A few instructions for people who would like to make montages soon of any FPS game, specifically full BF1942.
The quality of your frags
If you want others to be impressed by your footage, make sure to choose your game mode wisely. CTF and TDM come first here, because most 16/32/64 player servers, public servers, have all kind of players on from all skill levels and are mostly Conquest. CTF has a more strategic aspect for movie making, while TDM is where most clanwars take place. It is also much more easier to get sprees on those big public servers than on a private clan server where players are usually much better skill wise. Always try to get footage of you or your clan during cups, tournaments, clanwars and scrims, as getting even a small spree during those events is far less frequent than on public servers because of the quality of the people you challenge. If you cannot get video footage of clanwars and such, you can always play on small clan servers of about 10 to 15 slots.
Filming your gameplay
When recording yourself play with HyperCam, Xfire, Fraps or whatever, make sure you record a lot of sprees, as opposed to only "1 kill per clip" clips, unless you're getting special frags, or course, like knife-throws, stabs or no scopes. Try getting as much kills as possible in the shortest amount of time, you don't want to film a spree of, say, five kills and have the first two right at the beggining of your clip and the other three five minutes later. Always speed the clip up when nothing important happens in between the frags. That way your audience won't fall asleep while viewing your video. Make sure you have enough footage to make a short film of about five minutes long, the ideal time for frag movies.
Video editing
Video editing can make or break a montage. Now, making a good frag movie doesn't necessarily mean you have to have the newest, top-notch video editor. Windows Movie Maker, even for experienced people, can do the job perfectly, even if it's features are quite limited. In the editing process, make sure not to have too much effects or different transitions. Choose one transition you like, and always use that same transition throughout the whole film. Use effects only when needed, to enhance a special kill for example. Do not overuse effects, or else your viewers will close your montage quickly with a headache. Try having just enough effects and transitions to keep your audience interested. Remember, if you've used a song or sound effect that isn't yours in your film, like most of us do, always, and I mean always give the original author(s) of the soundtrack credit for it, or your video might be removed for copyright infringement. I recommend showing the song's name for a few seconds at the bottom or top of your video when it is heard for the first time.
Rendering your video
For your montage to be in high-quality on YouTube, and most video hosting sites, you need to render it accordingly. This means the higher the video's resolution, the better, basically. Here are YouTube's best supported video formats:
http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=132460&topic=16612&hl=en-US
Allright, render that video, grab a drink or go out for a while. The rendering process depends on the attributes of your video, like aspect ratio, sound quality, video encoding and format, FPS and resolution. For a higher video resolution, like 1024x768 pixels, the rendering time might be a few hours, lower than that (640x480 px, for example) it's about an hour tops.
Uploading your video and linking it to other sites
Now that your video is properly rendered, you need to upload it to YouTube or Metacafe. The upload time varies accoring to the size of your video of course. YouTube imposes a strict limit of 10 minutes maximum per video and up to 2 GB of size. If your YouTube account type is ''Director'', these limits change and you can upload videos longer than ten minutes long, but for a frag video, it should never be longer than that. Once your video is uploaded and processed, fill in the necessary information if you haven't already, such as the video's title, it's tags and it's description. Choose a meaningful title, and put as many tags (always related yo your video, of course) as possible. Once your video has been uploaded and processed, view it a few times to check the overall quality. If you've encoded your video in a high-quality format, there should be an option on the YouTube player to watch your video in high-quality (HQ).
Now, link the video on as many sites as you can. it can be anything from your clan's gaming forums to sites such as Xfire, PlanetBattlefield or even on your MSN or Xfire's custom status bar.
Have fun making those videos!
