Saints Row 2 Kept From Turning in the Wrong Direction with Blackmagic Design Multibridge Pro
By Alexander Mejia, Video Editor
As the main character awakes from a coma, he finds the Stilwater he once ruled is in disarray. Unfamiliar gangs have laid claim to the territory, rival factions have taken over, and cash-hungry corporations have laid waste to the once proud 3rd Street home. Abandoned and left scarred with an unrecognizable face, he seeks out a plastic surgeon to begin his new life on the streets of Stilwater.
I'm an Emmy Award winning video editor for Volition - a video game company - with a background as a television and film editor and shooter. After rolling off the film, Fraternity House, I was approached by Volition about a job as an editor for them. Having a personal background in video games made me excited for the job since I would be working with video games still in development.
A video editor is a relatively new position in the video game industry. Volition was looking at moving more media production in house because they wanted more control over the advertising process. Shooting video games is a different ballgame compared to television and the broadcast world. Normally, as an editor you only have the footage in front of you and stock footage available from your resources; however, in the video game industry we had to go back and "shoot" new shots whenever we thought it would be appropriate in the edit. This required online real time editing hardware to get the lightening fast turnaround times needed for cutting promotions, while still trying to balance revisions from the game director, legal, or our publisher, THQ.
Before I joined Volition, all game ads were outsourced, resulting in issues about instructions to other production companies on how to navigate an unfinished game. This was necessary to create high-impact internet multimedia that would showcase the game in the best fashion. Many times, we were trying to show off game features that hadn't been fully implemented, yet they required creative shooting to show them off. Turn the wrong way in a level and you would be greeted with a face full of magenta and cyan checkerboard textures. Originally, we would have to spend many weeks communicating back and forth trying to get a shippable product. But after implementing a Blackmagic Design Multibridge Pro workflow, we were able to shorten these times, allowing more time for programmers to implement features before we shoot for our deadline.
When I came to the company, I was asked to build the editing suite so that we could capture the highest quality game footage with surround sound audio. Mac based systems were not a choice since our systems had to integrate with the Xbox 360 development kit. All hardware we bought had to have full compatibility with Vista x64 to make use of all of the ram we had in our workstation. We also had a limited budget and couldn't afford high end HDMI to HD-SDI converters needed to ingest 4:2:2 YUV Xbox 360 footage from an HDMI port into high end capture cards. There were cheaper analog solutions, but with sharp videogame graphics, analog wouldn't cut it if we were to go to broadcast television. We also had to have multiple monitor real time monitoring since we would have multiple people supervising and acting out all on the same screen. It was a lot easier to have three people in front of three monitors, instead of three people in front of one computer screen.
After visiting NAB 2008, I discovered that Blackmagic Design was the only hardware provider on the market that allowed me to ingest footage straight from the Xbox 360, our target platform, digitally, at uncompressed broadcast quality. We never knew if our publisher, THQ, would decide if the spots we were creating would go to YouTube, or all the way up to broadcast HDTV, so quality had to be top notch at all times.
The workflow was fully integrated with Adobe's CS3 production suite. So moving from Premiere to Photoshop and After Effects was fully supported with external monitoring. This made reviews fast and painless.
The result was a powerful system that could do three simultaneous online streams of HD video for way less than any set of professional converter boxes.
Saints Row 2 has special tools built into the game that allows me to capture inside the game with a virtual camera. It's like being the Director of Photography on a big budget action film. We would have several players "act" out scenes via the multiplayer functions in the game and I would "shoot" with the virtual camera, hooked up to a Blackmagic Multibridge Pro. We captured the uncompressed footage directly to a custom raid box that our IT department assembled and from there, we could shoot, edit, and finish our projects.
This also allowed us to quickly re-shoot any ads or promotions we received back from third-party outsourcers who just didn't have the resources to give cinematic-quality shots. We were able to do re-shoots on deadlines in less than 24 hours.
Being able to quickly conceptualize trailers and shoot high quality media gives us an edge over video game companies which are outsourcing all of their video media. If more video game companies invested in a Blackmagic setup, they would realize that they can save money and still deliver a higher quality marketing presentation.
Depending on how the market responded to previous trailers, we are able to produce extra media that aren't in the advertising schedule. One thing I noticed when we were putting out game trailers that showed off game play aspects were the comments from the fans. "Where's the story? I don't see any story". Even though a story trailer wasn't in the plans for a few months, I was able to start cutting one. Having that kind of flexibility within a game's development cycle was critical for us to have the successful marketing campaign that we had with Saints Row 2.
The result is a broadcast quality HD trailer that looks no different from game play the audience would experience at home.
With the native DVCProHD support in the Blackmagic Design Multibridge Pro, we plan on buying the inexpensive Panasonic HPX-170 P2 camera to add to our arsenal for shooting developer diaries for our community. We also plan to start making internet marketing materials earlier in game development since we have more control over the media that goes out. Blackmagic Design has empowered our company to be more than just a game developer.
As the gaming industry continues to grow, the need for high quality video media will grow as well. More and more creative industries are starting to bring the video production in house because of the low cost of editing and shooting hardware to produce broadcast quality high definition media without having to pay the Hollywood rates of a professional company out of L.A.
Alexander Mejia, based out of Champaign, IL, is working on the soon-to-be released Red Faction Guerilla. Saints Row 2 is produced by Greg Donovan and Dan Sutton, and written by Steve Jarros and Drew Holmes.
