Im wondering if anyone has done this...

editing the movies,

Actually I have tried editing the movies from 4 into a movie, with the occasional in game scene for space combat or something. While I was please with my initial attempts, my computer that has all the editing equipment and software got vaped by a power surge. So I couldn't continue with it anymore.
 
hi guys, sorry i havent been around for a while. had some computer problems, and then work took hold, but im back and ready to get into this project. Ive currently located a copy of the doublesided dvd of wc4, anyone have any advice as to how id go about extracting the cutscenes from it??
 
True enough

I myself have always said, "Man, why couldn't they just make the movie like it was in the games." In Wing Commander 3 and 4 it really was good movie directing. A project like the one you want to take on would be a good idea. Then I could show people who haven't really seen the games all the cool cutscenes without having to load all my saved games. Good luck with that guy.
 
Flood, you can just try looking up "DVD extractor" or "VOB ripper" or any combination on a search engine to get a program that extracts the DVD's VOB files to editable video formats. There is a program bundle that I used to have that had all kinds of DVD ripping utilities, and a few of them ripped the WC4 DVD's VOB files relatively well.

I've been wanting to make a "theatrical" version of WC4. Extracting the original files and editing them together is the easiest part, and to most people it seems that it would be easy to edit the scenes together, it would just take time out of their lives. The problem is that most scenes don't have anything leading up to them; scenes mid-mission just pop up, with no shots of the battle before, and most of the scenes on the various carriers just start with no transistion, and just end with Blair walking away.

If one would to cut WC4's scenes together, it just would be a series of random scene changes of conversations and mission briefings, with a couple of the major film sequences already compiled (the Black Lance base scenes, or the easily spliceable Grand Assembly scene). The most logical thing to do would be to add scenes taken from the in-game engine, but doing that would severly reduce the quality of the final product.

I've really thought about doing a project like this, but it would require a lot. It would need new 3D scenes, a lot of sound editing and manipulation, and let's not forget excessive video editing. Although I've really wanted to do this project, it's simply not feasible at this stage for me and my scheduel. I'd be willing to help anyone who tries it, but I know I won't be doing any work for it by myself for a long time.
 
i already have a pretty dedicated team willing to replicate the style of the 3d cinematics using current 3d graphics technology, as of right now , were all using 3d studio max, and i have quite a few 3d models of the in game ships done. so re-creating the key missions from the in game portion wont be terribly difficult. still the hardest part is finding the points of the game that make up the crux of the storyline and editing it down to a reasonable 2 and a half hour time frame
 
ok ive come to my next junction, and ill use a lot of your opinions on this one... what would you all consider the most important events of WC4, and what do you think id be able to leave out?? also which way should the story go?
 
Try to stick to the novel. Cut out the unimportant missions (those that don't involve the main plot), decide on which on-ship interactions you want. But, this is your project, it should really be up to you. If your first cut is three hours long, you can figure out to shorten it afterwards.
 
I've been contemplating this project as well, but have been limited because I don't have a good enough computer at home yet. I actualy made a playlist of what I called the "good" version in which blair goes around always making everyone feel better and also defects at the earliest opportunity, I also included the carrier jumps when needed (The running time of this version was over 3 hours). I have been planning on doing an alternate version as well where basicaly blair makes all the opposite choices...

Anyway here are a few of my thoughts... The telamon missions have to stay as does the black lance base scene. That means that it is essential to include the early mission where you "free" the bioconvergence chemist to allow blair to recognize her later on..

There are a lot of scenes that are simply blair cheering people up that could be dropped for time. However you loose some of the wonderful characterization. But If you decide who you want to focus on more (for exaple you might want to keep maniacs scenes and drop catscratches... or hawks. whatever you choose.)

The pirate missions early on could be dropped but you way want to inlude the portion where they discover the burnt out hull of a transport. That leads me to the idea I had (maybe you had it too) to use extracted dialogue from the gameplay to fill in between the existing video. I'm sure you could use it and other sounds for the "new" scenes you are talking about making.

Oh, and just triming the begining and end of scenes a few seconds could shave precious minutes of the end product. After all they were never made with the idea that they need to transition smoothly into the next scene. So if a scene ends with a long thoughtful stare, you could still keep it and voice-over the begining dialogue of the next scene and then cut partway into the scene rather than waiting.
 
Well having my limited exposure to video editing I've got to say...what you're proposing (even if you were just shooting for 60 minutes) would be a hell of a lot of work...but what the heck? It's not my time and I'd enjoy watching what you made but you got a rough road ahead of you. Good luck!
 
I managed to piece together a movie from the Privateer 2 cutscenes. Made three different versions since the different choices you had presented different cutscenes. Added some of the space flight scenarios here and there. Came out well. Its just too bad there never was a DVD version of P2 like there was a DVD version for WC4.
 
Each disc takes about 670mb, vcd format. New discs in dvd format using Divx Pro 5.1.1 should be ready soon. Just got a new dvd burner and this will be a great break-in project for that drive. ;)
 
seeing as you have some experience in doing something like this, as you did with privateer 2, (which by the way was one of my choices for this project before i decided to go with WC4) i would really like to get some tips and input from you as my project progresses
 
Sorry for the delayed post..

I would be happy to help in any way I can. Thanks to great utilities such as Mario "HC1" Brito's WC movie player, which can extract these FMV's to uncompressed avi files, makes the processes less of a pain when creating either VCD or DVD discs.
I just wish the mpg conversion didnt take so darn long!


I use virtualdub, Dr. DivX and DivX 5.11 to edit the files and avi2mpg to perform the avi to mpg conversion. Then if I am making a VCD, I just use any old CD burner program, which most of them can do VCD discs. For DVD's I use Sonic MyDVD authoring software. Not the greatest..but is very easy to work with and quite fast in its processes.
 
Any progress on this project? I've been mucking about with some of the scenes from WC4, and I see what a previous poster meant when they said about disjointed scenes. Since most scenes on the Lexington and Intrepid have no build up to them, they'd have to be preceeded by, for example, a flyby of the carrier, and that would get old very quickly.

I've also noticed that not all the movies are in the same aspect ratio, it changes from scene to scene. While mucking about I've made a short clip of a couple of bits of scenes joined together to see what a 'film' version of WC4 might look like. You can view this clip here if anyone's interested (uses Xvid Codec).

You'll be able to see what I mean about the aspect ratio: the avi is cropped to a 16x9 ratio, and some of the clips fit it perfectly, but others still have a small letterbox.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top