Looking for tips for the new camera feature

[UnluckyFriedKitten]

Would somebody please point me towards a guide or instructions for the sequential screenshot movie mode, I can't figure it out.

[entuland]

Hello there UFK, I wanted to make a video but didn't come around to do that yet.

The best advice I can give right now is to practice according to these details.

When you open the camera and the drone there are no "keyframes" saved yet, you set the first keyframe when you hit the "New" button.

That first keyframe will store all the information about all the settings (position of the drone and its orientation plus all the camera settings).

At that point you can move the drone to another position and / or change the camera settings, and when you're happy with how that second "state" looks, you can add a new keyframe.

The game will prompt you with a dialog asking the duration and interpolation to be used for that transition (from the first keyframe to the second one).

The interpolation dropdown has a lot of possible options, it really has to do with how the values change at their extremes.

A linear interpolation will cause all the values to change at the same speed during all the timespan, whereas other options, such as the Cubic or Quadratic ones, will "smoothen" the rate of change at the two extremes.

Thinking of a dropping ball helps understanding how the two extremes change.

When you drop a ball it's steady in a position, then the gravity force will start pulling it down, accelerating. When the ball hits the ground it will bounce back pretty much at the same speed, without slowing down.

The point where you drop the ball is the "IN" part of the interpolation, the beginning one.

The point where the ball hits the ground is the "OUT" part of the interpolation, the ending one.

So having "CubicOut" will use a linear interpolation at the beginning of the animation between the two keyframes, and will use a cubic interpolation at its end.

To fully grasp how the above affects the "movie" just create a "new" animation, then move the camera sideways for a decent amount of blocks, hit the "new keyframe" button and select, say, 10 seconds in linear interpolation, then play it.

Then do the same from scratch but this time using "CubicInOut" with the same amount of time, then play it, and notice how this time the camera movement starts and ends at a different speed compared to the speed it has midway of the two positions.

The interpolation should get applied to all the values (position, orientation, camera angle, brightness and so forth) so it's possible to achieve a lot of different cinematic efffects.

[UnluckyFriedKitten]

Thanks Ent :) you're a star

[UnluckyFriedKitten]

Still can't get it started, I've tried taking pics in drone mode, creative cam and normal, is there an unlisted key binding?, I don't see any buttons for it on the menus.
-on a slightly related topic: is there a way to reverse Y axis in drone cam?

[entuland]

The buttons to create the frames are under the camera settings - you first open the camera, then hit "O" go into Drone mode, then you use the Alt key to toggle the camera settings visible or not.

Open the camera and check all the available buttons there at the bottom, they should have all the corresponding shortcut written if they have one, and the button to start the animation appear only after you have entered Drone mode.

No, unfortunately there is no way to only invert the Y axis of the Drone, it should have respected at least the same option that affects the regular gameplay, but it's not. I'm going to file a report about that.

[UnluckyFriedKitten]

Thanks again

[UnluckyFriedKitten]

Okay I got it now, I had been using the creative cam key instead of Alt

I made a little test film but now I'm not sure where to upload it from, where does it save?
...Hopefully this'll be my last question ;)

[entuland]

Originally posted by UnluckyFriedKitten:

Okay I got it now, I had been using the creative cam key instead of Alt

I made a little test film but now I'm not sure where to upload it from, where does it save?
...Hopefully this'll be my last question ;)

First, you're free to keep asking as long as you need, this is what these forums are for!

Unfortunately it doesn't save at all. All it does is store the keyframes to let you play it back as you do a regular capture with OBS or the alike.

[UnluckyFriedKitten]

I've never used any video capture software, are there plans to make that an ingame feature? -to save it as a compiled clip I mean.

[entuland]

Originally posted by UnluckyFriedKitten:

I've never used any video capture software, are there plans to make that an ingame feature? -to save it as a compiled clip I mean.

Unfortunately I have no idea about whether they're going to add sush a system.

Grabbing a screenshot is relatively easy, capturing video is way more complex and I personally find it very unlikely that they'll invest time into having the game capture the video directly.

In all honesty, OBS isn't all that hard to use, it's free to use and there is plenty of documentation and tutorial videos around. You should definitely give it a go.

There are many more screen capture systems out there, possibly also simpler than OBS, but I'd personally stick with OBS since it's free and widely used, and will also give you options that the game would likely never cover even if they decided to have it save the video directly - chances are you'd get some heavy AVI file you'd then need to edit with some video editing software.