[Sticky] Filming in SL - All of my tips and Processes

I get questions about filming in SL in my email all the time. May as well make a thread about it ^^

-Use FRAPS.

-If the little overlay ## that Fraps gives you says 30, it will go down about 5-10 numbers once you hit record. You need to be getting 35-45 FPS to have a solid 30 FPS recording output.

-Make sure to check your FRAPS settings religiously. I left mouse cursor on one time and boy did it piss me off! XD

-Decide on a resolution, 1024x768 for me.
You can set the SL window to that resolution but you'd be fooling yourself!

-First you should make the UI much smaller in your SL prefs *independent scaling* and hide the toolbar as well as chat bar for filming.
(don't need to make the UI the smallest possible tho)

-Open a 1024x768 video on your computer (I prefer VLC for this since VLC Players has very thin borders unlike most programs) and make your SL window just large enough so the 'workable area' fits in a 1024x768 window, meaning the toolbar up top and the unhideable buttons along the bottom are beyond the resolution just barely (for best FPS). Go back and forth from the two windows to make sure you can use an advanced video editing program to crop your preferred resolution video out without unnecessary stretching.

Now for FPS boosting tactics. ---------------------------------------------

-Use an alternative viewer.

-Derender things you don't want or need in the video, including excessive avatars, or if you want them, but not in the focus (like my first dance video) , turn on avatar imposters and set your preferred number of rendered avatars in the bottom-right sliderbar prefs of the UI (that is where this setting is in most SL viewers anyway)

-Disable or set to lowest value these things in prefs and the advanced debug menu (ctrl+alt+d) unless you need them, in which case just enable them in those scenes if you really are straining for extra FPS:
Trees / sky / ground / water / particles / grass / clouds

-Enable multiple thread rendering in the advanced menu.

-Check out the Node factor setting and decide what it should be at for your needs

-Run the draw distance setting at the lowest you need for your video.

-IF YOUR COMPUTER STILL SUCKS AT GOOD FPS - This is your last resort: Go into mouselook. It often provides a huge FPS boost. If you don't need special panning and you don't need to film yourself you can record in mouselook. Be sure to hide the mouselook crosshairs from the advanced menu. I use this sometimes myself. Such as in the newer dance video with lots going on.

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Some essential tips:

Mess with custom lighting profiles. For example the video Naughty Bunny Punishment uses a very customized lighting profile, or else the bunny's solid color avatar looked way too flat.

If you want to be lazy just hit Ctrl+shift+Y (bright noon)

I never film in dark settings, because you can easily put a dark lighting filter in post processing and have much more control.

CAMERA SMOOTHING: Oh god yes. I don't use a special mouse or space navigator or anything, just a regular optical mouse. Mess with the camera smoothing and transition time settings. Practice 'throwing the camera' with your mouse at different transition settings much like some sort of click-drag-throw and release game you've probably played before. You can get the camera to rotate someone without you even controlling the mouse anymore for a couple whole seconds, giving you time to do a very technical transition with added up / down or left /right pans and / or rotations. You've certainly seen some of these in my videos.

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Video Editing:

I use Sony Vegas Pro (for the main videos) and Adobe Aftereffects (for the lil 8 second intro thing in newer vids)

If I tried to get into detail here I may as well copy-paste sections of the manual. I'm not that good of an ask-and-respond type of teacher either but to me figuring out how to do basic editing just took some fiddling so please go from here and you'll probably be fine googling anything else you need.

Well the one video editing tip I need to give is this:

-Export to WMV at 6.4 Mbps and force 30 fps (or any other format that you find which does the following) So far it's the best format I've found for rendering SL footage shot with FRAPS because it preserves your original color profile very well and results in very little artifacting along gradients. I was using H.264 when I started and it was a pain to manually add brightness filters and have to re-render til It looked good. It's FRAP's fault for iffy color profiling.

Hope someone finds this useful!