Arma Bullshittery - Update #4

Good afternoon everybody. Hope you're having a great Monday.

An update on progress for Random Arma bullshittery (part 10).

I'm at the start of week 5. And the video is about 18 minutes and 49 seconds long, consisting of 37 gag sequences.

I have completed about 7 minutes and 37 seconds. A total of 16 sequences. I'm a bit further behind than I'd like, I'm afraid. Owing to some pretty complex keyframing work that I'll explain in a moment. I'd prefer to be around the 10th minute at the moment.

Here's a shot of the timeline so far:

So thus far things are going just fine. Those familiar with prior Arma updates probably know exactly I'm going to say next:

"God damn is the frame rate so inconsistent"

Arma is a difficult beast to run on most machines. And whilst it runs perfectly smoothly with only a handful of NPC's, when there's a few dozen players (and a lot of A.I) the frame rate can quickly dip into the low 20's.

This presents me as an editor with a specific problem. Because while I don't try to make everything frame-by-frame, I'm often forced to do so with low frame rates to avoid creating this weird sliding look. Where the text moves, but it doesn't look attached. It's something that absolutely must be avoided for the sake of quality presentation.

The text has to look like it's part of the scene. It's a big part of what makes it work.

Coupled with the fact that auto-tracking (if a scene permit it) often includes a characteristic skittishness, I often have to step in and manually override the auto tracker if it's putting in motion where none is needed.

So it's the age-old problem with Arma bullshitteries - if you want to make the text tracking look good, you've really got to do it by hand. Judging it with your own eye to compensate for the rapid changes in frame rate.

Hence why it's going a bit slowly.

Beyond that though everything is going just fine. The editing continues scene by scene. I remain pretty confident in the overall quality and I think you're going to like it. 

I'm soon to enter the World War II Zeus operations clips. No problems really anticipated. And I need to start getting in touch with some artists in order to commission 2-3 little cutaway jokes.

Hope you all have a splendid week and thank you as always for your patience :)