That was hard! It was a trainwreck of failures.

• First, i had about 143.472 image files captured. That looked a bit worrisome.
• The images were having serial numbers in the ld22-frameXXXXX.png format. However, as mentioned, there were more than 99.999 images, so half of them were using an extra digit and, thus, not sorted correctly.
• So i had to write a script to fix that.
• Then there were a lot of gaps. I’m using the screencapture Mac OS X command-line program to take the shots, but if the screen has blanked out, nothing is saved.
• So i had to write a script to fix that by using a filler image for that.
• Then i had to wait for almost a half-day for them to be converted to a (huge) .mpg file with ffmpeg.
• And after that, iMovie (the editor i usually use and so far has worked well) decided that it won’t support .mpg files.
• So i had to wait for a few extra hours for the huge .mpg file to be converted to a huge .mp4 file that iMovie can open.
• iMovie, however, saw through my scheme and decided that, no, it won’t open the file. It didn’t even tell me why – it just acted as if i decided at the last moment to cancel the import process.
• So i had to search for another editor. While doing that i noticed that all open source video editor for Mac OS X are either abandoned old editors from the PowerPC era that Mac OS X Lion doesn’t support anymore, or experimental ports of mostly Linux-based tools that may work if you are lucky enough and willing to compile from source.
• Fortunately, i also noticed that Blender, the 3D tool i use, has a video editing mode. Wtf, how i missed that for so long (ok, i had heard of it, but i thought it was some sort of simple annotations or whatever…).
• So i spent an hour learning how to do video editing with Blender.
• And finally made the video as i wanted it. That is, i added an intro image and removed the big delays while i was sleeping.
• Then i had to wait for another half-day (or so) for Blender to export a huge .mp4 file. I hoped it wouldn’t be huge, but it actually was about 2.2GB :-/
• So i decided to do the conversion properly with ffmpeg to H.264 and MP4 myself. And these formats were mandatory since i wanted to have (a bit of) control over the video quality and YouTube doesn’t seem to mess with the video encoding with these formats.
• Unfortunately the ffmpeg version i had wasn’t compiled with libx264 support. So no H.264 encoding for me.
• So i tried to use a version from Linux using VirtualBox since Debian would probably have it an apt-get install away and i was so tired of all of this.
• After another hour configuring repositories (because, apparently, Debian didn’t have it an apt-get install away due to licensing issues…) i managed to have a x264-capable ffmpeg converting the file.
• Only it was way too slow. Like, 1fps slow. Making that video would take more than the game itself.
• So Debian idea scrapped, let’s go back on Mac OS X. And compile our ffmpeg with x264.
• And thus i downloaded code for libx264 (i already had compiled ffmpeg previously), yasm (that libx264 needs) and a couple of others.
• I spent a couple of hours just trying to get ffmpeg compiled. Incompatibilities between (default) flags, the installed version of gcc, features, etc and almost no mention of it on the web. Bleh. But i finally managed to do it.
• And so, yet more hours of waiting to get ffmpeg convert the 2.2GB video to something i can upload…
• That would be a 415MB video.
• So, i left it uploading and went to sleep fully tired… and finally:

Making of
“She Loves You”
Ludum Dare #22
timelapse
Sorry, i couldn’t figure out how to embed a YouTube video

After watching it, i also figured out what exactly was missing from the game:

What was missing from She Loves You

Next time i’m going to fix that

Tags: timelapse

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 20th, 2011 at 5:22 pm and is filed under LD #22. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.