Second Life Videos

About a month or so ago I recorded a few duels, put them to music, and uploaded them (link). There are three videos—two of the them are videos of my good friend Surfer Ryder and me sparring with Combat: Samurai Island katanas, and the third video is just me operating a camera (somewhat clumsily) while watching two other friends practice. The latter video was my first attempt at recording movies in Second Life.

About a week ago I began to try to get the videos to work on my television in Second Life. This was very frustrating for me because I used Windows Movie Maker to create the movies but Second Life needed a different format hosted somewhere online. The hosting part was easy to do: I just searched the Second Life forums and found a place called blip.tv that allows videos to be uploaded in a wide variety of formats, allows the use of the files that are uploaded directly instead of forcing users to go to their website to view them, and the website's services are free.

The difficulty I ran into was converting the .wmv file to an acceptable Second Life format. The machanima forums for Second Life did have a little bit of information so I tested different software to convert. My first attempts, and of these there were several, I tried converting to the mp4 format. This sort of worked, but not well enough. Every attempt to convert from wmv straight to mp4 had audio syncing issues in Second Life: the audio was either behind or ahead of the video by a considerable amount.

This was an annoying and lengthy testing process and I should have asked for help sooner—I can be a stubborn girl sometimes and I really wanted to figure it out by myself—but the process of converting, uploading, and then dashing off to the Second Life television set was lengthy and lagging my computer badly. It probably didn't help that I was trying to actually do things in Second Life while the files were converting and uploading. Oopsie. Anyway, I finally posted a topic at the Second Life forums requesting help (my very first post on any of the Second Life forums) and gave up for the night.

So essentially I use two bits of software to get it working in Second Life. The first is Videora iPod Converter to convert from wmv to the Quicktime MOV format. After that I use 3GP Converter to get it into this weird format I've never heard of before but is useable by Second Life and a much smaller file size than the Quicktime MOV format. There is a loss of quality, but I still think it looks just fine on my Second Life television.

So I didn't figure it out all by myself, but I did give it a worthy try. I'm very glad to have it working.

I am definitely going to make more movies. I thought about making a C:SI and SCS training video series. That might be fun.