Demo Rells?

Just use your best stuff in there, no filler. Better to have a 1 min really good reel, than a 2 min half good one.

Actually just uploaded mine, which you’re welcome to take a look at –

http://christopher.dullahan.com/

Any feedback is greatly appreciated (from anyone)

Thanks, we should have our mod ready for the “Make something unreal” competition phase 4 in september.

Visit http://www.radgametools.com and download Bink, it’ll generate an exe from your movie, so when you’re sending it around your prospective employers don’t have to worry about codecs etc. It has better compression than mpeg2 and is well worth a look.

I’d suggest always having a Quicktime option as well for demo reels, and preferable hosted on a streaming server to allow quick viewing of the first few minutes.

Having to install DivX is an additional step that some less technical people might not take ( yep, there are non-techies working in the games industry ;) ), and even stand-alone options ( like using Bink ) can put over-wary security concious people off ( viruses etc ).

The more options the better… if you get someone with a licence for Quicktime Pro ( it’s only 20 or 30 dollars ), they’ll be able to convert it easily for you.

Just done the Bink actually gonna have it up soon, as for quicktime, I couldn’t get the setting write for it to look good and be huge. I guess in the back of my mind is comparing the size of the divx, bink did good at 70mb, but yea I was thinking about the virus probs, but its better than downloading divx….

Chris

Bink is widely used, I doubt most people will be worried about viruses, especially if they are downloading it from your portfolio website(why would someone go to the trouble of setting up a legitimate portfolio website just to get people to download a virus).

Also, most of the people who will be viewing it will have up-to-date Anti Virus software on their machines.
I really don’t see using Bink being a problem for potential reel viewers.

Inspired by this discussion, I started my demo reel last night, and progress is coming along nicely.

I decided to create it in Flash 6 as opposed to a video editting suite. There were several reasons for this. Firstly, its one of my core competencies, and I can do a much better job than I could trying to composite than in Premiere etc. Secondly, it allows me to create my own effects and advanced interfaces. Thirdly, and finally, it allows interactivity, such as clickable buttons and email / URL links.

Therefore, I will need to export as an EXE. This will create a much bigger file than if I made one movie file, but I’m not planning on putting this on the web, and have gone all out on the frills. It will be distrubuted on CD’s only (currently, with only 2 3d models demo-ed in it, it’s wieghing in at 20MB – but the quality of the video is perfect).

What do our resident experts think of this approach…?

Lewis

PS Nice work Lynchman

PPS Can anyone recommend a good free or cheap video capture tool that doesn’t leave watermarks all over the screen?

Fraps does good capturing, http://www.fraps.com, cept it sometimes slows the system down depending on specs.

PS Sorry Boadle about no reply to your replying email, I was super busy at school, and kept long fingering it….my bad…

PPS Can anyone recommend a good free or cheap video capture tool that doesn’t leave watermarks all over the screen? [/quote:f57c54d511]
Camtasia is widely used by professionals but I think it’s quite expensive, though you can get a 30 trial version from their site.

Nice reel, Lynchman! I found that it took a while to download even though I was using broadband. I’ve seen video tutorials from 3D Palace and 3D Buzz that are ten times as long yet take around the same time to download. You may want to look into shortening the time of download by compressing it or whatnot so employers can get to it faster. :)

thats as best as small as I can get it without making it look bad, I guess I could half the dimensions…. didn’t really want to reduce the clarity of the images….