As regular visitors to our forums will know, we have big plans for the next version of Moviestorm. We’ve already talked about the headline features such as the terrain editor and option for oversized set area, improved character animation, rewritten autosave feature, more flexible character creation tools, advisor system, plus improvements to the performance and stability of the program – but there’s one feature that we haven’t yet mentioned...
The way that Moviestorm handles video has been completely rewritten. We have adopted the new WebM video format developed by Google as our new standard, which offers great performance and image quality even on older hardware, plus the advantage that it’s as friendly to the Mac OS as it is to Windows – this means that most machines will playback the new movie format “out of the box”, and those that don’t will only have to do a small update for compatibility.
Another great advantage of adding this format is that the way Moviestorm handles video clips has had to be re-written. A side-effect of this is that you can now run video on Moviestorm props in the Director’s View in real-time (even on modest hardware) and with sound playing. You can also add videos in the Cutting Room that can be dragged to the timeline in the same way as your camera shots. This means that you can import footage into your Cutting Room bins and drag video clips into your movies without the need for an external editor. If you’ve previously had problems with running out of system resources on complex multi-scened projects, you can now simply render them out separately and combine the clips in an empty Movie, with almost zero overhead.
Of course, we’ve left the old video format in there for those users who have an established workflow that they don’t want to alter, but we think WebM is the way forward...
