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Interguild members have recently stormed sites like YouTube with dozens of videos about their custom levels, and now you can learn to do the same! While there are several different ways to make a video, this guide has been put together for the average user who has neither past experience nor any non-free video editing programs. This guide also has no information for Mac users, but if you own a Mac and manage to figure it out, tell us and we'll add it to the guide.

Downloading a Screen Recorder

The first step to making a video is getting your footage. There are several screen-capturing video programs that you can download, but we recommend Hypercam. It's free, and you get to use it forever, which means that it's not a trial period. However, one might complain that its quality isn't too great, but it's actually very decent. Your quality usually takes most damage when trying to upload it to YouTube. There is also some major confusion with recording sound, but you'll find that you'll usually want to not record sound so that any music you put in later won't get interrupted by sound effects. Because this is a free program, all of your recording will have a small box on the top-left corner that labels each clip as a Hypercam video. This box really is small, and it doesn't get in the way of the real video. The following are a list of steps to download Hypercam, but if you already have a screen-recording program, you don't have to download this.

      
  1. Click here for the Hypercam download page.
  2.   
  3. Under "Download HyperCam ver. 2.14.02 (909 KB )", click on any of the two Server links to download Hypercam. Choosing the server that is located nearest to your home will speed up downloading time. However, I honestly have no idea where these servers are, so it really doesn't matter which one you pick.
  4.   
  5. You'll actually save the setup file to your computer. I recommend saving it to the desktop so that you can easily delete it later. Open that file to begin downloading Hypercam.
  6.   
  7. Go through the following steps in the program. If you have problems, you can get help by posting it in our forums. Also, the default save location they give you is fine.
  8.   
  9. By now, you've finished downloading Hypercam. Go to your desktop and delete the setup file (it's the setup file, not the actual program), because you don't need it anymore.
  10.   
  11. To open Hypercam, go to START > ALL PROGRAMS, and you'll notice a new folder for Hypercam 2.

Be aware that at the time of this writing, the latest version of Hypercam was version 2.14. The next part of this guide will talk about using Hypercam, so if you already have a different program, you can skip it.

Recording your Footage

Now that you have Hypercam downloaded, it's time to start collecting footage for your videos. Open Hypercam and whatever game you want to film. When you open up Hypercam, you get a screen that looks like this:

Hypercam 2.14

Specifying your Recording Regions

The way that Hypercam works is that it only records a specific part of the screen. The four boxes in this window tell it where to record from, but you don't have to figure out all of these numbers to specify the area that you want to record. Instead, you can use the two options next to the boxes. I recommend using the "Select Window" feature. When you click on it, Hypercam will minimize, and you can then click on one of many automatic boxes that are formed as you move around your cursor. It's a really easy way to select the window that you want to film. In the case that it doesn't automatically have your desired selection, you can use the "Select Region" button to manually make a box around your area. Also, if you want to film the entire screen, use the Select Region button and simply create a box around your entire screen.

Now that you've set the frame of your movie, you can begin recording. There are several recording options that you are free to explore, but recording video isn't too complicated; just follow these steps:

      
  1. Use "Select Window" to specify your recording region, as explained before. For the sake of this example, open any game and try to work with that.
  2.   
  3. Go to the "AVI File" tab and tell Hypercam where you want your video to be saved to.     
            
    • There's a checkbox on that page that says, "Add sequential number to the file name." If you have that checked, you can film multiple attempts while at the same time creating new files for each one. This will also protect previous videos from being overwritten if you forget to change the file name in the future.
    •       
    • The advantage to having it unchecked is that you can film multiple attempts under just one file name. You're basically deleting each last failed attempt with each new recording. The only thing you have to watch out for is if you forget and accidentally overwrite an existing file.
    •     
      
  4.   
  5. Now that you have your game ready, the recording region specified, and your file ready, you can finally start recording. You can either press the "Start Rec." button on the bottom of the "Screen Area" tab, or you can use the shortcut by pressing the F2 key.
  6.   
  7. Now, Hypercam will minimize (unless you changed that setting). This is your chance to play whatever you planned to do in the game so that it can get recorded. To stop recording you can maximize it again and click on "Stop Rec.", or just use F2 again. If you set Hypercam so that it hides completely while recording, then you'll have to use the shortcut key F2 to stop recording.

You'll also find that you may not record exactly what you want on your first try. You can either start or stop recording for each individual attempt, but I recommend that you keep all of your attempts on one file and then edit out the failed attempts. Of course, you may want to restart your recordings if your files end up being really long.

At this point you've just finished recording a full video! The next step of the video-making process is editing.

Editing your Video

Why would you want to spend more time editing your footage? The main reason is that editing is the main creative part of making a video. At this stage you can add music, special effects, transitions, titles, and credits, along with many other things that will help your video stand out against the rest. You can also edit out any failed attempts that you may have recorded in the same file. Editing your video is a pretty basic process: import your video clip into a video-editing program, make the desired changes, and then export the movie into a compressed video.

In order to edit your video, you'll need video-editing software. Most, if not all, Windows computers come with the free Microsoft Movie Maker, and if you don't have it, you can look it up on the Microsoft web site to download for free. There are several programs that are much better than Movie Maker, but these programs aren't usually free. If you already know how to use another program, you can skip the rest of this section.


Windows Vista Movie Maker

The first thing you'll want to do in Movie Maker is import your video clip. Under that Tasks sidebar in the Import section, click on Videos. Then find your AVI file. After importing, it'll show up as an icon in the blank area in the center of the window. The preview player at the right part of the screen automatically shows you a preview of your overall video, but when you have an icon selected, it'll show the preview of what you've imported. It also shows previews for sound files. To add your imported clip into your movie, just drag the icon into the timeline at the bottom of the screen. Now that it's in the timeline, you can crop parts of it off by dragging the sides of the clip. As you move your position in the timeline, the preview will show you the frames that you're in, so this makes cropping your video much easier.

If you want to add a title, go to the Tasks sidebar and under the Edit section, click on "Titles and Credits". You'll then have four options. Click on "Title at the beginning". You'll now have two text boxes, and you can leave the second box blank if you want to. There are other buttons under the boxes that say "Change the title animation" and "Change the text font and color". Changing the font and color is pretty self-explanatory, but changing the animation can be tricky. The text animations are divided into three categories: "Titles, One Line", "Titles, Two Lines", and "Credits". Many Two-Line animations are compatible with One-Line titles, but that's not the same vice versa. If you have a two-line title and try to apply a One-Line animation, then your second line won't be included. However, "two-line" titles refer to titles that use both text boxes, but you can have multiple lines in each text box. Also be aware that changing the type of animation will also change the text boxes when you go edit your text again. For example, if you try applying a Credits animation, you'll see multiple text boxes appear when you go to edit your text again.

When you finish editing your text, it should appear as another object in the timeline. If you want your text to appear on top of your video, you can drag it down into the "Title Overlay" section of the timeline. To change its duration you can just drag its sides around, the same way as you would to edit a video clip. To edit the text again, double click on the

If you want to add a song to your video, you can import a sound file by clicking "Audio or Music" under the Import section. All sound files are placed in the "Audio/Music" section of the timeline, but any sound that is part of a video can be seen by clicking the plus sign (+) next to "Video" in the timeline.

To add a transition, you can drag any object in the timeline so that it will overlap another object. The automatic transition that will occur is a fade, but by viewing the other transitions under the Edit section, you can change it to a different transition by dragging it onto the overlapping clips. Also under the Edit section, are Effects. These effects can do various changes to your footage and also to your titles. To add an effect, simply drag it onto an existing clip. To remove an effect, right-click on the clip and click on effects. From there you can add and remove multiple effects at once.

Exporting Your Movie

If you're working on your video in Move Maker, you'll be saving your project as a ".mswmm" file. However, this file doesn't contain an actual video, it only makes references to the existing files that you imported. Therefore, if you delete your raw footage files, then your Movie Maker file won't be able to show you those clips. Also, you wouldn't be able to view your movie outside of Movie Maker. So in order to save your video to be an actual video file, you'll need to export your movie. You can do this in Movie Maker by going to File > Publish Movie.

In Publish Movie, you'll go through various options. Assuming that you're making this video to upload to the Internet, you should pick the "This Computer" option. The next page will specify where the file will be saved and its file name. The next page shows the compression settings. If you're finding that your video is too large of a file for YouTube to accept, then you can use the "Compress to" option to keep your video under the 1024 MB limit of YouTube by setting it to a size smaller than that. Once you've finished that, you can start the publishing process, which may take several minutes. If your computer is slow enough, it may actually take a few hours.

One of the main reasons why the compression time is so long is because the video itself is a very large file. Movie Maker does not give you options to resize your video into a smaller size, so this means that your video will be as dimensionally large the game you filmed it from. These large dimensions raise the file size of to a huge amount.

Uploading to YouTube and Spreading the Word

There are many sites that you can upload videos on to besides YouTube, but YouTube is definitely the most popular. Once you have an account, click on the "Upload" link on the top-right part of every page. Uploading a video is pretty basic: just fill out the information, find your file, and start uploading. After the file is completely on YouTube, you'll have to wait a few more minutes until the video is fully processed into the system.

Warning: Some videos have been muted, or in some cases deleted, from Youtube for copyright purposes. This page is a list of some of the artists whose music is sure to get you into immediate trouble with Youtube if you use them. Update: Youtube has recently become much more lenient on the issue. Now several songs are allowed as now an ad comes up offering the song for say on iTunes.

And now you're done! You've just learned how to make a video and then upload it. If there's anything you need to do next, it's to tell people about it. You may want to post the video into our forum, but I recommend submitting it to our Video Archive first. Once it's approved, a new forum topic is created for the video, so by submitting it first instead of creating a new topic, you'll help keep the forums clean. If you just can't wait for it to be approved, each video board for each game has a topic called "Video Chat" where you can talk about videos that haven't been approved into the archive yet.

If you have any questions or problems, feel free to post below.

See Also: How to take a screenshot

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Isa
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Monday, June 14 2010, 4:28 pm EST
No. I'm an octopus.

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What movie making program do you use, and what file formats are the songs?

A screenshot would be helpful as well, though (hopefully) not required.
Yaya
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Monday, June 14 2010, 9:36 pm EST

Age: 28
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Ok, I figured out why nothing was in the folders before, appaerently my computer doesn't think that my songs are Audio or Music files, but that's besides the point.

Now, when I try to import my desired my desired song (The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill by The Beatles) I get the following error:

C:\Users\linmon\Music\iTunes\iTunes Music\The Beatles\The Beatles (White Album) [Disc 1] [2009\1-06 The Continuing Story Of Bungalow Bill.m4a could not be imported.

Any ideas?



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Sefro
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Monday, June 14 2010, 9:38 pm EST

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It's possible your movie program doesn't support .m4a. Try downloading the song off of Frostwire or converting it to .mp3, and then give it a shot.
Isa
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Tuesday, June 15 2010, 3:19 am EST
No. I'm an octopus.

Age: 31
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I've actually never heard of a .m4a file previously. You should convert it to .mp3, .ogg or some other, more common file ending as Dando suggests. You can do that by googling "m4a mp3 converter", I'm sure.
nebnebben
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Saturday, February 12 2011, 3:21 am EST
Swim for your life!

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Thanks; this helped so much!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VDvgL58h_Y Oh no he's after me! http://www.interguild.org/greatlakes.gif
Yaya
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Sunday, March 23 2014, 1:59 pm EST

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Has anyone encountered a problem in Windows Movie Maker where between different clips there is a split second flash of a black screen? Its been happening a lot while editing my FR2 video and it goes away if I go to a different part of the video and then go back to what I wanted to see. It happens every time I edit in a new clip or split one though, so its really annoying. I'm glad that there's a solution but I don't want it to randomly show up in only a few instances when I publish and have to re-publish it until I get one without any incidents. I don't know if it disappears upon publishing. Similar experiences, anybody? This is the first time I've done any actual video editing like cutting and splicing footage, so I'm not sure if this is a common issue or just because FR2 is stupid.



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