Machinima for Dummies

Having now sold enough copies of Machinima For Dummies to pay for a cup of coffee a day for a week – each! – Hugh and I were delighted to see that the book has become part of the ever-growing library of Google Books. That means you can read Machinima For Dummies for free, online. Well, most of it – as is usually the case with Google Books, a few pages have been deleted seemingly at random. Nonetheless, the majority of the book is now online, and ready for you to read legally and for free. And if you really find yourself missing those few elusive pages that didn’t make it to Google Books, Machinima For Dummies is still available to buy in old skool dead tree format – we can always use more coffee.

I’m sure I’m late to the party here, and a lot of you will already know about and regularly use the freeware video encoder Super, but just in case there are people who, like me until very recently, have no knowledge of its existence, I’m blogging about it here.

Super is basically a GUI wrapper around the free and open-source ffmpeg codec and encoding library. Although there’s theoretically nothing that Super can do that clever command-line use of ffmpeg couldn’t also achieve, Super makes it oh-so-very-much easier. As regular readers will know, I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Linux fanboy, used to working on reasonably complicated tasks using the shell or command line. Unadulterated ffmpeg still makes my head spin.

The reason that I’m bringing Super to your attention specifically is that the latest version of ffmpeg can encode magnificently to Quicktime. We strongly recommend purchasing Quicktime Pro in the book, and I’ll stick by that recommendation as an excellent encoding solution, but ffmpeg wrapped in Super is definately worth considering before you get your credit card out – it’s freeware!

(Windows-only, I’m afraid, * nix fans, although ffmpeg itself is cross-platform.)

We spend some time on Page 362 enthusing about the brilliant World of Warcraft-made Edge of Remorse. We also generally sing the praises of the equally brilliant (but totally different) Return. Unfortunately, it seems that we got so carried away writing about these two films that we accidentally referred to Edge of Remorse as Edge of Return at the bottom of page 362.

Oops. Sorry Jason! (Thanks to Simon Taylor for bringing this one to our attention)

Well, it had to happen sooner or later, and the chances were pretty high that it was sooner.

I’d like to claim the prize for reporting the first mistake in the book. I’m aware that this may just be because the rest of you are too polite to tell us about the miriad of mistakes you’ve already found, but your timidity is our gain.

It’s not a biggie, but it’s still worth mentioning:

On page 132, the two links to Decorgal’s tools should be http://decorgalinc.com/blog/?p=157 and http://decorgalinc.com/blog/?p=179 (not ?p-179 as printed).

Told you it wasn’t a biggie.