Extracting Game Animations with Lossless Recordings in OBS - dbc60/Render96Wiki GitHub Wiki

To add to the presentation of this wiki I've been adding little animations to the pages that seem fun. I'll be using this page as a guide on my process to keep myself reminded in the future how to do so and help other people interested in animation extraction for their own needs.

Keep in mind this guide assumes you have some understanding of the programs being used and the technical side of games such as knowing pixel resolutions and frames per second. If you don't this may be hard to follow.

Tools Used:

OBS Studio

VLC media player

Photoshop

Premiere Pro or After Effects

There should be alternative programs that work for this but this is what works for me currently. If anyone knows alternatives or a better process I will list them here.

Lossless recording in OBS

To start I'll show the settings needed for this.

Go to File > Settings > Output.

Now set the Recording Quality to Lossless Quality. This will only appear if "Output Mode: Simple" is selected at the top

Now go to File > Settings > Advanced.

Set Color Format to RGB then set Color Range to Full. If this isn't done there will be a tiny amount of artifacting in your recordings.

Also set Color Space to 709 instead of 601 for more accurate colors.

Now you need to know the exact resolution and FPS your gameplay footage is. Once you know this go to File > Settings > Video and type in what it is.

Example

Now you're all set to record the cleanest footage you possibly can. Your video filesizes will be ungodly bloated now but it's perfect for ripping out clean assets you need for .gif's or videos.

Using VLC to create a .png sequence

Adobe programs have issues with the lossless .avi files OBS creates. The only current method I know to get these videos into Adobe programs is to convert the video to a .png sequence which OBS cannot do. Luckily VLC has the ability to take screenshots of every frame in your video files which then can be used as a .png sequence. There may be an easier method than this so feel free to let me know if there is.

Now to get started in VLC go to Tools > Preferences. In the bottom left corner you will see Show Settings which needs to be set to All.

In this menu scroll down to Video and open the Filters dropdown then scroll down to Scene filter and click it.

In this tab do this:

  • Image Format: type in "png"

  • Image Width/Height: set to what your resolution is

  • Filename prefix: can be whatever name you want your image sequence

  • Directory path prefix: copy/paste the folder location you want your images to appear in

  • Recording ratio: put "1".

The number in Recording ratio means how many frames will play before a screenshot it taken. Setting to 1 means a screenshot every frame while for example 60 would mean a screenshot every 60 frames.

Now that this is all set make sure to click save on the bottom right. Scroll back up to the Filters dropdown and click on that name itself. This will bring up a menu where on the top right corner you will have to checkmark Scene video filter to turn this on.

Make sure you turn this off when using VLC normally. Having this checkmarked on will mean it will create images every single time you watch a video inside VLC.

VLC is weird and will not make these changes work unless you exit the program after saving. Now that everything is set simply find the video file you want and open it in VLC which will spam images into your selected folder for every frame of the video you watch. You can now use the images in this folder to import as a .png sequence in Adobe programs.

Creating Green Screens with Texture Packs for Easy Extraction

It will be difficult to extract what you need if the object you want to extract is not inside the right background. Luckily for many emulators there's methods to sprite/texture hack in solid colors or create greenscreen levels with the custom level hacking tools a game may have.

Wario World Example

In Wario World there was an area at the top of the HUB area for the first world that allowed the perfect place to get footage from.

I simply dumped the texture with Dolphin, recolored it as solid green, then had the Dolphin load it back in through a texture pack

Using Dolphin's free cam feature it let me zoom the camera into Wario and get footage of his idle animation for this gif

This gif without the background was created by taking the .png sequence created through VLC then importing it into Adobe Premiere Pro. Inside there I used the Ultra Key effect to remove the green background. The footage was then exported back into a .png sequence which was then imported into Photoshop to export as a .gif. I use Photoshop's Save for Web .gif export because it tends to be higher quality than Premiere Pro's .gif export and allows more customization with the color palette if it needs to be edited.

Mischief Makers Example

For the Mischief Makers page I had an idea of her shaking the texture CD label. For this I booted up Project64 and dumped the background textures to replace them with a purple color not found on Marina's sprite.

Now that I had a good background to extract her shaking animation from, I loaded the .png sequence into photoshop and animated the CD cover with her shaking sprite.

Hope this page has been useful for other people! Please note my current method of creating .gif's can result in a inaccurate framerate that is not the exact same as the source footage which is something I'm still looking to improve. I'll update this page as I see better ways to present this info or find new and better methods of doing this.

Guide written by Fanamel