Soul Calibur Video Background Tutorial

[headkaze]

1. Create a screenshot of GameEx in the Default theme in fullscreen mode and in the resolution you want to make your Theme background video in. Alt-Print Screen should take a screenshot and store it in the clipboard.

2. Open Photoshop and select File->New then Edit->Paste to paste the screenshot.

3. Create a new layer Layer->New.

4. Set up your grids by selected Edit->Preferences->Guides, Grid & Slices. Set it to 16 pixels. You can experiment with different values to suit your needs.

5. Now turn on the grid View->Show->Grid, then turn on Extras View->Extras. Make sure you turn on View->Snap To->Grid and View->Snap. Now we can use the grid to draw our outlines and it will snap to the grid.

6. Using the Elliptical Marquee Tool from the toolbar, draw circles in each corner of the text areas and fill them using while. Alt-Backspace fills the marquee with your foreground color and Ctrl-Backspace fills it with your background color.

7. Fill in the rest with the Rectangular Marquee tool. Place an inner and outter glow using the following settings.

The result should be

8. Now turn off the GameEx snapshot layer by clicking the little eye next to it in the layers window.

9. Save this as a png file

10. Import the image into Gimp. I really wish Photoshop had this feature but as far as I know it dosn't. Once you have the image imported select Filters->Colors->Color To Alpha. What this does is convert the color white to alpha so that it is transparent. Save the new png.

11. Open up the new image in photoshop and finish off your background, and remember that the alpha channel (which looks like little light and dark grey squares) is where the video will be visible through the background. If you have a solid white background at the moment, you can right click it and delete it. You should have no background layer now so you should have the little grey grids instead. Now save your image as a png.

12. Now open up Premiere Pro and import the video file and png image you just saved. Drag both of them onto the Timeline.

13. You may need to scale the size of the image to cover the video properly.

14. Then export the video by selecting File->Export->Movie... In the Export Movie dialog, select the Settings... button.

15. Take the tick off Export Audio because you don't need it in GameEx.

16. I suggest a size of 320 x 240 and keep the frame rate the same as the source video. It just seems to work better that way. As your Compressor select ffdshow Video Codec. Then select the Configure... button.

17. I use the Windows Media Video V8 Encoder just because it works fine with GameEx and gives a decent compression ratio. You can of course use a different encoder if you wish.

18. Thats it, it should render your new video background! Test it first in Windows Media Player, then try it out in GameEx by copying it to your theme's folder and name it bak.avi and emubak.avi. When you view a game list you should now see your video in the background with your overlayed graphics.

[slipstream19]

hey hedakze! Could you make a little avi file for how it looks when its done?

[Michael]

hey hedakze! Could you make a little avi file for how it looks when its done?

Link for the theme

Hey slipsteam19 there a link for the theme (by Headkaze) so you can see what its like

[amos_82]

Nice one Headkaze, just a quick question...

on the first gameex snap, the title text 'mame games' has a gradient, how did you manage to get that?

Is this a glimpse of a new feature, or something you've been playing around with?

[headkaze]

Nice one Headkaze, just a quick question...

on the first gameex snap, the title text 'mame games' has a gradient, how did you manage to get that?

Is this a glimpse of a new feature, or something you've been playing around with?

You know what I have no idea how that gradiant got in that screenshot. I certainly did not manually add that. Perhaps something that happened while I was grabbing the graphics for the tutorial. I remember looking at the text wondering what that strange colored outline was on the title text, and I didn't even realise it had a gradiant then. So there you go, I have no idea how it got there!

[Tom Speirs]

Is this a glimpse of a new feature.

Yes, Version 3 themes, HK is running a private Beta.

[jthompson]

Nice one Headkaze, just a quick question...

on the first gameex snap, the title text 'mame games' has a gradient, how did you manage to get that?

Is this a glimpse of a new feature, or something you've been playing around with?

Hey Headkaze, maybe you can help me out. I tried to check out your new theme and it kept crashing my system. I noticed that no video was playing in the background for the part of the theme I did see, I just heard music playing in the background so I suspected my video codecs. I checked out ffdshow and made sure I was using a good build. I read a post that Tom put up a while ago saying not to use the latest daily build as they were buggy so I used a build from a link you posted in one of the other threads. Now heres the deal, I can watch the vids from your OLD theme if I go and click on them in the theme folder. If I click on the vids bak and emubak.avi in the NEW theme folder they open and play a black video. Heres the twist though, if I click on the progress bar as the black video is playing, then the black goes away and I can see the video. I was doing some reseach on this searching the forums and ran across this thread http://www.gameex.info/forums/index.php?showtopic=2888 from firebrand x where he had trouble with the haali splitter and avi files. I downloaded the same cccp codec pack to see what would happen on my system and here are the results. With the haali splitter on and avi support enabled I could watch the avis from your OLD theme no problem. When I tried to watch the avis for your NEW theme however I got this error message (AVI: Stream has no index entries). I have no idea what is going on with my system that will not let me view these AVIs but I assume that it has something to do with the other problem I have with not being able to create mame vids which was a problem I just kind of gave up on a while back. (Mame vids create black video) I don't know what the hell is going on but I thought if anyone would have an idea it might be you or Tom. If you have any suggestions I'll give it a shot. BTW I do not have any other codecs installed that I know of, no dvix xvid or any of that.

Thanks in advance

Jay T

[headkaze]

Yes, Version 3 themes, HK is running a private Beta.

Lol, I did not even think about that!

[headkaze]

Hey Headkaze, maybe you can help me out. I tried to check out your new theme and it kept crashing my system. I noticed that no video was playing in the background for the part of the theme I did see, I just heard music playing in the background so I suspected my video codecs. I checked out ffdshow and made sure I was using a good build. I read a post that Tom put up a while ago saying not to use the latest daily build as they were buggy so I used a build from a link you posted in one of the other threads. Now heres the deal, I can watch the vids from your OLD theme if I go and click on them in the theme folder. If I click on the vids bak and emubak.avi in the NEW theme folder they open and play a black video. Heres the twist though, if I click on the progress bar as the black video is playing, then the black goes away and I can see the video. I was doing some reseach on this searching the forums and ran across this thread http://www.gameex.info/forums/index.php?showtopic=2888 from firebrand x where he had trouble with the haali splitter and avi files. I downloaded the same cccp codec pack to see what would happen on my system and here are the results. With the haali splitter on and avi support enabled I could watch the avis from your OLD theme no problem. When I tried to watch the avis for your NEW theme however I got this error message (AVI: Stream has no index entries). I have no idea what is going on with my system that will not let me view these AVIs but I assume that it has something to do with the other problem I have with not being able to create mame vids which was a problem I just kind of gave up on a while back. (Mame vids create black video) I don't know what the hell is going on but I thought if anyone would have an idea it might be you or Tom. If you have any suggestions I'll give it a shot. BTW I do not have any other codecs installed that I know of, no dvix xvid or any of that.

Thanks in advance

Jay T

Yeah I had the same problem I believe with WMP 10. Updating to WMP 11 solved it for me. Open WMP and select Help->Check for Updates... Sorry about that perhaps I should have chosen an older codec.

[jthompson]

Yeah I had the same problem I believe with WMP 10. Updating to WMP 11 solved it for me. Open WMP and select Help->Check for Updates... Sorry about that perhaps I should have chosen an older codec.

No Problem, I didn't even realize I was still using 10 as I mostly use Winamp. That fixed the problem for me, thanks.

Jay T

[slipstream19]

No Problem, I didn't even realize I was still using 10 as I mostly use Winamp. That fixed the problem for me, thanks.

Jay T

michael thx!

[slipstream19]

THe soulcalibur theme bugged out on me while entering emulators . went black..

i could not se any video or moving pictures either. srry

(running an old but stable version of gameex)

[headkaze]

Did you try updating WMP to version 11?

Hmm I may need to re-do the video in an older codec.

[Michael]

Did you try updating WMP to version 11?

Hmm I may need to re-do the video in an older codec.

i tried your theme while i had wmp9 on and it just didnt play the video it did lag for a second or 2 but still worked just displayed picture background

so i updated to wmp11 and all worked fine

[slipstream19]

Did you try updating WMP to version 11?

Hmm I may need to re-do the video in an older codec.

--

hey

no i have wmp 10 , didnt know you had 2 update. but im not running a reg ver of W so i dont know if i have the ability to update WMP.

ill look into it.

im sure it works fine though. just me runnin with an older system i guess.

ps very beautiful theme. ( just buggs out when starting emulated games) (get blackscreeN n have to reboot computeR)

peace

[headkaze]

Okay I've encoded another version of the video using a different codec. It's wierd after installing WMP 11 I can't encode using any of ffdshow's WMP codecs. So this time I tried XVid, but it's saying it's MPEG4. I don't know *shrugs*, codecs can drive a man insaine!

Anyway, try this one instead bak.zip. Replace both bak.avi and emubak.avi. Let me know if it works for you.

[slipstream19]

Okay I've encoded another version of the video using a different codec. It's wierd after installing WMP 11 I can't encode using any of ffdshow's WMP codecs. So this time I tried XVid, but it's saying it's MPEG4. I don't know *shrugs*, codecs can drive a man insaine!

Anyway, try this one instead bak.zip. Replace both bak.avi and emubak.avi. Let me know if it works for you.

tryin it 2morrow. its 06.00 in sweden :S