Or you could, you know, buy the software and get full exporting capability.

Personally, the program has its place, but it isn't the magic bullet people seem to think it is, and if I see one more hideously creepy animated head out of it I'll scream. It seems that most people who use it just don't tweak it at all, and half the time they don't even synch the audio to the mouth...

I set all my previews to 1/8th resolution and make heavy use of the caps lock key in after effects(which temporarily disables realtime previews). I also try to determine when I can get away with lower quality footage and make heavy use of proxies.

Defrag your hard drive! Video editing can be hell on a hard drive, especially if you do frame by frame footage renders.

On windows, use msconfig(part of windows) to turn off junk programs in your startup, and download microsoft's Process Explorer to manage running programs and monitor. where your system resources are going.

A quick googling brings up: http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/...

I don't see the point of such a prize. Would anyone really want thousands of views that they know(and everyone else knows) are fake?

Katana- the legality of machinima varies by game. It is quite legal for all Blizzard Games and most Microsoft games(all the ones that don't use licensed properties) as long as you follow the company guidelines.

For music, even when using unlicensed music legally(under fair use) you'll often find action taken against you thanks to how easy DMCA takedown notices are. Unless you actively piss off the owner of the music, chances are that that is the worst that will happen, but there really is plenty of entirely legal creative commons music out there to use- dozens of artists are, at this very moment, practically begging you to use their music and not pay them for it.

They are under creatures>band.

Also, you posted this topic to the wrong group =P

I'm not very familiar with Source modding or filming, so take this all with a grain of salt- it is especially hard to give constructive thoughts since I cannot say how I would actually do things differently^_^

Well, the first thing I noticed was the titles/intro. I thought it was very well realized, but rather long- it was the same length as the ending credits, and a significant portion of the entire movie.

I liked the set design- a very well modeled scene, though I didn't think that the lighting did it justice. Particularly, the exteriors were very bright with uniform ambient light, which didn't seem to fit the space setting. While showing the extent of the map is good, perhaps using some sort of colored lighting to match the nebulae visible in the background would help.

Also on the subject of lighting, it was very uneven on the various characters- most noticeably on the Yoda person. I'm assuming that most of the character illumination is in the form of baked textures(not terribly familiar with the source engine) but some characters seem to have much better light/shadow balances and more defined lighting than others. Some, like the girl with the worried look on her face, seem to be less detailed but with a more defined texture, while others like the arguing girl seem to have a more detailed model but relatively undefined lighting and texturing. And the dwarf seems to have lower resolution modeling and texturing both, (perhaps in the style of some particular game?).
Yoda, meanwhile, is lacking nearly all definition, and seems to be evenly illuminated across his entire surface with little contrast in the textures of the skin, so it can be hard to even tell what he is.

The pacing in general seemed awkward, with a lot of periods of people standing there, sometimes talking and sometime not. Especially when you can see shots where characters in the background just seem to be posed, waiting for their cue, like the girl and the skeleton standing at the slurpee machine before they have their fight. Points like the announcement of the fight don't really have a sense of punctuating the proceedings, since there is already so much jumping around.

During the argument, the line of action is cut constantly, and you can see a marked difference between that and the relative smoothness of the cuts in the previous scene with the chatting combine guys. The way the argument started seemed a bit strange, also- They're just staring at each other, and presumably they went there together and she dumps him. Her tone doesn't seem like the way I'd expect someone who takes her boyfriend to a convenience store to break up with him to talk.

I thought the conversation between the dwarf and the alien guy was interesting, but it was kinda awkwardly presented- I could see someone leaving a store complimenting someone else's dragon, but then following up with asking questions about what he does just in time to get set up for a demonstration seemed to just not work for me. Perhaps if they'd both been entering, they could have continued the conversation as they entered and seen the fight break out themself instead of seeing the frightened onlooker run out and tell them- that would also have given a starting point for that swoopy camera move from the front of the store, since it would be able to place them in the scene near the action.

There are a couple continuity bugs, but the biggest is at that point as well, when the alien enters his ship and leaves- the car parked next to him vanishes abruptly as the camera moves.

The scene where the cannon went off seemed like a good place to use the time slowing, I suppose, but the combination of the time slowing and the fire pointing upwards instead of behind the flying dwarf made it seem more as if the action was slowed down instead of just being replayed in slo-mo. Dunno if that is a source limitation with the fire, but perhaps a particle trail of smoke would have worked better.

Ok, this is getting a bit long, so I'll stop now.