the end of the Spring festival, although due to the horse issue that might get extended a bit.

In game for me I’ve been enjoying the spring festival doing the dirty work for the dwarves and their Ale Association.  I just hit the first tier of reputation with them and I’m curious to see what’s available from that kindred vendor.  For this festival, I’m just focusing on my Warden but I may grab a few of the rewards/items on my Minnie as well.  I have saved most of my fortunes, so those titles should be pretty transferable – and they’re also relatively cheap on the AH 🙂  Sadly though I didn’t get in too much time with my RK so she’s still stuck at 20 (or maybe 21) but I’m interested to not only see the new Lone Lands but also see what it is like to run Skirmishes from the start and not from the level cap 🙂

On Friday I mentioned a new website (well new to me) I stumbled across lotro.mmorsel.com and today’s tip was one I really wanted to stress.  The tip is regarding using the fellowship assist options to better coordinate attacks between DPS classes.  This has been in the game for a long time for raids, but didn’t come in for fellowships until more recently and many still don’t know it exists.  As a tank (and a healer) I can’t stress how important and helpful this setting is when used properly as it makes everyone’s job that much easier.  Not only does it provide a way to select the proper target, but it also gives the tank and healer a good gauge on how the fight is progressing without having to switch targets.  By focusing all your DPS on one target, not only do they all drop faster but it makes tanking that much easier as you only have 1 mob to compete with DPS on and then you just have to out agro the healer on the rest.  Using the fellowship assist not only can you set up the tank’s target and the main target for DPS, but you can also do things like designating targets for crowd control or other such tasks.  In groups that I’m not leading, I always make sure that not only is this turned on and used by the leader, but that everyone in the group has it up and knows what to do with it.  So if you haven’t used this tool before, next time you’re in a group check it out!

I still have a piece in work on comparing not only the different tiers of skirmishes but also comparing the Rift to other skirmishes as I’m now very convinced it is by far the toughest skirmish out there, excluding the Barrow Downs one of course 😉