Halo 3 video Pink vs Blue Episode 4

Halo 3 ingame footage: author's vision of a post apocalyptic world - men and women are enemies in an epic struggle for gender supremacy.

Halo 3 Saved Films Database

Today I read at AMN forums about an interesting idea.

Bungie, with Halo 3 release, is introducing the "Saved Films" feature.
That's what the community has been asking for countless times, and now Bungie's gotten that wish granted.

But the catch is, you can only view said films through Halo 3, and they can't be transferred to your PC.

Unless, that is, you have a video capture card.

This is where my idea comes in. I will gladly partake this endeavor because, well because I can. Anyways, here's the idea:

If you would like to have a Halo 3 saved film of yours up on the web, for the purposes of sharing to the world, showing off your Halo 3 skills, etc, to those people who don't have Halo 3 or want to view the Halo 3 saved film on PC/Mac, I'll gladly capture some of your Halo 3 films onto my computer on upload them onto the web, on a special website I can create.

Well, that's kind of an elaborate idea anyways. For now I'll do my own. I've got a few that I'm setting up right now for all to see, because some of them are just so funny.

Halo 3 Saved Films - what is it?

So the Halo 3 beta is announced. It’s worth watching the ‘making of’ video, if only for the segment about saved films. What it looks like is a file that can be played after the game, but with full camera and time control: you can move the camera as you watch, and pause, slow-mo etc.

This is nothing new. Years ago I got a great kick out of watching saved films of Myth, an earlier Bungie game. Driver was a series with quite an elaborate saved film component; I’m sure there are many more examples. It’s rumoured that Bungie wanted it in Halo 2, but it was one of many dropped features in the rush to actually ship the game. But I like to keep an eye on developments in this area because I believe spectatorship in gaming is a key issue, and when good solutions for it are developed, gaming’s role in the larger culture will expand massively.

Bungie’s goal in this case (at least as far as I can tell from the video) is a mode of spectatorship for players: an easy way to review and share a recently-played game, as well as a way of developing one’s game, just as pro athletes review video of their games – and those of their opponents. So this is not something that attempts to make games watchable to non-gamers, which is the final frontier.

That being said, Bungie are masters of UI. The scope of their mastery is another potential article, but suffice it to say that if this feature is as well-implemented as is reasonable to expect, no other tool may be necessary to make the transition to mass-market spectatorship. If it performs as advertised, and any angle can be captured, then all the necessary footage to make a pretty kickass ‘film’ of a given match could be piped into an external editing app. I suppose the games could not be viewed live. But a case could be made that this is something people will want to watch, and ‘live’ technologies would follow from there.

And just imagine the machinima possibilities.

Halo 3 Saved Films FAQ

I've been developing a short FAQ on Halo 3 Saved Films.

Q: How do you change the view perspective on a saved film? I would like to see how my opponents played.
A: you cannot.

Remarks:
Oh. Well. That helps, at least. Thanks.
...That will be included in the final game but not now. Right now all you can do is see what changes you can make in your play style.