Since World of Warcraft is such a popular game there are a lot of third-party applications that we can use to our advantage, such as WoW Model Viewer. WoW Model Viewer allows the user to actually extract information about the character models right from the game files. Most developers frown on this but Blizzard makes their code open for such programs which allows a of creative freedom for artists.

Now I just had to decide what software package to use. Since I currently only use a PC then any Mac based options were out. I thought about using Windows Movie Maker which I have used to make quick videos for the guild in the past. However, it just isn't powerful enough to do all that I wanted to do. I have used Pinnacle Studio 7 to make my trebuchet video years ago but that was just simple transitions from camcorder footage.

To do this right I had to go with either Adobe Premiere or Sony Vegas, neither of which I have ever used. After reading a lot of testimonies and comparing the price I figured that Sony Vegas was the way to go. I couldn't afford the Ultimate version (caused some headaches later) so I got the second best version; Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9 Platinum Pro Pack.

Some of the scenes required some 'photoshopping' to create green-screens, but since I didn't have Photoshop I used Macromedia Fireworks. It did the job quite well.

Finally, all that was left was to capture footage from both titles. The absolute best software to do that is Fraps. I spent the $30 to get a license for Fraps probably five years ago and it is some of the best money I have spent since you get free updates every time they release a new version. I highly recommend it to any budding machinima artist. I record all of my movies full sized at 60 fps and then lower the framerate when I export the rendered movie. This allows the highest amount of detail possible. But, it eats up a crapload of drive space. The initial captures took up over 250 gigs!

After the video was created I exported the movie and then used Virtual Dub with the Xvid codec to crunch the 15 gig .avi file down to a respectable 140 megs with very little loss of visual quality.

Now for the specs on my machine:

• Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R mobo
• Q9550 Quad-core processor running at 3.2 GHz
• 8 Gigs of OCZ Reaper DDR2 1066 ram
• Nvidia GTX260 video card with 1 gig of ram onboard
• 2x WD Raptor 76 (scratch files)
  1x WD Raptor 150 (main OS)
  1x WD Velociraptor (raw video capture

  drive)