From Rooster Teeth:

Jack 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!

Fails of the Weak 71

HRSotD (short for Halo: Reach Screenshot of the Day) is a daily feature dedicated to the wonders of Halo: Reach screenshots and the artists that capture these amazing images. A variety of shots—all of which are completely unaltered and captured in Halo: Reach’s theater mode—are included for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy the varied selection of images, and maybe even find inspiration to make your own!

Author: sheesh1991

From CruelLEGACEY:

Welcome to part four of my “How to Make Machinima” guide! In my previous posts, I’ve covered the process of voice acting and sound recording, followed by storyboards and animatics, then filming. This week, we’re going to look at editing your machinima.

The editing process is the single largest part of production for me, so I’m going to split it into two sections. The first section involves taking all the footage I’ve recorded and putting it together into a complete rough cut. The second section involves taking that rough cut and adding the final music and audio mixes (I’ll cover this section next week).

As I mentioned before, I use Bungie Pro Video Rendering to take all the footage I record and transform it into usable video files. Every clip I record gets uploaded to my File Share, then rendered into 720p WMV files. I do this for a couple reasons. My computer is a piece of junk and lacks the video processing capabilities to handle most capture devices properly. Bungie Pro, on the other hand, produces excellent looking video. By using Bungie Pro, I automatically have a backup version of every single video clip I’ve ever recorded, and they’re all available in my Bungie.net profile.

Once I’m done filming, I go to my list of rendered videos and download every clip. For Playtime Season 2, I recorded over 150 clips, ranging in length from five seconds to over one minute per shot.

For the sake of organization and for my own sanity, I divide these clips into groups, or “scenes.” Some scenes will contain only four or five different clips, other scenes will contain as many as 30 clips. I grab a scene’s worth of clips, and load them into my video editing program. Up until recently, I used Window’s Movie Maker for all my video editing. I’ve recently switched to something more advanced, but the most important thing is to use a program you are comfortable with.

If you remember part two of my guide, I had already created animatic videos using storyboard sketches and a rough cut of the recorded dialog. Using those animatics as a guide, I edit my newly recorded video files together into a rough cut of the scene.

Because of all the time I spent storyboarding each scene, I already have a very good idea of how to cut every scene together. This means I end up with far less wasted footage. For example, while making Playtime Season 1, I only ended up using about half of the footage I shot. For Season 2, I used all but two of the 150 clips I filmed. On top of that, having the dialog pre-recorded means that I already have a sense of the rhythm and timing of each scene. All of this adds up to a relatively smooth and fast initial editing process.

A couple weeks ago, I posted this clip of one of my animatic sequences:

Now, here’s the same scene after filming. You’ll notice a few differences in the timing of the different camera angles, but overall it is very similar to the original storyboard.

Once I have a rough cut of the scene put together, I’ll watch it start-to-finish a few times to make sure I’m happy with the sequence of the different shots and camera angles. I might move a few minor things around and trim some time off a few shots. Generally speaking, my first cut of a scene is what I call a “long cut,” meaning that some of the shots are a little longer than they’ll end up being in the finished version. This early in the editing process, it can sometimes be difficult to know for sure if I’ve got the timing of every single cut just right. If I ever think to myself maybe I should cut away from that shot a little sooner, I leave it as it is. It will be far easier for me to cut a few seconds of footage out later than it would be to add it back in if I change my mind.

From here, it’s a matter of repeating the process for every single scene in your machinima. In my case, once I have a rough cut of every scene, I slap them all together into one, giant video. This is another way in which Playtime Season 2 differs from Season 1. The first season of Playtime was made as four self-contained episodes. Season 2 was made as one continuous video. It wasn’t until after I completed the season that I split it up into individual episodes.

Now that I’ve put all the different scenes together into a single video, I have a complete rough version of the entire season! The end is close…. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel…. almost.

The final major step is the audio editing and music, but there is one more thing to do before I get to that. I take my complete Season 2 rough cut, and watch the heck out of it. I watch it over and over and over again, looking at the flow of each scene and the progression of the story over the entire season. I’ll make lots of little cuts; a half-second off the end of a shot here, a couple seconds off the beginning of a shot there, etc.

I’ll also look for problems with continuity or anything else that needs fixing. This is my last chance to make any substantial changes to my machinima. Once I move on to the final audio editing, I’ll be committed to what I’ve got. I’ll be able to cut little pieces out, but I won’t be able to add things or move anything around in any substantial way.

It just so happens that I did find a logistical problem with the continuity of the Playtime Season 2. Nothing major, but enough of a problem to annoy me. Luckily, catching the problem at this stage made it fairly simple to fix. A few simple cuts, and the issue was solved!

We’re in the home stretch now. Next week, I’ll cover the process of recording the music and mixing the final audio. See you then!

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

Last week, for our Friday Caption Fun festivities, you provided quips for an image featuring a potentially painful situation. Here are the top captions you left for that particular image!

 

“Ouch! Charlie bit me!” –Gamerguy378
“Ze top of your head… it is so POINTY!” –ZZoMBiE13
“This is the last time I volunteer to feed the Elites.” –Link1201
“Sanghieli Thul, not understanding what a high five is, thought that Spartan Tim was offering his hand to eat. In fact,
such social misunderstandings are what initially cause the Human-Covenant war.” –ThreeSixXero
“Don’t bite the hand that feeds you…. especially when it’s a Spartan that’s feeding you.” –Sir Kamikaze666
“This is why you don’t ask an Elite to pull your finger.” –Master Al64
“Got your…. wait, where is your nose?”” –Xerzaph
“They called him… the Elite Whisperer.” –Coux73
“And that’s how Rtas ‘Vadum lost his mandible.” –W1ltz

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 one of Halo 3’s most deadly weapons. Soak in the screenshot, then leave your witty and relevant quip in a comment. Off you go!

Author: HI IM CAPS LOCK

 

From Rooster Teeth:

Geoff, Jack, Michael and Ray hit the mound to test out a little baseball in Blood Gulch. Hey Batta Batta Batta… BLAM!

Things to do Halo: Reach – RBI Halo

Office of Halo Intelligence, or OHI for short, is a semi-regular diary-type feature brought to you by various members of the Halo 4 development team. Kiki Wolfkill, Executive Producer of Halo 4, kindly agreed to write the second entry. We hope you enjoy an inside look at the making of our next title!

From the 1.25.12 edition of the Halo Bulletin:

Sweet! I feel honored to get to contribute a little blurb to this week’s Bulletin. I’ll do my best to try to keep you entertained for at least 15 seconds with all sorts of savory and unsavory details about the goings-on here on the Halo 4 team. In all seriousness, this team is doing some extraordinary work, and I look forward to being able to share more of their heroic deeds periodically over the next few months.

So, what the hell are we up to? Well, as even Kotaku noticed, Seattle was hit with a Snowpocalypse of proportions unseen since, wait for it…. 2011. Some 343-ers were stranded at home, racking up gamerscore and ruining their futures with hours of TV viewing (my marathons of choice: Downton Abbey and Spartacus). Now we’re back and man, catch-up is a b****.

We’ve had an action-packed week of internal mission reviews, a deep-dive with the Marketing and PR teams, and a quick little exec review thrown in for good measure. It may sound like a lot of reviews and that’s because it is…. we are in full execution mode. There are hundreds of moving parts across 343 and Microsoft Studios that need to be aligned and coordinated—now is the time to get all our ducks in a row. While it’s been a little hectic making up for last week’s snow days and going through these reviews, it’s always invigorating to be able to get the game in front of folks who aren’t staring at it every minute of every day. I do look forward to getting back to our normal routine of game-building, playtesting, and general creative rabble-rousing. More on this later.

Oh—did I mention that my favorite hour this week was our music review? Magic….

Kiki

 

From MythicTyrant:

Welcome to the Tyrant’s Halo 3 Legendary Walkthrough! Each week I’ll be taking you on a detailed tour of Halo 3 on solo Legendary with in depth, narrated video guides brought to you in high definition. Each week a celebrity from the Halo community will be guest hosting with me in addition to giving away awesome avatar prizes at the end of each episode.

Be sure to follow me on Twitter for a chance to win free XBL avatar prizes each week! The day of release, I will be asking ONE question regarding the released episode. The first person to get it right will receive a 343 Industries t-shirt avatar code: one male & one female.

Tyrant’s Halo 3 Legendary Walkthrough – Crow’s Nest

 

The Halo Waypoint forums are currently down for maintenance. Once we’re done clearing out all the cobwebs, you’ll be able to once again satisfy your craving for thought-provoking, in-depth Halo discussion.

In the meantime, playing some Halo may help pass the time. Post your gamertag in a comment if you’re looking to fill your online party!

UPDATE: Forums are back up. Have at it!

HRSotD (short for Halo: Reach Screenshot of the Day) is a daily feature dedicated to the wonders of Halo: Reach screenshots and the artists that capture these amazing images. A variety of shots—all of which are completely unaltered and captured in Halo: Reach’s theater mode—are included for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy the varied selection of images, and maybe even find inspiration to make your own!

Author: HEY iM GREEN