Using Video Game Footage - Part 1a

Tools

During the course of the article, we are going to be using various tools and programs to edit and clean the videos. They can all be found here. I am using Windows 2000 Professional, but other Windows operating systems should work.

Movie Converters

These tools convert the source video files into AVI files.

• PlayStation Movie Converters
  • http://segu.psxemu.com (PSmplay, My Favorite)
  • http://www.psxemu.com/tools-players.shtml (Other PSX Movie Tools)
• Sega Saturn Movie Converter
  • http://www.emuhq.com/powerse/files.htm (cpk2avi is the only one I know of)
  • http://www.rightstep.org/media.html (another version of cpk2avi and the Iccvid.dll)
• Bink and Smacker Computer Game Movie Converter
  • http://www.radgametools.com/bnkdown.htm (converts .BNK and .SMK files)
  • http://www.diablo2.com/files/d2mpqviewer.zip (MPQ viewer)
• ASF Video Converter
  • http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmedia/ (Windows Media Encoder for ASF CODEC)
  • ftp://ftp.otakuvideo.com/tools/edit/VirtualDub.zip (version 1.3 for ASF files)
  • http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/ (Direct X SDK which has the Filter Graph)
• MPEG Video Converter
  • http://www.flaskmpeg.net/ (FlaskMPEG video converter)

Video Processing

These tools are what you use to extract the quality out of the original files, and to make your video.

• Video Processing Application
  • http://www.virtualdub.org (good video processor app)
• Video Filters
  • http://sauron.mordor.net/dgraft/smooth.html (Smart Smoother)
  • http://sauron.mordor.net/dgraft/resize.html (Smart Resize)
  • http://sauron.mordor.net/dgraft/dnr.zip (Dynamic Noise Reduction 2.1)
  • http://sauron.mordor.net/dgraft/smart.html (Smart DeInterlace)
  • http://www.virtualdub.org/virtualdub_filters (more filters there)
• Video CODEC
  • http://www.math.berkeley.edu/~benrg/huffyuv.html (Lossless, fast, and open source)
  • http://www.projectmayo.com/opendivx/ (not compatible with the older DivX ;-))
  • http://www.divx-digest.com/software/divxcodec.html (location of DivX ;-))
  • http://www.jpg.com (Lossless Motion-JPEG CODEC, also has MJPEG and Wavelet)
• Video Editing
  • http://www.adobe.com/products/premiere/ (Adobe Premiere)
  • http://www.ulead.com/msp/ (Ulead Media Studio)
  • http://www.5star-shareware.com/Utilities/Video-Editors-Utilities/axogon-composer.html (Mechaman: Axogon Composer, a lightweight-but-full-featured compositor and non-linear editor)

Video Storage

These tools provide the ways to archive your video file, and to output it to tape.

• Tsunami MPEG Compressor (my personal favorite MPEG-1/2 encoder)
  • http://www.tmpgenc.com/ (official page, Japanese and English)
  • http://www.jamsoft.com/tmpgenc/ (unofficial English page)
• MPEG-2 Playback Card
  • http://www.sigmadesigns.com/products/hollywood_plus.htm (cheap video out)