Every (other) week, Mike Sylvester brings you REVOLUTIONARY, a look at the wide world of Wii possibilities.

Segueing from last edition's topic: you've just built a sick Smash Bros. Brawl level, and you're ready to share it with the world. You upload it to your website and throw up some pics from the game's handy built-in photo mode. Everybody can see your creation without needing to first go through the trouble of downloading the level, putting it on an SD card, and loading it up on their Wii. Of course, your level looks like so much fun, they won't be able to resist trying it for themselves. But what if, like so many other games, there was no photo mode? How would you display your masterpiece? Or maybe seeing a still pic isn't enough to really sell the dynamics and spirit of your build. Then what? Read on as we delve into the art of video capture and photo composition -- for games!

We've all had a gaming moment that we wish we could share with others. Verbally recounting the story of a miraculous victory or unbelievable defeat just doesn't have the same impact as actually seeing it. Or how about when you made your first Mii and told everybody that it looked "just like you." Anybody who's ever seen a Mii would have a tough time believing that these simplistic charicatures could be anyone's spitting image, yet seeing is believing.

The best images and videos I've personally produced have come from direct capture methods. Connecting my console to a TV tuner/video capture card, USB capture device, or even the video input on the back of my video card has netted me crisper, more colorful images than pointing a camera at the screen. It's much easier to go that route, too, as the picture generally doesn't need much (if any) further processing, except perhaps to crop off black bars surrounding the screen.

Once, I even connected the output of one computer to the input of another to get some clear gameplay footage and lessen the number of editing steps I'd have to go through when compositing some camera footage of my hands working the controller.

Barring direct capture, a digital video camera is going to give you the best quality for editing. DVD-R, hard disk drive, flash memory-based, digital video cassette, CCD, 3CCD, CMOS, SD, or HD -- there's a ton of options to choose from and covering each of those in depth is beyond the scope of this primer. But any of those choices will produce video that's higher resolution than what is displayed on YouTube. So if that's your ultimate goal, you pretty much can't go wrong with any dedicated digital video camera.

Web cams, on the other hand, can vary greatly in specs and image quality, but even mega cheap ones can produce acceptable results under the right circumstances and with a bit of editing. I bet you can't pick out which videos I've shot with a used $5 PlayStation 2 EyeToy.

For still pics, you can go with a digital camera, or kick it old school with a film camera and a photo scanner. Some would argue film is king, but for my money (and time), digital cameras rule.

Some digital video cameras support still picture shooting, but be advised: the quality of these photos is pretty shoddy compared to dedicated still cameras. You can also hook up a camera to some video capture hardware, which may be your best bet if the hardware lags too much to game while viewing what you're recording. Your camera won't mind if Mario moves a little sluggishly in response to your controls, but you sure will when you jump into a black hole for the 80th time straight.

If all you've got is a cell phone camera, I don't know what to tell you. As much as I love my iPhone, there's no denying that photography belongs on the top of the list of features they threw in as an afterthought, and in my experience, that seems to be the case with most cell phone cameras. As with anything, there are exceptions, but even those can't compare to even a "Wal-mart Special" dedicated digital camera.

We seldom take a photo or shoot a video that wouldn't benefit from some touching up or editing. The image may be too bright or too dark. Sounds may be too soft or too loud. There may be extra stuff in frame that doesn't need to be shown, or some captioning or diagrams may be necessary to point out objects of interest. Both Windows PCs and Macs come with video editors, and while the tools and features aren't as comprehensive as a thousand-dollar editing suite, it's enough to get your toes wet cutting clips together, adjusting the image quality, dubbing commentary, overlaying music, and throwing on captions and titles.

Use of "gateway editors" can lead to an addiction that must be fed with more potent packages. Avid Xpress, Adobe Premiere Pro, and Final Cut Pro don't come cheap, but they are so robust and powerful that they are industry standards used by the big boys. If you want to do a simple capture with minor editing, VirtualDub or one of its forks may be all you need to capture and cut together a video. If you're of the Ed Wood school of filmmaking, where first take is all it takes, YouTube lets you upload live feeds from a web cam. I've tried it out a couple of times myself, but if you want to see how I get down in Rock Band, you'll have to pay up.

Photo editing can be less time consuming, if all you want to do is crop a pic or try to enhance the visibility. With a few minutes tooling in your "photochopping" application of choice, a blurry smear of pixels can oftentimes be made to resemble the image you wanted to preserve.

Note: Results not typical

People who don't already have experience with photo or video editing applications usually feel overwhelmed by all the palettes, plugins, filters, fonts, effects, and tools at laid out before them. Even for a seasoned Photoshop veteran, the open source alternative looks at first glance like too much to learn. Go into it with a goal of what you want your finished product to look like, and the steps to getting there can be just a Google search away. Just playing around with it is the best way to learn the ins and outs of many editing programs, and some of the most impressive projects are done through experimental methods which may not have any prior documentation.

Prepping for a shoot is very important. "Garbage-In-Garbage-Out" is what we say in the graphics world when we have material that is too low quality to be made pretty. There're lots of things which, if ignored, can make your material uneditable garbage. Here are a few tips to keep in mind when prepping for a shoot:

Steady the camera
A tripod's your friend if you don't have a surface to sit your camera on. Even if you do have a surface, a smaller tripod may help you in positioning the camera optimally.

When a tripod isn't handy or is just not feasible, I've found that I can stabilize the camera by holding it close to my chest and holding my breath. That's just for photos, though. Neither myself, nor Wii Fanboy will be held responsible for any injury or brain damage resulting from holding your breath during a 30 minute video shoot of a Subspace Emissary bout.

Lighting
Flash reflects off of glossy screens, or washes out the picture on non-reflective ones, so turn your flash off. While you're at it, turn off any lights directly in view of the camera, behind, or to the side the screen. If turning off the lights isn't an option (Wii-ing in the dark can be dangerous), try to angle yourself so lights aren't reflecting off the screen.

Focus
Your web cam probably has a focus ring around the lens. Use it! What's the point of making a video or taking a picture when you can't make out what you're looking at?

If you're using a video camera, turn on manual focus. The same way your eyes are tricked into perceiving depth on a flat screen, your camera can also be fooled. You don't want it trying to decide what objects on screen it should focus on, because then it's blurring out everything else. Turn off the auto focus and adjust the lens so that the whole screen is sharp and clear in your view. (I've gotta remember to listen to my own advice on this one, because I forgot to do it for the video below.)

Sound
If using a microphone, try testing your TV at different volumes to find the sweet spot where it's loud enough, but not so loud that it's noisy or garbled. A microphone is essential if you want to provide commentary or just capture reactions from players and spectators in realtime. If you're going to edit the video later, you can always throw on voiceover at that time, too.

Some cameras have a line-in or microphone jack, and that can be used to record audio directly from the console, but the sound a console outputs may be too loud for the microphone input, and just make things too noisy. In that case, outputting from your TV (with the volume lowered) is a handy feature if your TV is sporting a set of output jacks.

Pick the right screen
By this I mean choose a display technology that's suitable for photographing. CRT televisions, even big screen projecting ones, don't hold up well to photographing or videoing. The constantly redrawing of the image, line by line leads to rolling black bars, flickering, and other visual artifacts which often can't be fixed in post. If it's at all an option, hook your console up to an LCD, plasma, LCOS, or DLP screen for shoots. My best photos were taken on an LCD monitor because the anti-glare coating eliminates reflections and there's no other display artifacts to fret over.

PC gamers have simple tools like FRAPS and GameCam for capturing video, and often times if they want to grab screenshot, it's as easy as hitting PrintScreen or a dedicated key pre-configured by the game's developer.

On the console side, we're rarely given the tools to record gameplay or take screenshots to share with others. While most racing games at least let you save ghost data and replays, and sometimes even enter a photo mode, there are few examples outside of that genre. Halo 3 set the bar pretty high in this respect by automatically saving replays for gamers to later watch from any perspective they can place their virtual camera. Smash Bros. Brawl followed suit with replay saves and a freely moveable 3D camera for screen grabs. We hold onto hope that, like stage builders and character creation, photo modes and replay saving become staples in games of the future. Where would we be if we thought "next gen" ended at upgrading graphics? There's no reason why we should rest at adding online functions or evolving controls.

If you haven't got top-of-the-line camera equipment or a 4-year degree in digital arts, don't be discouraged. As Wii fans, we're not the sort to let looks or presentation get in the way of enjoying the content or the vision. If I hadn't started out with the jankiest of ghetto setups, I wouldn't be here writing this for you now. A 15-year old VHS camcorder plugged into a DVD recorder, whose discs had to be ripped and transcoded before editing in Windows Movie Maker was what got me into video editing, a YouTube addiction, and writing about the GlovePIE scripts I was so eager to show off.

If you've shot any amazing gaming videos, have a photo of a cool Mii to show off, or have a story of a gaming moment you wish you could have "caught on tape," please share it with us in the comments.

Every (other) Tuesday, Mike Sylvester brings you REVOLUTIONARY, a look at the wide world of Wii possibilities.

The rhythm gaming genre, while relatively young, is already on the verge of becoming stale. Hitting buttons in time with a visual cue only remains as fresh as the accompanying song. But there's a new game that's set to turn the genre on its ear and destroy your preconceived notions of what a rhythm game can be. Today we'll be giving Audiosurf the GlovePIE treatment.

A few weeks ago I expressed my disdain for wipEout XL, which I had been playing to test its worthiness as a comparative platform for the Wiimote versus the SIXAXIS. It's admittedly a good game, but my experience with it at the time had been anything but. For a few months prior to the showdown, I was building a script for the game to demonstrate one of my favorite aspects of the Wii controller design. The script was to feature several different control methods that could be automatically selected by just holding the controller a certain way or plugging in a Nunchuk or Classic Controller.

Well, the PC version of wipEout XL, being old, does not run very well on today's machines. The already-fast game plays at hyper speeds on a modern machine and real Jedi reflexes are needed to control it. So I completely wiped it out of consideration for scripting, and suspended work on those projects which involved that game. And then came Audiosurf - a game that, at its core, is the embodiment of the "have it your way" sensibilities I wanted to express with my multifunctional script, and at the same time, it incorporates the high speed thrill ride dips and dives of a futuristic racer like wipEout.

Audiosurf lets you load up your own music, which the game analyzes to build levels. That alone is not an entirely novel idea, but the twist comes from the puzzle-style gameplay. The tracks are littered with colored blocks for you to collect and arrange, until they disappear and you're rewarded with points. It's a simple concept that's been the basis for countless great puzzle games, but the musical element dictates the placement of the pieces and the tempo of the music sets the speed at which the game runs.

At first I wanted to try controlling the game with just the IR sensor pushing the virtual mouse cursor. But the game is designed in such a way that miniscule flicks of the mouse can slide your ship from one side of the track to the other. I could have designed an IR script to accomodate for that, but I also wanted to keep the full range of mouse motion available for navigating menus and clicking on the pop-up dialogs that give you tips in the tutorial levels. So what I ultimately decided on was to have the IR sensor control the mouse pointer's full range, and limit the mouse range on the other controls.

var.MinXRes = (Screen.Width * .45)
var.MaxXRes = (Screen.Width * .55)
If (Wiimote.HasNunchuk = False) or Nunchuk.ZButton
// Mouse movement
If Wiimote.PointerVisible
(Mouse.X /2) = Wiimote.PointerX
(Mouse.Y /2) = Wiimote.PointerY
Else
Mouse.CursorPosX = smooth(MapRange(Wiimote.GX,1,-1,var.MinXRes,var.MaxXRes))
Mouse.Y = smooth(MapRange(Wiimote.GY,-.5,.5,1,-1))
EndIf
Else
Mouse.CursorPosX = smooth(MapRange(Nunchuk.JoyX,-1,1,var.MinXRes,var.MaxXRes))
Mouse.Y = smooth(MapRange(Nunchuk.JoyY,-1,1,0,1))
EndIf

Fewer than twenty lines of code gives us three ways to control the mouse pointer, which controls your "car" in the game. A couple more lines could add in Classic Controller support, which might even work well for Audiosurf's "Double Vision" mode. But we'll save that for another Revolutionary.

// Mouse Buttons
If Wiimote.A
Mouse.LeftButton = True
Else
Mouse.LeftButton = False
EndIf
If Wiimote.B
Mouse.RightButton = True
Else
Mouse.RightButton = False
EndIf
Key.Space = Wiimote.Home //Help
Key.Escape = Wiimote.Minus //Options
Key.Enter = Wiimote.Plus //Enter
Wiimote.Rumble = Wiimote.B //Rumble when firing
Shift + P + I + E = Wiimote.Two //Stops script running

My inspiration for this project came from using my iPhone. It, like the Wii Remote and Nunchuk, has an internal accelerometer for detecting tilt and motion, and the iPhone's iPod interface can change from a standard media player interface to the Cover Flow interface by just rotating the device. Around the time that I realized the brilliance of this simple trick, I was working on a script for Star Fox 2, and thought it would be neat if I could change from my Excite Truck style of Arwing control to a more natural joystick style of control when transforming my ship to the landwalker mode. Titles with varied gameplay are made all the more interesting with adaptable controls, but if transitioning between control methods initiates the change in gameplay style-- that's another degree of coolness.

Imagine a Rogue Squadron game in which you point your Remote at the screen to pilot your X-Wing in pursuit or evasion, and turning the Remote sideways "locks S-foils in attack mode" and gives you finer motion controls for banking and rolling. There are so many possibilities to explore, and I'll be exploring some of them in future GlovePIE scripts.

If you've got ideas for a game that might benefit from a control conversion, let us know in the comments.

1. Attach Wiimote.
2. Aim.
3. Pull trigger.

WiiCade forumer Loki has instructions and a photo tutorial on how to plant an LED under your own Wiimote's trigger. You can set the button to light up all the time or when the controller rumbles, whichever your fancy. Check past the post break for video of the glowing mod.

[Via Digg]