World of Warcraft Mac client adds builtin movie capture
Some of you might already know that I do some other blogging work on another Weblogs, Inc. blog called WoW Insider, all about World of Warcraft, the MMORPG videogame. Most gaming companies tend to shy away from the Mac, but Blizzard has always been the exception. And with World of Warcraft, there are actually huge benefits to playing the game on a Mac. A while ago they added builtin iTunes controls (right into the official client), and as of the upcoming patch (now available for players to play around with on a public test), they've actually created an ingame movie recorder-- only for the WoW Mac client.
It's a pretty well done feature, too. WoW Insider's Paul Sherrard took the recorder for a test drive, and created what you see above (after a little bit of iMovie fiddling). The options are pretty impressive for an ingame vid capture as well-- you can control whether the UI or cursor is seen or not, and you even get a choice of codecs (including H.264, Pixlet, or Motion JPEG). Very nice. Whoever's working on the Mac team at Blizzard really knows what they're doing, and is definitely giving Mac users the hookup on cool exclusive features.
Thanks Mark, who also sent this in!
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
7-13-2007 @ 7:02PM
Michael S said...
Wow, I never knew about the iTunes thing, and the movie capture looks amazing.
I'm glad I have a mac :D
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7-13-2007 @ 7:08PM
stephen said...
I too was unaware of the iTunes controls. I expect some serious geekery will come out of this movie recorder.
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7-13-2007 @ 7:30PM
Adam B. Nicely said...
LEEEEEEROOOYYY JENKINS!
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7-13-2007 @ 10:07PM
Taylor said...
I wonder how slow that will run on my MacBook. The game alone gets about 20fps with all-low graphics... 15 if you've got iTunes or Firefox running in the background
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7-14-2007 @ 12:03AM
ktc64 said...
If its done right it shouldn't do too mucht o your fps. You talking aobut normal MacBook? When i first bought my MacBook Pro i was getting 80-100 fps sadly im mod happy and im down to like 40-50 usualy. Im so glad they added this feature. Ever since i switched from playing on my pc to my mac i havent been able to make the videos i used to due to the fact that the video recorders available for macs werent nearly as good as fraps. Downloading the PTR as I type so i can go test it out myself.
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7-14-2007 @ 2:18AM
G said...
Should we assume that Motion JPEG is the safest codec to use because it is so basic that it taxes the CPU the least? Then convert that to whatever else you want afterwards. It would have been cool if Paul had mentioned which he used. The results are nice and smooth, however. Very cool.
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7-14-2007 @ 5:07AM
Paul Sherrard said...
I used the H.264 codec, it seems the clearest, and pretty compact. I haven't tried Motion-JPEG yet, but I did try Pixlet, and it came out looking fuzzy.
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7-14-2007 @ 2:07PM
Britec said...
I was unaware of the iTunes controls. Nice post
Thanks for sharing.
http://www.britec.co.uk/techblog/
Britec
http://www.britec.co.uk
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8-21-2007 @ 7:06AM
patric said...
Hey what settings did you use in imovie when you exported this? Sorry im new to video editing and when i drag the movies I record to imovie it looks real pretty. But when i export it to upload on youtube... I can't stand to even look at it! Please get back to me I make WoW vids and again I don't know what the settings should be i just click export for web which really sucks... Thanks.
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9-20-2007 @ 10:40AM
flimhair said...
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