Filming update

On Friday lunchtime (when everyone else was doing Sport Relief) we set up a bluescreen in the drama department and began filming the first bit of footage, there was some problem because our actor was busy (at Sport Relief, probably) but I stepped in and acted instead:

If one uses the blue as a chroma key, the resulting alpha mask you get is this, from within the editing software:

Yesterday Jonny came round at around lunchtime and we 'acted out' the scenes we wanted on the Halo 3: ODST multiplayer disk, before he got here I had the opportunity to mess around in Gmod and built a rocket, it's a useful asset for later on:

The acting was massively time-consuming, but it went well in the end. The filming however did not. We took the decision at the start to record in uncompressed 720p HD. Every other time I've done this on another computer and it's played at a slow framerate but at least it played it. This time every media player either refused to play the video or just showed one or two frames. The editor refused to edit it until I installed the proprietary codec included with the capture card, only then would it let us edit with virtually no audio and broken video:

All in all we captured 9.56 gigabytes of video, before Jonny arrives this morning I will record it all again in a compressed format.

I should also note that DivX brought out a new codec pack last week and I bought it yesterday. That tweet has a picture of the new converter.