A trip around the Lighthouse

I thought that I might experiment, yesterday, with the recording of video in SL, and thus I did so.

I have no other tool to record with apart from the built-in “save to movie” option, which I find is somewhat lacking. Whilst it will record, unless the window is set to an extremely small size, for me at least the results are unusably jerky or fuzzy. What is more, it does not record sound. But it does work, at least.

I recorded with the window at 320×240 (well, that is reasonably sized for a compact Aethernet Presentation) and then edited the results with HyperEngine-AV, adding a few captions and a relaxing soundtrack.

It is a simple piece as an experiment in the whole process, hardly art, but what I found most annoying (apart from the poor quality of the source) was the camera; with practice one can swing one’s camera around with great ease in SL so that it is positioned and pointed precisely where one desires, but each time there is a short pause, and a graceful, sweeping pan or circle of an area is rather difficult without some sort of scripted device, which I don’t have. I tried to do this manually at one point, and it was something of a failure, I’m sure you can tell where.

The best results seemed to be to gained in third-person view, holding the mouse on one’s avatar and moving it around to look in appropriate directions.

I think I may try to put together some form of gadget which automatically pans or circles a point, or spirals away from it, or has a number of different effects, though one problem may be controlling it whilst recording and not having this be visible. Perhaps a combination of control keys (say left and right at the same time) could turn an effect on or off, but otherwise controls would be left untouched.