You’re a busy person, and we have a thing for releasing as much Halo-related content our multi-fingered appendages can handle. That means—assuming you aren’t a speed reading super-soldier—you probably missed a few stories along the way. Not only do we forgive you, but we’ll also happily provide a convenient weekly wrap-up of absolutely everything we covered during the last seven days. Don’t worry about saying thank you. We’d rather you spend that time soaking in the goodness that is this entertaining collection of articles. Off you go!

News
The Halo Bulletin: 2.2.12
Motion Comics – Now Available on the Zune Video Marketplace
Reach Weekly Challenge – 1.30.12

Videos
Last Forger Standing 2 – A Community Forge Competition Show
Spartan Rube Goldberg Machine – A Halo: Reach Video
Reach Customz: Feed the Monster
Helljumper 1 – A Fan-made Halo Web Series
Soaring and Exploring – A Halo: Reach 1v1 Snipe
Without Honor – A Halo: Reach Machinima
Playtime: Season 3 Teaser – A Halo: Reach Machinima
Small Bump – A Halo 3 Montage
Minesweeper in Halo
The Lives of the Brutes – A Halo 3 Machinima
Double Barrel Roll – A Halo: Reach Racetrack Review
Fails of the Weak 72

Fun Stuff
Weekend Webcomic: Oh Fish
New Halo-themed Forza VIP Car!
Tattoo Tuesday: Matching Legendary Tattoos
Halo IRL: Exit 117
Friday Caption Fun 38
How to Make Machinima, Part 5 – by CruelLEGACEY

Community Happenings
Community Member of the Week: The Little Moa
Test Night with a Cartographer: 2.1.12
Forward Unto Dawn Podcast Episode Three
Tyrant’s Winter Mythic Recon Challenge

Halo: Reach Screenshots
Jet Packs – Fun with Forge
The Spark of Life – Simply Amazing
AT-AT – Fun with Forge

From CruelLEGACEY:

This is it, the final installment in my “How to Make Machinima” guide! This week, we’re going to look at audio editing and final mastering.

If you’re late to the party, here’s what we’ve covered so far:

• Part 1 – Voice Acting and Audio Recording
• Part 2 – Storyboards and Animatics
• Part 3 – Filming
• Part 4 – Video Editing

When we left off last week, I had just completed the video editing process. If you’re keeping pace with me, you should now have a complete video version of your new machinima. With the video cleanly edited and looking good, it is now time for me to turn our attention to the audio.

Before we dive in, I should say this: mixing the audio for your machinima can be very simple. All you really need to do is record your voices and slap them on top of your video footage in your editing program. But, if you’ve been following this guide so far, you already know that I never like to do anything the easy way. 😉

There are three primary layers to the audio landscape of any machinima or video. We’re going to go through them in the following order:

1. Voices
2. Music
3. In-game Audio

If you remember Part 1 of my guide, I have all the voice acting for Season 2 recorded and mixed into a single audio file. Up until now, this audio file has served as a placeholder. It is recorded in Mono, meaning it doesn’t yet have any of the panning in place. Now that I have the video fully edited, I can go back to the voice recording and add in all the panning and effects. When a character is on the left side of the screen, I can make it sound like their voice is coming from the left, and so on.

For all my audio editing, I use a multi-track recording program called Sonar. This recording program is often used for recording and mixing music. You can separately take a bunch of different instruments, such as drums, guitars, keyboards, etc, and record them on to their own tracks. You can then mix them all together into a stereo sound file. You would use Sonar to control the volume level of each instrument, their stereo placement, and you can even add different audio effects on to individual instruments. For example, I could make the drums sound like they are in the center, add some echo to the guitar and move it 45% to the left, then move the keyboards to the right and make them a little louder. This is exactly how I mix the audio for my machinima, except instead of instruments, I have voices.

I have every character’s dialog loaded into their own track in Sonar. This gives me the ability to adjust the volume level and panning of every character’s voice separately. It also allows me to adjust these parameters moment to moment. For example, if there is a shot in my machinima where a character walks from the left side of the screen to the right side of the screen, I can make their voice move in the same way.

With Sonar set up and ready to go, I open my Playtime Season 2 Video in a separate window and press Play. As I watch the video, I am taking note of each character’s position on-screen as they speak. I slowly move through the entire video, stopping every 10 or 15 seconds to go back into Sonar and make the appropriate adjustments to the volume and panning of each character’s voice. I continue this process until I’ve reached the end of the video. I now have all the dialog properly mixed.

On a side-note, I wanted to take a quick moment to discuss my general stylistic approach to mixing all the audio for Playtime Season 2. When I mixed the audio for Season 1, I took a very cinematic approach. The stereo panning of the voices was strongly exaggerated, I paid insanely close attention to each character’s distance from the camera and adjusted the volume of their voice accordingly, and there were spacial effects like echos and reverbs all over the place. Sit down and watch Playtime Season 1 on your big flat-screen TV with your sweet surround sound speakers cranked up real loud, and it sounds fantastic. Lots of detail and subtlety.

The problem was nobody watches machinima like that. Playtime is a web series, which means most people who watch it do so on their computer, with tiny little speakers that sit directly in front of them. In this situation, all the audio subtlety that I worked so hard to create just turns to mush. Worst of all, it could sometimes be a little tricky to hear what my characters were actually saying to each other.

So, I decided to take a slightly less subtle approach to mixing the audio in Playtime Season 2. There is still plenty of panning and reverb effects going on, but I made a point of keeping every character’s voice a little more front and center. The result is a slightly less cinematic audio mix, but one that is more clearly audible on tiny little laptop speakers or iPhone headphones.

So the voices are essentially done. Next up: music. I’m going to go through the process from the point of view of someone who is making their own music for their machinima.

I wrote and recorded all the Music for Playtime Season 2 myself. Being a musician, I have a simple-but-decent setup for recording at home. Nothing too fancy: a couple of microphones, keyboards, lots of guitars, a handful of amplifiers, drum machines, and a little mixer with a USB port to get all the sound on to my computer. To record the music, I use the same software that I use to record and edit the dialog: Sonar. I edit and mix each piece of music, then turn them into a stereo audio file.

With all the music complete, I once again boot up Sonar and open my “Playtime Season 2 – Audio Mix” file. I have all the voices mixed and ready to go. Now I begin adding the music in. I create another track specifically for music, and add in each piece of music at the appropriate times. I have complete control over the volume of each piece of music, and I fade them in and out accordingly. I do a lot of subtle adjustments to the volume of the music, particularly during scenes when characters need to speak while there is still music going on. Being able to hear the dialogue clearly is my primary concern, so I would actually turn down the volume of the music any time a character speaks. When done correctly, the viewer won’t notice the music constantly getting softer and louder around the dialog. This requires a lot of subtle adjustments, but is definitely worth the extra time.

I now have all the voices and music properly mixed together. Only one thing left: the in-game audio.

In its current form, my Playtime Season 2 video file has no voices or music, but it does have all the in-game audio that got recorded along with the video. All the footsteps, gunfire, and environmental sounds (waterfalls, birds chirping, etc). With so many different audio layers coming together, I need to have direct control over the mix of the ambient noise as well as the voices and music.

Using a program called Video Converter Pro, I rip the in-game audio from my Season 2 video file. I now have all the in-game audio in a 25 minute long audio file. I take this audio file and add it into my Sonar audio mix. I then go through the entire season again, adjusting the volume of the in-game audio so that it balances properly with the music and dialogue. Once I have everything balanced nicely, I use Sonar to create a single stereo audio WAV file. This WAV file is the complete Playtime Season 2 audio track. It is now a simple matter to take this audio file, and add it to the silent Season 2 video file in my video editor. I press Publish, and after a couple of hours of rendering I have Playtime Season 2 in its complete and finished state on my desktop. After two months and over 300 hours of work, Playtime Season 2 is finished!

Thank you very much for reading my “How to Make Machinima” guide. Above all else, it is important to remember that there is no single “best way” to make machinima. Every machinima maker develops their own techniques and processes based on what works best for them. You don’t have to follow these exact steps to make a great video. But hopefully reading about my approach to making machinima will give you an idea of where to start.

If anyone has questions, feel free to contact me.

– CruelLEGACEY
www.cruellegaceyproductions.com
www.playtimeshow.com

 

From Rooster Teeth:

Gus and Geoff bring forth a wonderful bounty of failure in Halo: Reach. Hold hands with them as they giggle their way through this new batch.

Editor’s note: Language is mature. So is content. Consider yourself warned!

Fails of the Weak 72

Last week, for our Friday Caption Fun festivities, you provided quips for an image featuring one of Halo 3’s most deadly weapons. Here are the top captions you left for that particular image!

 

“This is one of the many reasons why MacGyver got banned when he tried to play Halo.” –spy998
“Covenant forces fell down laughing at the Spartan’s new weapon… until they saw what it could do.” –GunRunner48
“Told ya you didn’t need Armor Lock to deflect rockets.” –Kroadge
“Do you think maybe 343 went a little too far when trying to recreate the effects of the “God Pistol” from Halo: CE?” –Tenikov
“Are you kidding? I said CLONE Wars!” –Ninjaywolf
“It was after the fourth explosion that Jimmy figured out there was something wrong with the loudspeaker.” –Rolling Flame
“So this is what Halsey was protecting under Sword Base….” –DarkEdge
“When the UNSC first introduced the new handheld C1 surveillance cameras, the Spartans were not impressed.
Until they found out how to operate the flash on it, that is.” –Dae Ravenheart
“Press RT to fire… Wait, what? How’d I do that?!?” –ArchedParasite
“Can you hear me now?” –Coux73

Now that we’ve wrapped up that picture, let’s start a new one. Up for your captioning pleasure this week is a picture featuring a rather explosive vehicle. Soak in the screenshot, then leave your witty and relevant quip in a comment. Off you go!

Author: moundskills

 

From ducain23:

This is a really fun racetrack by oomishday3 featuring a double barrel roll and a front flip. Enjoy!

Download the map

From MythicTyrant:

Welcome to the first of nine weekly challenges geared toward pitting you against the most challenging aspects of the Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST, and Halo: Reach Campaigns with a chance at gaining a very precious reward. Each week, we will be selecting a campaign mission from each of these games. Each challenge will become progressively harder since we are ordering the missions from easiest to most challenging. The first nine weeks will be comprised of missions from Halo: Reach, week 10 will surround a special raffle for the folks who manage to complete each of the previous nine challenges, and the weeks that follow will focus on the most challenging missions from both Halo 3 and Halo 3: ODST.

This week’s missions? Complete Nightfall on Mythic Difficulty and submit your entry for a chance to win three months of Xbox LIVE Gold and Reach Recon! The rules are fairly simple. Load up the mission, make sure your settings are on Solo Legendary, switch on ALL 13 skulls (both Gold and Silver), and also turn on FFA scoring. For Halo 3: ODST, there are only 12 skulls, so don’t go looking for the 13th! When you complete the mission successfully, upload the film to your File Share, and send me a tweet on Twitter with the hashtag #wmrcentry along with a hyperlink to your film. Don’t worry about tagging the saved film. Simply put “Mythic Difficulty” somewhere in the film’s description, and that will suffice.

Just a few other tidbits of information for you to keep in mind:

1) You must have an Xbox LIVE Gold subscription.
2) You must have your XBL gamertag linked to your Bungie.net profile.
3) The mission must be completed while you are online and during the seven-day contest period. Make sure you can view it in your Game History.
4) The mission must be completed in one setting. No save/quit abusing! Only Solo Mythic rules apply here (Legendary, all skulls active, FFA scoring).
5) If you die, you must exit and reload the mission. This generates a ‘clean’ carnage report for the film.
6) Only one submission is allowed per person, per challenge.
7) You must submit your entry during the seven-day contest time period.

This contest begins 12:00 AM Pacific Time on Friday, 2/3/2012, and lasts for seven days. This gives you all day Friday, an entire weekend, plus four additional weekdays to complete the mission. The winner will be notified the following weekend.

To help you out, there are a few tools to help boost your stamina and get you on your Mythic feet. Aside from Tyrant’s HBO Mythic guide and the massive Mythic Difficulty thread on Bungie.net, you can find other videos of Mythic and LASO runs on my website www.mythictyrant.com. Keep in mind we’re not judging you for time or score, so if you’d rather hang back and shoot your way through, that’s perfectly fine as well. Just worry about getting to the finish line. That by itself is an accomplishment you should be proud to have under your belt!

 

From Teh Spearhead:

“David Attenborough” returns to give you another informative look on the Brutes, otherwise known as the Jiralhanae. See? We’re educating you already!

The Lives of the Brutes – A Halo 3 Machinima