I'm glad I'm not the only who has been thinking this. Isn't it also rediculous that you cannot rewind films from the campaign? If you want a good laugh read Bungie's reasons for why it "can't be done".

its cause its still technically hard cause its not a actual video. its game assets and the game just runs that thru the engine to render the video you see on screen.

so right now its really hard to do alot of things with that. now ncaa 08 had a similar function but i think that was an actual flash video file. which is why they were shorter and much bigger to store.

but good idea none the less .

Here's the big issue with Bungie's Save Film tech- its not a breakthrough technology because its not even new for Bungie. Bungie's own Myth:The Fallen Lords and Myth 2: Soulblighter had the ability to save and trade films, so its somewhat of a wonder to me why they didn't include it any of the previous Halo games...

@SeannyFunco:

it can be done but with so much going on the engine soul;d have errors. and even freeze up. so they decided to remove that function and possibly add it back after they fix the bugs.

once again its not a VIDEO. WHEN YOU WATCH A VIDEO OF THE GAME YOUR ACTUALLY PLAYING THE GAME AGAIN.

its the game engine rendering what happened based off of simple data. its not a video. its a controlled rendering in the engine.

Crecente, as much as I love you, you didn't have to tell me you were a tech idiot, I watched that whole Halo match and not for 1 second did you have a good shot of the tv. Gizmodo's feed was 100 times better video wise. It makes sense that the tech gurus had a better AV setup than you but then, wouldnt the game gurus... win?

@MassaLefty: Yeah, that's why I call it data.

Skates replay save, edit and share online system should win the breakthrough technology award if they are considering Halo 3 for the saved films feature.

The fact that you can browse and rate other peoples replays from within the game is amazing. It adds a whole new dimension to the community aspect of the game and expect it to be the basis of replay systems in future games.

I would love to see this feature in GTA4 and Burnout Paradise for example.

That's a great idea, I hate having to fork over another 60 bucks just so my friends can watch my movies.

@crecente:

yeah its a nice idea and i am sure something they are looking into but its almost technicaly impossible cause you need the game engine to watch the film.

baby steps lol. having the replay film changes alot of halo 3. and this function adds a whole new angle on mulitplayer and social gaming in general.

@Kamizzle: $60? what costs sixty bucks?

But Crecente, think of the tubes! The tubes would be clogged with Halo 3 videos! The tubes, Crecente!

My friends and I have talked about this quite a bit. The tech issues are understandably tough but if the game can make checkpoints that you can load from, why can't the film replays take advantage of those? A regular video option would have been golden, also. We all have moments like that "best stick ever" a while ago but only a few of us have the means to share them.

DO NOT WANT.
If people with Halo 3 can play the demos that's good enough - anyone who actually cares already has it anyway. There's no need to clog up Youtube with thousands of "look i flippd teh wrathog!!1!" videos. If they want to do something like that, they should host their own video site.

Ok, so you you are saying Bungie should invest a couple millions in developing new technology that that will run the conversion from in-game data to actual video, and then allow all users to download what is the equivalent of 25MBs/50MBs of video data per 10 minutes game each time one users feels like it? Good idea Crecente, I mean they have all that cash laying around, lets fuck their project budget and their bandwidh. Nevermind no other console shooter has even offered a matchmaking system that rivals the one of the previous game iteration. HALO 3 deserves no technology award until they get on this.

Agreed, Crecente.

While we're on the subject, Bungie should work on implementing some sort of rewind and super-speed feature for saved films, since that "go back X seconds" button just causes more frustration than it alleviates, and the fast forward only doubles your play speed, so you still have to rip through 15 minutes of nothing to clip an 8-second clip out of a half-hour match.

@godhandiscen:

I agree with what you said. not what you meant.

@SeannyFunco:

Oh please, the system is more complex than you know. Can you write a replay system that well? Doubt it.

It's not millions of dollars in new technology. The hardware is already present, since you have to render the saved film in the first place.

What would need to happen is, like with clips that you take of your saved films, there would have to be a set camera position. In saved films (I don't know if you've toyed around with this or not, Crecente), you can detach the camera from yourself, hover over others' shoulders, or just fly the camera around while the action is occuring.

What the game is doing is simulating everything that's occuring, not just replaying the game from your persepctive.

You can detach the camera in a clip, too, but it's a start for having a fixed view to render from. With the appropriate software, that rendering could then be exported as a video, though the video file would be significantly larger than the raw data (which is why they aren't doing videos in the first place).

@SeannyFunco:

Perhaps you should re-read Bungie's reasoning, because you obviously haven't fully understood any of it yet.

sounds like the replay saved game film works basically the same as it did in Marathon, so unless they can make a way to view it outside the game engine it's not exactly a breakthrough technology.

@godhandiscen: Ahh have you played Skate? Because this enormous technical feat you are describing is being done in that game right now.

@Archaotic:

You can't rewind in a literal sense. It's not a video. You're jumping back to a benchmark. The physics are trying to recreate what occured by telling the engine where things are and what they're doing. It's a simulation, where minute details under the hood more often than not won't be identical. Rewinding frame-by-frame wouldn't be likely to yield the same position x after going to x+1 and back down to x.

Saving data specific enough for that would make the file sizes even larger, so you'd be able to host fewer over your fileshare and hold less on your 360.

I am so with Fuchikoma on this one. Right now it takes just a small amount of effort and some easy to obtain third party hardware/software to export and save a replay. If you make it so that ANYONE can do it with no effort at all, YouTube will collapse under the weight of a billion teabagging videos.

The replay technology is amazing -- saving the last 25 matches you played IN THEIR ENTIRETY for you to watch from any angle or player perspective is an astounding technological feat. Not catering to lazy people who want an easy way to annoy others with their replays hardly means it's "broken".

@godhandiscen: I could do the job in a month for $100k.

I had gotten an overkill on a slayer game that I was quite proud of, and I saved the film. Later I looked at bungies site and saw something for download, I thought I could actually download it to my computer to make a video out of it. So I made preperations, I have my idea all set, and then i realized I couldnt. I was so bummed, but I went ahead and made a video using screen shots anyway. [www.youtube.com] It would be great if somebody could make what you are saying possible.

speaking of Brian Lam whats the fate of his actions from yesterday?

reprimanded?

locked for 10 days in the kotaku tower?

would like to know.

The reason you can't do an exporter is because you're not actually recording 'video'.

The halo 3 recorder is recording the coordinates of every object in the game world every second and feeding them into the game. Instead of recording the images - its as if it was keystroke (or in this case gamepad press) recording every move to be played back later through the game.

Bungie would need to come up with a utility that recorded those actions being played back through and I bet they'd need a beefy server or some sort of complex system and the bandwidth to do it - the same thing that makes the movies so small and sharable makes this next to impossible to easily do.

Hmm... flaunting a teabagging video. When you lost.

Seems wrong.

Then again, if that's all you got out of a best-of-7 match...

Everybody surely has had this idea by now, and I'm sure Bungie have too. I have a feeling we'll see such a feature before too long.

I don't think the same process is happening in either Skate or THPG, but nice try.

@Astrofox: Skate offers replays that are less than 10 seconds long (havent seen a longer one tbh) with fixed cameras. A Halo 3 MP game last from 15 to 20 minutes, and the editor gives you a free roaming camera. Also, think how big is the Skate community compared to the Halo community, and you will get an idea of how much that multiplies the bandwidth costs for offering such a feature.
@Jest:
Will you also provide the server farm that will process all the data and replicate it in video form, and what about the bandwidht, is that part of the deal? You are selling yourself for too little. A small team of people would charge 100k for only testing the application, nevermind developing it.

I am not saying I do not want a Halo 3 youtube button, I am human. My beef is that Halo 3 is worthy of a technology award for offering what no other console shooter has ever offered before and for adding that on top of the finest matchmaking system ever achieved.

@Rambo731: People know they're watching data.

People are hoping Bungie creates a tool that lets you take one of your saved films and have it render an actual video you could upload to Youtube or where ever.

Jesus.

Sure, right, Halo videos are stored as in-game data, but there's that feature (forget what it's called) where you can pre-edit videos, with camera movements, etc., and then watch them as straight dumb video. That could be exported. I mean, your 360 has to turn it into video so your TV knows what to do with it.

Integrating that all with a site like YouTube wouldn't be trivial, but it's not impossible either. The fact that they haven't done it yet implies to me that either 1) they want to force people to buy Halo 3 so they can watch any Halo 3 movies or 2) they just haven't decided if it's worth the effort yet or 3) they'll be adding it soon in some way. I'd bet on 3.

I mean, if I were the sort of casual mainstream gamer who Halo 3 is targeted at, and I'm on the fence about buying a 360 to get the game, I could probably be convinced by wasting an hour at work by watching funny frag clips on YouTube.

Incidentally, as somebody who works in the online video field, I can say that in some ways a 360 is a *better* environment for posting a video to a site like YouTube than your laptop. Uploading big files, for one thing, would be easier to manage in a more locked-down user environment like a game console.

Cmon, Saved films isnt exactly brand new anyway. Its another leftover from Halo 2 that Bungie cut to save time, just like the Mongoose. And for proof, if it decides to work: [www.ptop.aborman.com]

The first video tells the tale.

I'm sure Bungie already knows how awesome it would be to watch the video outside of the game. But I'm sure it isn't easy to implement it, or it would've been done. And I don't think MS was really going to delay the game to add in Youtube functionality.

@godhandiscen: Paying for the bandwidth is no issue at all.

I was definitely disappointed to see that the video I uploaded to Bungie's website was not actually playable...on the website.

Uploading a 10 second clip means something like 20MB of data...I see the point in allowing the user to freely roam around the clip on their xbox but its just a pain to transfer 50MB here, 35MB there, just for a couple seconds of gameplay that you really didn't care to spend that much time downloading. Screenshots show up online though! I guess that's something, but yeah Skate has the advantage here.

Okay, guys, let's get to the important stuff... Which saved video features Crecente teabagging Brian Lam, and approximately when does it occur? We need to examine it to make sure he got his comeuppance for yesterday's shenanigans.

You're not saving video. You're saving game data that is recreated in the form of a video. That's why you can't rewind anything properly.

@MassaLefty: I completely understand that its game data and not video. Bungie makes that clear on the same page where they explain why you can't rewind campaign video.

@DigitalHero: Last time I checked I never claimed ANYTHING about being able to WRITE any code. Let alone a replay system.

LennyShimizu's comment is on the right track. There should be a way to export the video in some fashion. Wether that's an AVI file dumped to your PC via the X-Box Connection to your PC or to a USB device, we should be able to export it in some fashion. Hell even if its 2 minutes only, like .skate, thats something. What Bungie has done is ground breaking but I think the technology IS there to go the whole rest of the way. If it means I got to wait 6 months to a year after Halo 3's launch to get it, thats fine, I just know we are capable of getting what we want in some form or another.

Have to think about where all that video will go too. a couple hundred thousand people play Halo3 3 everyday, that means every game played, which is a crap load of games, every person playing would have a video of every game played. that is hundreds of thousands of videos a day.

Sounds kinda far-fetched and unecessary.

@SNK-Jorge: Online video is a bit of a gold rush right now. If YouTube doesn't want a million Halo 3 videos, there are 20 other online video sites who'd be happy to take them instead.

Skate boarding game vs FPS, different kinds of game and different kinds of showing off.
Ollies and such are more accepted than grenade stickies.

I say leave it as it is this time around. Concentrate on adding more maps and content.

Just playback the saved film, record it on your tape/dvd/HDD recorder and upload it to youtube.

The real question is this: would you rather have a farm of dedicated servers set up to host Halo 3 matches or to upload user videos to YouTube?

I do think that I'd get Bungie Pro if they offered some kind of video upload service for members only. That'd make it worth the 800 point subscription fee, if you ask me.

@Raydancer: I think that would absolutely be a great feature to have for Bungie Pro.

The problem is the difference between data translated by the engine and a video itself.

In order to make a video of the data, probably you will have to render it first with your xbox from a fixed perspective (because it is a video), do it locally and store it on your system. The size of it will be too big compared to just the data, preventing server storage.

This way can be acomplished, but the videos will not be available for sharing as they are store locally, unless you move them to the internet.

"He had asked what nominees I had selected for breakthrough technology and mentioned he liked Bungie's Saved Films tech."

Err what? Oh, right.. MTV. SpikeTV. Too bad they're over 10 years behind reality. If they actually had some interest in games maybe they'd let their viewers know that although the "saved film" is nice and new to Halo, it's a really old concept. Maybe that would encourage console developers to actually do something new for the genre.

Crecente, "broken" is putting it a little lightly.

Sounds like your trying to steal some more of PSNs ideas, isn't it bad enough their thinking about doing their own home.

Hmm... 3.3 million people blasting Bungie's servers with videos of themselves teabagging eachother. You've really thought this through, huh? I'd recon that's a couple more people than either Project 8 or Skate. Not to mention the absolutely crappy user experience this would turn out to be. The fact alone that they put in a free-flying cam makes the saved films as they are way more useful and also totally destroys all hope of having a video converter. The reason it is easier for other games like skate is because you cannot manipulate the camera in the awesome ways you can with Halo 3.

Another problem here is that the more they give the more people complain. I can totally understand that people want more now that they have been shown what may be possible with this complex of a game a little further down the road, but that just shows how much Bungie has brought to the table this time around. But where does it end? If Bungie were to make a video converter, for example, then some people would complain because maybe it isn't in an HD resolution.