Billy doesn't want anything advocating cracked programs on bartz, so you will have to find out how to get a copy of fraps and vegas 4.0 on your own. Remember to get vegas 4.0 and nothing higher. Everything after 4.0 is crap.

Running Fraps

Check http://www.fraps.com/faq.php for exactly how the menu's in fraps look.

1. In the FPS tab disable both the overlay display hotkey and benchmark hotkey. Set the overlay display corner to the upper right corner of your screen. When games are running you will see a yellow number rapidly going up and down. This is your framerate in the game. In PVP you will generally get 10-30 FPS.

2. Go to screenshots tab and disable screenshot hotkey. Lineage 2 has a build in screen capture feature. You can however use this feature in fraps to capture screens from movies in windows media player. Just make sure you disable this or set it to a key you never use in L2 or else you will end up with hundreds of screenshots on your hard drive.

3. In the movies tab set your FPS to about 30 FPS. You will generally never get higher than that in PVP. Set the FPS higher if you have some crazy computer that your parents bought you that you shouln't even have you spoiled little shit.

Click "record sound" and "detect best sound input". Also make sure "record full size" is checked.

4. Set your video record hotkey to something you will never use and that you won't accidentally bump. Number pad 0 is a good option. When you start recording the yellow number in the upper right will turn into a red number. Hit the same key again to stop recording.

Recording ingame footage

Every every every time you log into lineage 2 you should have fraps running. Have fun alt-tabbing to get fraps going whilst getting PKed. Fraps only eats about 2 megs of your ram so just run it all the time.

Set gamma to 5. Audio to 5. Ingame resolution to 800x600.

LEARN TO PLAY L2 AT 800X600 RESOLUTION. Everything seems too big at first but you get used to it fast, and 800x600 makes absolutely beautiful movies. If you try recording at any larger resolution you won't be able to read damage or chat or even be able to tell what the fuck is going on. 800x600. Trust me. I'm finalElf.

Hit your video record hotkey to start recording. Test it in your loading screen. Set your audio levels to "5" and make sure sound is recorded. Lineage 2 videos without sound are like hookers with a penis. They look good at first but then you realize all they can do is suck.

If you run ventrilo or TS on the same computer as L2 you will be able to hear vent sounds whilst playing. This is a good thing. Don't be afraid to let someone hear your clanmates nerdy voices during pvp. It adds to the ambiance. Silent L2 videos are really really really really lame. If you are really pro you will have ventrilo running on a different computer so you can keep in game sounds cranked to 5 at all times.

Remember that while recording you cannot talk on vent. All people will hear is your ingame sounds. You must stop recording to talk on ventrilo.

Importing Footage Into Vegas

Record at least 2 diffent 5 second segments of video from the lineage 2 loading screen for a test. Remember that the FPS you get at the loading screen will be much higher than what you get in PVP.

Exit the game and load up vegas. Your fraps movies will be in c:\fraps. Put vegas in window mode and click and drag the two videos from their folder into the grey area in vegas (the timeline).

Since you recorded audio there should be 2 seperate timelines overlapping each other: one video one audio. Click menu option "view" at the top and check the box for "video preview":

Now you have a mini preview of where you are on the timeline in the bottom left.

Remember that fraps movies aren't the only type of movies you can use. Take any mpeg or most avi files and import them as well. Nothing spices up a movie more than some old kung fu footage or cartoons in bad taste. Better yet, use Dave Chappel. You already have kazaa. Go download it.

Speeding up/slowing down/cutting footage

Cut sections from the beginning or end of your movie via left clicking and dragging on the far left or far right sides of your video and dragging inward. This cuts off parts of the video that you don't want, like that part when you died at the end. Unless the asshole that killed you was also running fraps no one will ever know anyway. Fuck him.

To speed up or slow down a video segment do the exact same thing except HOLD CONTROL. You will see accordian like lines appearing on the video segment.

To split a video into 2 seperate parts (this is the same for audio segments) left click on the timeline where you want the split to occur. Click the menu option "edit" and scroll down to "split":

You can now click and drag those two video segments independant of each other. Yay. You are so fucking pro.

[b]Transitions[b/]

Click the + or - signs in the bottom right corner of the timeline to zoom into the timeline further. Zooming in allows you to make quicker transitions or show quick flashes of screenshots. Left click and drag one of those video segements and slide it halfway over the 2nd video segment. The X that shows in the overlapping portions of the transition symbolizes a terrorist threat. Err no wait. It symbolizes a transition:

In the bottom left corner of vegas you will see a tab for "transitions". You can click and drag these various transitions onto the overlapping portion of the video segments to create transition effects. The default transition is a fade effect. Less is more. Don't kill yourself with too many transitions.

Take a break

If you got this far it's time to get off your damn computer. Your mom is going to be pissed at you for staying up too late anyway. Finish the rest tomorrow.

Video effects

Woo woo the fun part. Right next to the transitions tab at the bottom left corner of your screen is the video FX tab. Effects work just like transitions. Click and drag them onto the video segment where you want the effect to be. You can use more than one effect in a video segment.

Example:

Go to "brightness and contrast" effect tab and click and drag the "brighter" effect onto the video. L2 videos are typically too dark anyway (even at 5 gamma) and you will probably have to do this for all video segments anyway.

Now go to the "glow" effect section and click and drag "white soft glow" onto the timeline. This is the effect that Mikey47 first used for ThoR back in C1, and I still use it in every video today. You will get a window that pops up when you click and drag the effect onto the video segment that allows you to tweak the specifics on how you bright you want the glow to be. All effects in vegas can be tweaked and customized, it just takes time to learn the menus.

The rest of the effects are self explanitory, and I'm too lazy to go through them all. Play with it.

See timing zoom/video FX section for how to make an effect fade in or out during a movie.

Zooming In

Right click a video segment and go to "video event pan crop". You will get a popup window with alot of confusing numbers and shit. I still don't know what the hell they all do; but this is what you need to know.

There is a mini window with 8 small grey or blue boxes around its perimiter and one small circle in the middle. Left click and drag the box on the bottom right inward. This makes the square smaller. Where you see the square in the mini window is where the camera will zoom in once the movie is rendered. Observe:

you can click and drag this box to anywhere in the window and it will zoom to that location. To time your zoom exactly where you want it follow the next steps.

Timing Zoom/Video FX

In the popup window that you got when you dragged an effect onto your timeline or in the popup window that you got for "video event pan crop" there was a small grey timeline in the bottom right corner of the window. This mini timeline allows you to zoom in/zoom out at a specific point in your movie or make a video effect lessen or greaten during a video segment.

I like cheese.

Right click a video segment on the timeline and go to "video event pan crop". When the window pops up double click in the center of the mini timeline. A small grey diamond will be created. This is a reference point for exactly where the camera will be zoomed in at that point in the video. For each diamond you create on the mini timeline you may specify a different part of the screen to be zoomed into by modifying the position of the box in the window as previously described. The zoom will slowly transition between the points on the mini timeline.

For example if you created a reference point at the beginning of the timeline that had the camera zoomed way in, and a reference point at the end that had the camera zoomed way out, the video would start at an extreme zoom and slowly pan outward until the end of the video segment.

You can make the zoom easier to manage by using the earlier mentioned splitting technique. Split a video in two place and only modify "video event pan crop" in the center portion that you created. Now you don't have to filter though a 5 minute video to find the exact point where someone died to zoom in. Just split that section out and modify it.

Practice by creating multiple reference points on the mini timeline and setting each to a different zoom, then playing the video and watching it in the "video preview" window.

This principal works exactly the same for the video FX. You can specify multiple points on the mini timeline and have a different level of effect in each.

For example you can have a "brighter" effect that gets brighter then darker then brighter by creating 3 reference points on the mini timeline, each with a brighter or darker level of the effect:

Overlapping Video Segments

If you have two video segments and you want them to play on top of each other, or if you want to do that crazy effect where your video only shows in the shadow of some text media, do this:

Overlap two seperate video segments on the timeline. On the top timeline click on the button illustrated for "composite mode". Set type to "source alpha" to "add". These two video segments are now playing on top of each other at the same time:

Take this same effect but put a piece of text media on the bottom, and you have an effect where the video will play only inside the letters of the text on the screen. Pro imo.

Fading In/Out In Video OR Audio

Right click on in the grey area to the right of any video or audio segment and scroll down to "insert empty event". You can make this event longer or shorter by clicking/dragging it outward or inward. Left click and drag this blank media so that a portion overlaps a video or audio segment. This creates an automatic fade out or fade in for both video and audio.

A great example of using this whilst making a video is if you run out of in game footage but the song you are using isn't over. Since you can't speed up the song, split the song using the previously mentioned split technique, then insert an empty event after the end of the audio. Click and drag it over the last few seconds of song and it will automatically fade out.

Rendering

If you are using any version of vegas but 4.0 I pity you. They fucked it all up after 4. If you are using version 5 or higher they don't have default rendering templates you can use. So good luck with that shit.

If you were smart are you are using 4.0, render as such:

Go to "file" then "render as". Your settings will be in wmv9 format at 3 mega bits per second. Don't bitch and scream at me about xvid or divx or any of that bullshit. Those codecs all work terrible for lineage 2. Not to mention the fact that they take at least 3 times as long to render. My computer hates the divx codec, and so should you.

Notice the two small triangles with the grey area in between above the timeline. That is your "loop region". If that option is checked when you render your movie only what is between those two yellow triangles will be rendered. You can make a very small loop region that only covers a quick transition or fade if you want to see exactly how that effect is going to look when you finally render your movie. It always sucks to spend 4 hours rendering and find out you fucked up a transition.

Uploading

Yay for filefront. People complain alot about it but it is free and download speeds are not horrible. Just go to filefront.com and create an account, then upload. Easy as pie.

THE NUMBER ONE RULE IN VEGAS

If you fuck something up, just hit control+z. Instant undo. That saved my ass more times than I can count.

Also know that vegas automatically creates backup files as you edit your timeline, so if vegas gives you an error and closes or your computer crashes, next time you open vegas it will ask you if you want to load the backup file. Nice imo. To be safe though always save your project files as you go, and use different names each time so that if you screw something up and don't know it then save, you can go back.

Good luck, have fun, and if you ever use these video techniques against me I will show up at your house and eat your cat.