Andrew_McP

Nice movie GA. I don't get misty eyed over the F-14 myself (perhaps because it was the sim 'Fleet Defender' which taught me I have roughly zero interest in BVR combat) but it was touching to see the role call in there. I didn't realise the aircraft had killed so many people. I suppose that's the trouble with 2-seaters, twice the danger when there's a problem. And of course it's been flying for a long time now, so the overall casualty rate might be quite low compared to other aircraft. Andrew McP

Did you get any footage from your trip to Russia to use as the basis for a movie? Or is it all of you with your head between your knees puking into a bag? :-) Andrew McP

I was asked if I could produce a copyright free version of my recent movie to go on a magazine cover disk. That probably won't happen now, but hardcore movie collectors might be interested in what happened when I ripped out the Google & F4 footage, created a new start, and replaced the music with muzak by the Flanker Filmworks Filharmonic. Then again, you might not if you have a musical ear. I never could play in time... or tune. Still, what do you expect for free. ;-) The 94Mb file's only up on rapidshare for now. http://rapidshare.de/files/12859690/McP11_Tornado__copyright_free_version__94Mb.zip.html The original is still up at... http://www.andrew.mcp.dsl.pipex.com/lomac.htm Andrew McP

You're right Rich, VirtualDub's a very useful tool. I use it to convert various file formats and to chop up huge files generated by LOMAC's avi-maker. But it's not a very friendly editor. Mind you, the price is right! :-) > thanks for the Sony link Everyone will have their own preferences, but I find "Vegas junior" to be the best of the bunch for ease of use. You get most of the functionality offered by Vegas, but fewer of the more professional features, and only four video & four audio channels. But for hobbyist needs that's plenty, and the price is very attractive. The demo's good for 30 days, which is plenty of time to explore. I'm not sure though whether it uses multithreading like its big brother though. As x2 CPUs start to become affordable the idea of a multithreaded editor really appeals to me. When you start layering clips and adding LOC/GA-style special effects things can get very slow very quickly. Enough rambling from me. Andrew McP

:-) For what it's worth if people are paying for an editor I tried just about everything when I started down this movie making path two years ago. Movie Maker 2 was what I started with, and it's a superb place to learn the basics. But eventually you want to be a bit more "clever", and I ended up with Vegas's much cheaper "junior" version, which is now called Vegas Movie Studio. Nothing else was so easy to use (similar in style to MM2), and it's *much* cheaper than Vegas 6, which is great but unnecessary unless you have plenty of cash or a *really* bad movie habit. :-) http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/products/vegasfamily.asp?keycode=3144-3000 I nearly bought Editstudio, which is even cheaper, and has excellent support from the designers in their forum. But it has a *really* unfriendly interface IMO. http://www.puremotion.com/ The good thing about all movie editors though is that there's usually a demo to try. Andrew McP

When you start a mission, use the mission editor page. Load a mission, then instead of hitting "FLY" go to the Flight menu at the top (I think that's the right menu anyway! :-) and start the mission using "record track". Then when you quit the mission you are prompted for a name to save the track file as. You can then use the same menu to "play track" and you can pause, change the views etc while watching. Hope that helps. Can't teach you to land the 25T in one piece quite so easily ;-) Andrew McP

Erdem's right. Movie Maker 2 (if you have XP SP2 installed you should find MM2 on your "accessories" menu) is very good and totally free. Ideas are the biggest part of movie making, the editor is just what you use to stick those ideas together, and MM2 is a great beginner's tool. Be careful though. Movie making isn't a hobby... it's a disease which gets into your blood and is very hard to get rid of. ;-) Andrew McP

> Think of it as a teaser for the next trailer Very nice GA. But can you just clear something up for me? Is this a teaser for the trailer of the teaser for the trailer for the campaign from last year, or the teaser for the teaser for the trailer that teased us the year before that? I get so easily confused. ;-) Andrew McP

Oooh! Is the high AOA modelling really as good as that kobra at the end makes it look? I spend most of my time in the Su-27 flying displays, not trying to kill things 10km away, and that movie looks like the flight modelling's good enough to keep me happy until the AFM gets added to LOMAC at some point in the (far) distant future. FWIW I've always been pretty impressed by FS2004's flight models, not just the low speed passenger aircraft (maybe I'm just easily pleased ;-). And as the 25-T proves in LOMAC, there's no substitute whatsoever for a decent landing model. It's infinitely more satisfying to land when you've got proper modelling of all the wheels. I also loved the bomber at the end (Tu-22?). It makes me wish LOMAC was more of an "open" sim. There are downsides to having 3rd parties designing aircraft, but the upside is so huge in a genre with such dedicated followers, who cares! Never mind, no harm dreaming I suppose :-) Andrew McP PS And I see there was full Tir4 support in the cockpits! Looks like credit card could take a hammering this month; that website is full of lovely aircraft. Must... re... sist!

That's excellent! I think I may have to reinstall FS2004 and get my credit card out. The high AOA modelling looks like great fun, and those dirty engine trails are very realistic... well, they certainly match the few Mig-29s I've seen fly! :-) Given that AFMs are still a long way off in LOMAC for the aircraft I enjoy flying, this looks like a great buy... especially the version with carrier landings! FS2004's landing modelling is particularly satisfying, on a par with the satisfaction of getting a 25T down in one piece. Anyway, thanks for the link. Andrew McP PS. I originally bought FS2004 just for a great Tornado mod I wanted to buy. I was going to use it in my recent movie, but it's so good it would've made the LOMAC footage look very poor.

Yay! Booo! Just what the sim-starved world is looking for, another F-16 to fly! ;-) <fx:sound of scab being picked off old wounds and even older threads> Andrew McP PS Lovely missile, I agree.

Just in case anyone's interested in seeing the (1.1) mission used for the core of this movie, it's here... http://www.andrew.mcp.dsl.pipex.com/mcp_tdo.zip I can't guarantee it will work 100%, because it plays back slightly differently every time (especially if you fast forward through part of it). When it was a 1.02 mission and I could test it on both my PCs, it would often fly *very* differently on the second PC because of the accurate timing needed to get the Tornados to cross over without spooking each other. Anyway, it's probably not going to interest many of you, but it allows you to see the action without the Jerk-o-vision. :-) Andrew McP

Excellent, thanks for the link (and hosting it obviously). I didn't know this existed before this thread, but I have to say the stall modelling is much better than the non-AFM aircraft in LOMAC. It's very nice to fool around with. This sim's clearly been put together by someone very familiar with ED's work... it even has the much missed joystick deflection indicator. I feel really rather at home in that cockpit! :-) Andrew McP

I've only looked at the first one so far, but great work! The flying and the movie-making are excellent. I particularly enjoyed the music, it's very atmospheric. Andrew McP PS The second movie is superb! Very inventive, and some very good ideas. It made me smile a lot.

Is it too early to start pestering them for a flyable Vulcan? ;-) Andrew McP

I mainly fly Hind (because of the great flight model), and read the Tornado manual. :-) Tornado missions can still be enjoyable though. From the front seat the graphics and flight modelling are too poor to be enjoyable now. But from the *back* seat you can fly whole missions while managing the autopilot and offensive/defensive systems without too many ugly distractions. 3 MFD screens give you plenty of information to create a virtual world inside your head. I'd better shut up now, I've dragged the poor guy's thread far enough off topic already! :-) Andrew McP

http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?id=511 Why wait? :-) The flight model's still very good even after 10 years! The graphics could be a lot worse *and* you get a sim with infantry as well. What more could a man ask for? :-) The only thing I had to do to get it running in XP was select w95 compatibility in the .exe properties. Andrew McP... currently in Digital Integration retro-worship mode. Normal service will be resumed as soon as the after effects of my Tornado movie wear off... in about six months. ;-)

I'm increasingly aware that sound is what makes the difference between a good movie and a great movie. If captured properly I think LOMAC's sound is good enough, especially if using Zzzspace's/Archer's mod. But the problem is capturing it well in the first place, especially when using zoomed modes where the camera's a long way away even if it looks close to the subject. I guess that means there's no substitute for post-processing. :-/ That's a very kind offer GA, but it'll be a while before I make another one, so I'm going to try to think of another way around this problem. It might be possible to record paired tracks to capture video on one track, and sound on the other (with altered camera distances and angles to make sure the sound engine is able to pick up sounds which match). That might be a bit complicated to set up, but the sound captured will at least be authentic. I do still like the idea of producing movies which show off ED's work as it *is*, rather than how we'd like it to be. But as you point out... ...so who knows what might happen in the future! Having said that, us old folk don't like change much. ;-) Andrew McP

Thanks for the comments everyone, glad you're enjoying it. Kula66: (and a few others!) > oh for a flyable Tornado! (I know its 2 seat etc etc ...) Ground-hugging radar, those amazing ALARM missiles (especially in indirect mode... so much gameplay value), the ability to fly whole missions from the back seat by using the many autopilot modes. But it'll never happen, so we have to make do with the 25-T. Which is a shame, because I like my aircraft to have afterburners and fewer annoyingly overheating lasers. :-) Glowing: > There were some tiny errors in this movie That's how you can tell they're my movies! ;-) The Fraps thing slipped past me until I'd produced the "finished" item, and the few days' holiday I've just had is over, so this project had to end today. As for the sound... I only had one short clip of a real Tornado and it has commentator noise on it, so I wanted to be careful not to over-use it because it's too short. The rest... well, as the AVI-maker messes up sound when you shift to half speed flying, or when you use the <shift><esc> modifier to the F2 view, I originally deleted all the sound from the clips I used. But in the end I realised I had to add background sound back because the movie was missing something that the occasional sound effect couldn't make up for. Rebuilding the sound from scratch using a mix of real LOMAC sound and Zzz's wavs wasn't easy or fun, so it was never going to be perfect, and I gave up after throwing a day at it. Whenever I do another movie I'll have to find a better solution, but I'm not sure how to avoid having to rebuild everything from scratch unless I record with Fraps at full speed... and I often use quarter speed to try and smooth out the jerkiness (not that it works!) and try to get more control over what's captured. Either that or I need to find a much bigger library of sound effects... though that's taking me further away from my original aim of using only what you'd see or hear in the sim. Witchking: > The next assignment for you is to start adding glare and > other filters in your movie.. It takes a lot of skill to use those things properly. I have tried to tweak things using what tools my editor has (and it shares many of Vegas's basic tools I believe), but the experts in this field are LOC and GA. It's also yet another layer of complication to add to an already long and complex process... and I work slowly enough as it is! The core mission alone took me well over 20 hours to put togther last year. Getting 5 Tornados to perform a coordinated attack was a *lot* easier in 1993! :-) Thanks again everyone. Andrew McP

The page only went up an hour or so ago, so it probably won't have refreshed in your ISP's local cache yet. If anyone else has the same problem, <cntrl><refresh> usually forces internet explorer (not sure about other browsers) to go looking for the latest version. Andrew McP

That's not a movie, it's the ghost of the F2 we never got. ;-) How old is it... seven, eight years? Maybe more... I can smell the mothballs from here! Andrew McP

This project, which I started in 1.02 a *long* time ago, will appeal to some of you more than others... especially the old gits like me who cut their sim teeth on DI's Tornado :-). But hopefully you don't have to be a hardcore Tornado enthusiast to enjoy it. http://www.andrew.mcp.dsl.pipex.com/lomac.htm There are two versions, 50Mb in my webspace, or 100Mb hosted at Rapidshare. Andrew McP

My movies have always been based around a single mission, and what you see in the movie is exactly how the mission played out. There are exceptions to that, obviously. Sometimes I just can't get everything I want into one mission. But the majority of the movie is always filmed from one track. Let's face it, you and LOC are so skilled at using Vegas to polish your ideas that you could make movies about a single aircraft standing still on the tarmac, and it'd still look stunning! :-) Andrew McP

It looks like the unlocked (shift-esc) F2 view attached to the front of another aircraft to me. Andrew McP

<fx: sound of man shooting himself> LOL! I can't believe you can put something so good together so quickly. That's incredible. And rather depressing for those of us who have to fight a little harder to give birth. :-) You'll have to forgive me, you caught me at a bad time. :-) After trying to give up this movie madness I did return over Xmas to a project I started in 1.02. The mission alone took more than... well, I daren't add up the hours! Not 7 or 8, that's for sure! In fact the only reason I've returned to it is I invested so many hours in the stupid mission I couldn't bear to waste the effort. Anyway, well done again. There's a real knack to making a "simple" clip movie into something which is far more than just the sum of its parts. Andrew McP PS Of course there's still no excuse for shooting down so many Sukhois. ;-)