Video Creation Howto

It is rather straightforward to create videos from globulation 2 games, thanks to the videoshot feature.

1. Export videoshot from glob2

You first need to export the videoshot from glob2. To do this, run glob2 with the following flag:

glob2 -G -vs name_of_your_videoshot -s640x480

• First check that you do have enough space in your GLOB2_DIR/videoshots, where GLOB2_DIR is ~/.glob2 on Unix and installation directory on Windows. By enough space, I mean lot's of space. Each frame will be an uncompressed bmp file, so for 640x480 images you'll roughly need 1 MB per frame. There is 25 frames per second, so count 1.5 GB per minute of game.
• -r640x480 sets a low resolution, remember, the 1.5 GB per minute is only for 640x480 images, switch to 1280x1024 and you'll get around 6 GB per minute.
• -G disables OpenGL acceleration, as there seems to be a bug in SDL when exporting the framebuffer using GL.

2. Add website banner

A video showing glob2 without mentioning its web site is not very usefull. The trick here is to use imagemagick's tool mogrify to convert the raw bmp to png images with a text banner. To that end, you can use a simple perl script such as this one:

#!/usr/bin/perl
my @files = glob("*.bmp");
foreach $file (@files)
{
	print "Processing $file\n";
	system("mogrify -format png -pointsize 35 -fill white -draw 'text 40,450 \"http://www.globulation2.org\"' $file");
}